I recently put in a FOIP request to the Alberta Executive Council and got a pretty quick response that no records exist (EC000-2024-G-10 closure letter).
I asked for clarification, and received,
"Based on your very specific request for a list, a thorough search was undertaken to locate the records, and it was discovered that no such list (record) exists with Executive Council. FOIP is unable to interpret results of a search other than convey the results."
That wording makes me think something does exist, but I have to re-word, or ask a different department. Anyone have any advice?
My original request was,
Several news sites, but specifically CTV at https://globalnews.ca/news/10281751/alberta-says-it-consulted-widely-in-drafting-controversial-transgender-rights-policy/ have reported that Premier Danielle Smith "consulted widely" before announcing policy changes affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults on January 31, 2024.
I am requesting a list of all parties, organizations and individuals with whom the Premier met on this issue, including dates, locations and how long each meeting lasted.
Timeframe: May 29, 2023 to Feb 16, 2024
Eliminations: duplicate records, draft records, email records which are duplicated in the final longest string, records subject to solicitor/client or litigation privilege, records containing third party business information, and records containing third party personal information.
Should I not have asked for a "list"?
It seems a rarity, but I have two really interesting sites open in my browser talking about qualitative data in the relatively current environment. The first, Pandemic Journaling Project Archive Opens for Research, is notable because it fills a big gap. As the article notes,
“There are several large quantitative surveys in the social sciences that are broadly used,” says Karcher, “but qualitative datasets that are large enough to be analyzed from so many different angles are very, very rare. The PJP data are going to be a treasure for social scientists for years to come, and we at QDR couldn’t be more excited to be the permanent home for them.”
That does remind me of another tab I have open that I wanted to explore - A listing of qualitative data results from the lunaris data repository here in Canada...
The second is timely in that it talks about the problems of using AI to try to perform qualitative data analysis. How not to: We failed at analyzing public discourse on AI with ChatGPT. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to help a researcher successfully use NVivo's automatic coding using existing coding patterns feature, and wonder if it would've helped in this case.
Related to the above, I know folks are exploring the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools to assist with qualitative data analysis, but I sure haven't yet seen anything that makes me think we're very close yet. And that leaves aside the questions around confidentiality in letting any online tool churn through qualitative data. Though I do still have to delve more deeply into CoLoop and Qeludra.
There's not (yet?) a link to each recording in the original schedule, but the recordings from the 2023 Access Library Conference, held in Halifax on October 23-25, 2023, are now live on YouTube. Definitely some good stuff worth checking out!
Not quite as intimate as Brian's, but according to the sites with whom I share my info, I read 37 books with 13,262 pages last year, and I cycled and ran 5,689 kms (3,535 miles), not including my e-bike commutes. I plan for 2024 to be significantly bigger on the cycling front, so stay tuned. I know you don't care, but I still use this site as an auxiliary brain :-) You should be able to click to embiggen either of these infographics.
I lifted the title directly from Simon Willison's post: llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer, even though I don't have the expertise to know if it's the BEST way. I can tell you it's a damn easy way, even on Windows! Simon's explanation works on a mac, but you can also run this on Windows with the following miniscule changes.
llamafile-server-0.1-llava-v1.5-7b-q4
file from Justine’s repository on Hugging Face.Simon reports that on his M2 Mac he's seeing 55 tokens per second. On my brand-spanking new Dell office machine running Windows 10, I get 5.5 tokens per second :-( I was getting ready to grump all over Windows, here, but on my 2-year-old M1 MacBook Air it barely runs at all, clocking in with 0.35 tokens per second. And now my MacBook Air has crashed - maybe don't try running it on yours, or do, and tell me why mine sucked so hard! :-)
I just came out of a webinar that generated a slew of good-looking links, and was off on Friday, so have a handful of newsletters, also with tasty-looking links. The rest of the day is full, and I fear I may not get to these for some time, so here, maybe you have time:
In no particular order:
Quite some time ago, I used a browser extension called TLDRify that allowed me to highlight some text on a web page, and it would create a link I could share that would jump a person directly to the text I had highlighted. It was a way to both create an anchor link when one didn't exist, but with the added benefit of highlighting the block of text you wanted someone to see. At some point I stopped using it because several browsers threw up scary warnings to the clickee that they were being redirected to a different site, which is true, in that TLDRify actually shows your desired content on a different URL (tldrify.com).
The other day, my friend Peter posted about something called URL Scroll-To-Text Fragment, and it looked promising enough to explore. In my explorations, I think I've learned that TLDRify seems to be working well enough again that I'll likely start with that, but you may be interested in figuring out if either of these solutions might be useful to you. It seems that different browsers may play more nicely with one or the other, with Chrome possibly being the best bet, but I have gotten both link types to work across Windows and macOS, on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Edge.
The "fix" to TLDRify is that now all the browsers that are warning about the link are doing so by displaying the following at the top of the page, but otherwise the link works as desired.
So here are some links to try - how do they work for you?