Happy New Year! Heh.. never too late? For those working in scientific research in Portugal that has to be the motto these days... we all need some positive notes, call it daily affirmations if you will, to meet each day. See now, we are still in time for the lunar year of Dragon on the 10th! Of course, come a new year and I am wiser (reads older), but this time I am also older (reads wiser) in the face of a newborn soul :) This belated newsletter brings an extra number of things to read, to uncover (or not), and to schedule, eventually. Should this not be enough, you can see the previous newsletters backed up here.
Added note: images on these emails are not attached to the email itself but served as html external sources - meaning, this email is eco-friendly and is not going to eat up loads of email storage. So, as always, I'd be grateful if you help share this with anyone who might be interested in signing up.
WRITING
LUSA interview
On the past January 7th, LUSA, the national news agency in Portugal, released an interview with me. Similar to what happens with other news agencies, like Reuters, this resulted in having that interview appearing in local and national newspapers, as well as in online platforms! It was fun (and not so fun) to see me next to the politics news in some places, and even find out photos that I didn't know existed! This interview shares a bit of the backstory and introduces the general public to this work. Be advised that it is written only in Portuguese.
On the past January 15th, I delivered a presentation (in Portuguese!) about the Community. This was an internal presentation to the group that I am a part of at CEIS20, called Grupo 4 - Práticas Artísticas: Imaginação, Materialidades, Transições (Group 4 - Art Practices: Imagination, Materiality, Transition). Since "(finally) Learning Portuguese" is in the new year's resolutions list of so many, I decided to record my presentation and share it here, on youtube.
"Music at UC" is a new event organized by graduate students at University of Coimbra to bring together researchers across campus who might be working on Music related subjects. This event will include a roundtable and 3 thematic sessions, on "Cognition and Psychology of Music", on "Concept, creativity, and technology", and on "History, paradigms, and identity". This even will take place on February 15th, 2024, 10am to 5pm, and I'm very pleased to be one of the speakers.
Upcoming talk at IST
On the week of 19 to 23 of February, I will be delivering a presentation at IST (Instituto Superior Técnico) in Lisbon. I am thrilled to receive this invitation from none other than Professor Yasser Omar, coordinator of the Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group at the University of Lisbon, and the president of the Portuguese Quantum Institute. I already had the pleasure to do short visit to the new facilities of QuTe Lab (Quantum Technologies Laboratory) this week, and I am looking forward to interacting with the rest of the community at IST at the end of the month. Precise date and time will be shared via twitter and on my websiteasac (as soon as confirmed).
Introduction to Github, project management, and collaboration
With the presentations that I've delivered at UC, and the interactions I've taken part of in my research center, I noticed that, though very supportive of open science practices, many researchers here don't use Github. Since I am generally interested in knowledge exchange, besides that being a requirement of my Marie-Curie Fellowship, I decided to partner with III (Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar) and offer a workshop to the entire UC community on introduction to Github, project management, and collaboration. This will take place online on the next February 29th, at 2:30pm.
In Portugal, virtually all research centers rely on the FCT national public agency. For better or worse, FCT has its own CV platform, called Ciência Vitae. It is similar to ORCID, but unlike this one it is not open source (sad times) - that reminds me: maybe a good number of readers on this newsletter could chime in on issue #6894 for ORCID! Still, Ciência Vitae is mandatory for all those who, directly or indirectly, have something to do with FCT. Long story short, in conversation with Olga Solovova I realized the struggle of managing hundreds of CVs and prepare for an evaluation process, so I decided to collaborate building a tool to parse all the contents of Ciência Vitae XML exports into human digestible table formats, that Science Managers love.
This past month I stumbled upon a little website called positivenotes.com. Though seemingly stale, it still has around 100 notes to light up your day, or give it a little boost of motivation and a laugh. Before you click away: viewer discretion is advised, they are simple text notes but... written in a Fearless and Funny way. More interestingly perhaps, is the clean layout and web design. But I wondered what it would be like to have this as my desktop wallpaper (99% of time covered by 80 floating windows but still), so I quickly wrote: positivenotes.och.art. Should you be so inclined to do the same, you can add this webpage to your desktop using Plash on mac, or Lively Wallpaper on windows. See their Patreon/Github sponsorship pages [1] [2] [3] [4].
Even before I had time to finish organizing my cloud collection, I was involved on a drop of 5 hybrid analog/digital NFT. This collection is called "Unfinished Constellations" and it is now open for minting on Foundation. This is the result of a collaboration with an artist who asked to "remain mysterious, at least for the time being". The collection will be revealed on a date to announce but there is a sneak-peek on the button bellow, single frames of the animations. And if you read this news and are still confused about "what does drop even mean?", you're not alone - and fortunately Foundation has a nice visual explanation here.