Week Notes 5

Short week! Monday was a bank holiday (mostly recovering from my mate Pete's wedding) and Friday was off to EMF Camp.

But, I managed to get some work done!

LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!

And the accompanying blog post

NHS

Majority of my time spend on helping run a design sprint for improving some NHS processes with Data Science. At my dark moments, I wonder if we can ever break free of the inefficiencies of paper and fax.

Standards

Submitted a request to The European Multi Stakeholder Platform (MSP) - the expert advisory group on ICT standardisation - for HTML5. We have to make sure that modern standards are quickly adopted and promoted.

Bugs

A little quirk with XML files. Not an earth-shattering bug, but it annoyed me. Fixed by Deborah Chua.

Reading List

What books I've read this week. Thanks to Net Galley for some of the review copies. Affiliate links ahead.

Fiction

• Edna's Death Cafe - Angelena Boden
  • An unconvincing soap-opera of a novel. The dialogue is sub-Archers and the "twist" is shocking to no one. There's a beautiful gem of a story in here - revolving around how we talk about death and dying. But it is smothered in a dappy plot.

Non-Fiction

• Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up - Tom Phillips
  • A supremely daft account of how humans have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Written in a convivial style which is supremely tweetable. Some of the examples were already known to me, but were no less entertaining.
• Mini & Me - Michael Cooper
  • I watched the shocking documentary about young arsonist, "Mini" Cooper. His autobiography is tragic and frustrating. Constantly battling for self-control, it paints a picture of an abused lad trapped in a hellscape of care. And yet, it also shows a man who refuses to engage with the help he is offered and continually makes the wrong choices. A passionate and articulate writer. A complicated and, at times, unsympathetic character.
• Soonish - Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Improve and/or Ruin Everything - Dr. Kelly Weinersmith; Zach Weinersmith
  • Only a couple of preview chapters - but that was enough. A light-weight, folksy explanation of some cutting edge science. Peppered with SMBC cartoons, it attempts to Make! Science! Fun! But I found it a bit tedious and forced.