Richard West

@richardhwest
139 Followers
193 Following
42 Posts
Chemical Engineering faculty at Northeastern University, researching computational modeling and prediction of chemical kinetics, in heterogeneous catalysis and combustion. Also a husband, dad, a photographer, a violinist, and a weird toast chef.
PronounsHe/Him
Research group websitehttps://web.northeastern.edu/comocheng/
Twitter handle (soon to be former?)@richardhwest
Richard WestAug 1, 2023
Dan GillmorJul 31, 2023

The BBC's experiment with Mastodon is pathbreaking in English-language news -- a major organization setting up its own instance. They've really thought this through. Key language:

"We're using social.bbc as the domain, so you can be sure these accounts are genuinely from the BBC. And by linking to and from the BBC’s website, we have verified our identity on Mastodon."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub

Welcome to:
@BBCRD
@BBC5Live @BBCRadio4
@BBCTaster
@Connected_Studio
@BBC_News_Labs

The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media

Trialling ActivityPub and the federated model for social media and it's possibilities for the BBC.

BBC R&D
Richard WestJul 17, 2023
Joshua HollandJul 16, 2023

CT state troopers entered up to 60K fake tickets, issued to imaginary white people, to game a database designed to ferret out racial profiling. (And didn't enter real tickets issued to Black people.) One in 4 troopers were doing it. And it seems like nobody is being punished for this crime.

https://archive.ph/jTv5E

#police #racism

Richard WestMay 5, 2023
counternotionsMay 4, 2023

“Leaked” Google document: “…the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.

I’m talking, of course, about open source.”

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"

Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI

SemiAnalysis
Richard WestDec 24, 2022
Brandon RohrerDec 23, 2022
If you think running yourself at 110% is a good way to get a lot accomplished, just wait til you try running at 70%.
Richard WestDec 22, 2022

"A Parent’s Typical Day, as Envisioned by My Child’s Preschool" - this McSweeney’s column is so on the money. Just perfect 👌🏻. Had me in stitches 🤣

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-parents-typical-day-as-envisioned-by-my-childs-preschool

A Parent’s Typical Day, as Envisioned by My Child’s Preschool

I get up at 4:30 a.m. for some pre-dawn food prep. Today, it’s my turn to bring a snack and read a story for my son Ash’s preschool class. The scho...

McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Richard WestDec 20, 2022
Jonathan PeelleDec 20, 2022

How to plan a scientific project timeline

  • Take a sheet of paper and write out each step of the project; bonus points for using different colored pens and/or highlighting

  • Estimate how long you think each step will take

  • Triple that estimate

  • Put the sheet of paper on a corner of your desk

  • Discover sheet of paper several years from now and think "oh that's a cool idea for a project"

    • Richard WestDec 20, 2022
    StephanieDec 20, 2022
    "Within 10 days after the event, 28% of respondents came down with COVID-19, and a further 11% reported getting sick with something else. These percentages are consistent with other accounts of attempts to assess infection rates after a conference."
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04469-8
    Track post-conference COVID infections

    Organizers should evaluate the risks of COVID-19 infections at conferences and communicate those to attendees, says James Kirchner.

    Richard WestDec 19, 2022
    Paul GrahamDec 19, 2022

    I'm in the middle of writing a new essay, and there was one awkward paragraph that I just couldn't seem to fix. Eventually I realized it was because the underlying idea was wrong, and that the real solution was to delete it.

    This often happens. Trying to make the sentences perfect is not as shallow an undertaking as it sounds. It also exposes the bad ideas.

    Show threadRichard WestDec 19, 2022

    "Your performance this semester has been good, and I appreciate your efforts, my good chap."

    "...it is an important part of the learning process, old bean."

    "I encourage you to put more thought into these aspects in future projects, old boy."

    "I am confident that your efforts will pay off in your future endeavors, old sport."

    Richard WestDec 19, 2022
    I tried having ChatGPT draft end-of-term emails to students from prompts mail-merged from my grading notes spreadsheet. Mostly quite successful, but sounded rather like ChatGPT and not me. So I tried the text-davinci-edit-001 model in beta, telling it to "make it less formal and sound more British".
    It just appended things like "my good chap", "old bean", "old boy" etc. on the end of each sentence. It's hilarious! (examples in next toot)