A non-digital service example of working in the open

Matt has recently been blogging and speaking about "working in the open" in public service roles. Giles has written a lot about working in the open too, most recently collecting examples of teams who are doing open for different purposes, e.g. for remembering and thinking out loud. I've worked in the open on software and … Continue reading A non-digital service example of working in the open →

Calculating carbon emissions for energy data in the UK

I've recently been taking a closer look at the Streamlined Energy & Carbon Reporting (SECR) guidelines. While we currently produce figures on CO2 emissions in Energy Sparks we're not producing SECR style reports for schools or trusts. This is something we're planning to add to the product soon, so I've been looking at what's involved … Continue reading Calculating carbon emissions for energy data in the UK →

“AI-Ready Data” is the wrong framing

A paper was published this week by Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Zahuranec and Hannah Chafetz called "Moving Toward the FAIR-R principles: Advancing AI-Ready Data". The paper sets out to do two things: Make the case that we are in a "Fourth Wave" of open data in which it is critical that data is made useful for … Continue reading “AI-Ready Data” is the wrong framing →

Falsehoods this programmer believed about energy meters

This is the second part to a post I published earlier this week in which I summarised some things I learned about working with half-hourly energy data. I'll be updating that shortly with a few extra details and clarifications. This post will be a summary of some things I've learned about energy meters and metering. … Continue reading Falsehoods this programmer believed about energy meters →

Falsehoods this programmer believed about half-hourly energy data

It is common for energy generation and consumption values to be presented as half-hourly readings: giving 48 readings over the course of a single 24 hour period. This is the type of data we're working with on a daily basis in Energy Sparks. I thought I'd share a few things that I learned about working … Continue reading Falsehoods this programmer believed about half-hourly energy data →

A quick review of the 8BitDo mechanical keyboard

I don't normally review things here but a few people expressed an interest in how I got on with this, especially as I was planning to use it with Ubuntu. So here we are. Be warned, I know nothing about keyboards except how to go tippy-tap on them. And sometimes not even that. So don't … Continue reading A quick review of the 8BitDo mechanical keyboard →

Reflecting on 2024

Another of my annual end of the year reflections. Like last year its taken me until February to finish. This post is likely to be of little interest to anyone else, but I enjoy doing them and they're the closest thing I have to a diary. I’ve previously done these for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Reading … Continue reading Reflecting on 2024 →

What does community-driven data governance look like?

Some idle thoughts for a Friday afternoon. I was just taking a look at Source.Plus a dataset of public domain images for training Foundation models. It's a project of Spawning.ai which is working to build "data governance for generative AI". I have some thoughts on the tools they're building, but that's not what I'm writing … Continue reading What does community-driven data governance look like? →

Comments on “A data for AI taxonomy”

Jack Hardinges and Elena Simperl recently published a taxonomy to describe the data relevant to AI models and systems. Their goal is to help to better distinguish between the different types of data relevant to developing, using and monitoring AI models and systems to help to better distinguish them and thereby add some nuance to … Continue reading Comments on “A data for AI taxonomy” →

How to accidentally DDOS yourself

We had some performance issues last week. Entirely of our own making but not in the usual way. We nearly DDOS ourselves by sending out emails. We do a lot of analysis in Energy Sparks and, to be honest, some of it needs optimising. Tickets are in the backlog and we are exploring solutions. Anyway, … Continue reading How to accidentally DDOS yourself →