Random Doctor Who Picture

Sep. 6th, 2025 03:32 pm
purplecat: The Eighth Doctor. (Who:Eight)
[personal profile] purplecat

Cover for the Eighth Doctor Book Endgame by Terrance Dicks.  A burning radiation symbol.  The Stars and Stripes and Hammer and Sickle are just visible in the read background.
This was one of a sequence of books in a soft reboot of the Eighth Doctor range, in which the Doctor has lost his memory and must live through the 20th century - in this case the Cold War. Terrance Dicks increasingly recycled his old ideas, or perhaps obsessions into his book. This one features a shadowy set of beings called The Players about which I recall little, beyond that they had already been inserted into various books of his. Anyway, at least I remember something about this one.

Random Roman Remains

Sep. 5th, 2025 09:30 pm
purplecat: Black and White photo of production of Julius Caesar (General:Roman Remains)
[personal profile] purplecat

Tree growing close by some Roman footings with large fallen bricks behind.
Chesters Roman Fort
purplecat: An open book with a quill pen and a lamp. (General:Academia)
[personal profile] purplecat
One of my post-docs, and I was previously on the supervisory team for her PhD, has been partly occupying her time generating publications from her thesis. This is one such. She's addressing the question of what people actually want when they ask that an autonomous system provide explanations. In particular, though she doesn't really get into that in the paper, most explainability research has focused specifically on neural networks that are classifying things into groups, not on robotic systems that are taking decisions about what to do next.

Eliciting Explainability Requirements for Safety-Critical Systems: A Nuclear Case Study talks through her approach, and tries to categorise her results into groups. There is also some formalisation of the requirements into logic, though via the use of structured English to make it more comprehensible. Lastly she reports on some lessons learned.
purplecat: The Tardis against a sunset (or possibly sunrise) (Doctor Who)
[personal profile] purplecat
Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.


Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.

Wish World/The Reality War

Sep. 1st, 2025 07:22 pm
purplecat: The Fifteenth Doctor (Who:Fifteen)
[personal profile] purplecat
I went into Wish World/The Reality War knowing it was likely to be a hot mess and I was not wrong.

Are we still doing spoilers? )

Random Doctor Who Picture

Aug. 30th, 2025 08:37 am
purplecat: The Second Doctor holding his diary (Who:Books)
[personal profile] purplecat

Cover for the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventure Palace of the Red Sun by Christopher Bulis.  Picture of a domed palace with four pointy turrets.  The silhouettes of two figures, one in a long dress and one in a shorter one walk down an avenue of upright trees to the palace.  Everything is in oranges and yellows.

Another blank in my memory. The back makes it sound like there is an underlying quest style narrative which, as I recall, is common in Bulis' works.

Random Roman Remains

Aug. 29th, 2025 06:30 pm
purplecat: Black and White photo of production of Julius Caesar (General:Roman Remains)
[personal profile] purplecat

The foundations of a long oblong stone brick roman building showing the pillars that once supported the hypocaust.
Housteads Roman Fort
purplecat: An open book with a quill pen and a lamp. (General:Academia)
[personal profile] purplecat
The award winning paper I mentioned next week, actually had a sequel. In The human factor: Addressing computing risks for critical national infrastructure towards 2040 we performed a similar exercise of asking a number of experts about risks to Critical National Infrastructure arising from computing developments and synthesising the results.

I am honestly, happier with this paper, I thought we had a better range of genuine expertise in the people we talked to, and a more focused area of consideration. We had a little trouble with the third referee, who thought our experts were wrong about Quantum Computing and that we should rewrite the paper so they gave the answer the referee thought was correct. Our experts did not think Quantum Computing was among the biggest risks to be considered in the next 15 years - but instead thought there were a number of issues relating to human factors (sophisticated phishing, difficulty tracing the cause of problems and poor incident response in complex situations).
purplecat: The Tardis against a sunset (or possibly sunrise) (Doctor Who)
[personal profile] purplecat
Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.


Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.
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