Livre d'Or

So the first online course of our giant international Covid training project is live: behold The power of genomics to understand the Covid-19 pandemic.

I'm mainly linking to show off, but you're welcome to join if you'd like. It's pitched at a scientific audience but if you have high school biology and some general curiosity you'll probably make sense of most of it. Totally free of cost and it doesn't matter if you poke at it but don't complete it.

Getting it over the line has been a massive enterprise; basically it's involved three months of shifting our entire way of working from a local thing mostly run by me and senior minion, to this incredibly complex collaboration with the COG consortium, already a huge mega-group across many different institutions. Plus we are desperately trying to decolonize! all! the! things! and work on an equal level with experts from all over the world, even though most of the UK team are used to a Eurocentric model of training.

I mean one of the reasons it's slightly delayed is that Omicron hit in the middle of the development process. The African-led group who first identified the variant got extremely angry with the rich countries that punished their disclosure instead of helping them with the crisis. Which was entirely justified but we got somewhat caught in the backlash and a bunch of previously enthusiastic African collaborators decided they didn't trust Europeans at all any more. We are honestly trying not to be parasitic White Saviours, but it's a learning curve and it's basically fair that we've run out of benefit of the doubt and second chances with some people.

Anyway, work discussions and planning have reminded me that in my personal life, I've spent the pandemic years creating and accumulating a huge pile of teaching resources, while I'm teaching on Zoom and don't have access to books, or the books available aren't suitable for what I'm trying to achieve. But it's all a big mess just dumped into a directory on my computer.

I know I have information management people among my circle. Would you be willing to give me some hints for organizing all my electronic teaching materials? I feel like I should know this kind of thing based on my professional experience, but actually... I've either been in large institutions and relied on infrastructure and expert support, or I've been in backwaters who never really had an IM strategy and just got away with things being in a bit of a muddle because the scale was small enough that it never got unmanageable.

What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them. I am willing to spend some money but not five figure sums on subscribing to a service meant for institutions, not individuals. It needs to be something fairly easy to use; if even starting to tag and store things becomes a massive faff I'll end up just not doing it. I would strongly prefer something where the architecture is on my own computer and not in the cloud. I don't have a massive amount of stuff in terms of file size, just a very large number of mostly text files. Backups would be good but that's not the main part of the problem I'm trying to solve.

And-a-pony level would be something that can easily manage a mix of English language and Hebrew language materials, but I can probably catalogue things in English and use transliteration as appropriate.

So, are there any real, non-parody guides or even training for how to communicate effectively with autistic people?

( disclaimers )

I'm not sure if it's even legitimate to ask this, but if you were able to change something about the way I communicate to be better for autistic people, what would you (want me to) change? Do you know of any resources aimed at teaching non-autistic people to do better, that use a neurodiversity type model and centre autistic people?

*Note on terminology: I have some autistic friends who insist that the opposite of 'autistic' is 'allistic', and some autistic friends who find 'allistic' offensive and strongly prefer 'neurotypical', and both those views are completely valid but I'm going with 'non-autistic' as the least-bad compromise for how to describe myself.

I have been trying to play Minecraft with the kids. I love the idea of playing, exploring and building and fighting in a shared world, it's basically the dream. But in practice I absolutely cannot get it to work reliably. I am starting to wonder whether I'm turning into the 21st century equivalent of middle-aged people who need to get small children to program the video recorder for them!

( frustration )

Halp?!

Can anyone suggest to me:

A text editor / word processor that runs under Linux and handles Hebrew and bidirectional text?

A period and menstrual cycle tracking app where all the data is local only and never transmitted to the cloud?

( more detailed spec )

I don't mind social bonding by chatting generally about related software, but I am mainly looking for actual suggestions that meet my requirements. Please don't bother telling me I should use a different operating system though. I'm not really interested in opinions about Ubuntu, Linux or Android.

ETA: You guys are amazing. I was really not expecting to get so many volunteers! I have more than enough people for now. I'm happy to add any additional names to the list for future opportunities. I can't add any more volunteers for this course, otherwise it would end up being all my friends which isn't great for diversity.

My awesome job involves creating free online courses about genomics. The first course I've been fully in charge of is about to go live, and it needs some final quality checks. It's quite exciting IMO: it's about using genomics to identify and avoid antibiotic resistance.

We need people who can put in a couple of hours in the next week, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through the whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.

We want people from all backgrounds, so a mix of people who know something about microbiology and genomics, and people who have no idea. I will say that the course is fairly technical, though, so you probably don't want to volunteer if sciencey stuff is hateful or scary to you. We are especially happy to have beta readers who aren't completely fluent in English to be more representative of our target audience.

Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested. The number of available slots is somewhat flexible, probably in the range of 3-5.

So does anyone know anything about the prohibition on writing down halachot / writing down the oral Torah? Behind the cut is deeply technical stuff, and I'm sufficiently confused about it that I don't think I can explain if you can't follow my description. But there's quite a few people reading this who are likely to know more about the topic than I do, so I'm posting about it to ask for help.

( religious nerdery )

Help?

Three topics about learning I'd like some advice on:

( where I'm stuck )

So my lovely husband had a birthday, and we had a tasting menu at Navadhanya. I'm really pleased ghoti_mhic_uait discovered a restaurant which is so well suited to our tastes. We had a bottle of Indian white wine, and I should probably be less surprised that Indian wine exists, but it was merely pleasant rather than exciting. I think in future I will go back to drinking their extremely exciting passion-fruit and chilli lassi.

Then at the weekend we had a birthday party; we seem to be reliably hitting really good house parties these days. Lots of people from different bits of our social group, lots of really good interactions and conversations.

The third part of celebrating jack is that he asked for a spa treat for his birthday. Does anyone have any recommendations at least vaguely local to Cambridge?

I've never really found the idea of a spa appealing so I don't know anything about it. Ideally we want to avoid anything too far in the "woo" direction; we're looking for someone who is going to do nice things to muscles, not chakras or auras or chi or that sort of thing. I don't really want to join in with the massage because I have some mild but annoying trauma around massage, but if it's possible to pay for a couple of hours of hanging out in a nice relaxing environment then I could keep jack company.

The most plausible option I've found so far is The Glassworks. They don't seem to offer the option of just paying for spa time, though. I would be glad to hear if anyone's been there and can tell us personally if it's any good.

I have a spreadsheet with approx forty thousand rows. Around 6000 of them are irrelevant - they're mixed in with the rest, but are identifiable based on data in one of the columns. The data covers three years. The years are not recorded as proper dates, but as plain text saying things like 2015/16.

My task is that for each year, I need to count the unique values in one of the columns. This column contains only text, no blanks. It's not made out of meaningful English words, but serial numbers containing letters and digits. The values in each column are repeated anywhere from 1 to 60 times; I just want to know how many different serial numbers there are, not overall, but separately for each year.

( detail, with example )

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach this?

(The reason why I'm trying to wrangle this myself rather than delegating it to someone who has relevant expertise is, well, annoying work politics. But the fact remains that I need to do it.)

So my two former bar mitzvah students want to carry on with Hebrew now they've both completed their ceremonies. They've said they'd like to do a bit more conversational modern Hebrew as well as just practising prayerbook reading. Does anyone have any recommendations for textbooks?

The boys are 13 and 15, both reasonably academically able and reasonably committed. They can read fairly fluently, but have very little vocab or grammar at the moment. They're also extremely busy and probably won't have huge amounts of time for practice in between their fortnightly lessons. My options at the moment are:
The textbook recommended by the GCSE exam board. I'd generally like the boys to be thinking about GCSE sort of level, not that they hugely have to pass exams but as a streching, but attainable, target. The problem is that the book looks incredibly dated and dull and I don't feel inspired to teach from it!

Or Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew. I think this is basically aimed at beginners, but beginners who are university students or otherwise quite advanced in general language skills. It's really quite heavy on grammar, and might be overkill for a couple of years of informal lessons for teenagers.

I can't find anything I like better than these two options. I don't want a course that is primarily audio for self-learning, because I'm going to be there teaching and keeping up reading fluency is a big priority. And I don't want just a vocab list or beginners' dictionary. The younger boy suggested using a tourist phrasebook, which might work but ideally I'd like something more like a textbook and less like lists of phrases to rote learn.

Secondly, I still have not succeeded in giving the younger lad his bar mitzvah present, because everything I could think of is out of print and not for sale for reasonable money. I would like to give him a good work of popular non-fiction, something enjoyable to read but also informative. He's quite interested in politics and world affairs, which is a subject I know little about. And he's pretty bright but not especially precocious, I think he'd get more out of something accessible or even aimed at teenagers, than something hardcore academic.

I'm thinking something about the level of Jared Diamond's Guns, germs and steel, except not that because I'm now aware that Diamond not only plays fast and loose with scholarly accuracy, he conducted some rather unethical ethnographic research and published identifying stories about his subjects without their permission. And I have in mind that there used to be a journalist who did short programmes on Radio 4 about US politics and culture, and that he died a few years ago (?) and that prior to that he had written a book of anecdotes that this young man might enjoy, but that's not enough information to shake his name out of Google, does anyone have any clue whom I'm talking about?

So. Anyone who's taught conversational Hebrew, any recs? And in a less specialist query, what's the most interesting popular non-fiction book you've read lately?