There are more intervention strategies in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— Hamlet, sort-of
Tomorrow, I will be presenting our paper in the IR4Good track at ECIR 2024 on strategic IR impact interventions.
From my side, this paper grew out of a couple of things:
I often get comments, and sometimes questions, about my Zoom and video lecture setup in my office. In this post, I want to talk a bit about it, my choice of equipment, and things that can improve the quality of video recordings, remote teaching, and videoconferences.
There are a few key pieces to this:
I’ve often closed out the year with two blog posts: my tool report, and a year-in-review. It’s been a pretty full year!
One of the major accomplishments was moving to Philadelphia to take a new position in the information science department at Drexel University1. I’m very excited for the coming years here, as the interdisciplinary information science context is an ideal home for my approach to research and scholarship. I did have to give up tenure for the move, but I think it was worth it.
Beyond that, a few other good things have happened this year…
It’s time for another review of my current toolkit!
With a new job and a new city, I needed to re-assemble my work computing setup from scratch and am now running MacBooks both at home and work, so there are a number of changes. I also completely overhauled our home network. Quite a few software things have stayed the same, though.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that parallel computing on Python is an experience that ranks somewhere alongside “facial exfoliation with a rusted cheese grater” in its pleasantness.
In this post I’m going to briefly review our particular (common!) problem, the state of multiprocessing in Python, and why it unfortunately appears necessary to continue using my own parallel processing layer in LensKit.