The mean girl in the internet of things

Jason has consciously uncoupled from his employer. Inger's getting a Volvo. There is clearly a lot to discuss in the first half an hour, including the survey that Inger finally has out (participate here!)

Jason's had some time to wrangle the mailbag, so he's cleaned up Inger's mess and made a spreadsheet. People have a lot to say about our travel episode and we are ready to hear it!

In work problems, Jason brings Inger up to speed about Apple Intelligence and we have a chat about AI, privacy and the fact that Inger seems to be saving 12 hours a week by outsourcing to Claude...

Jason had to go to coffee, so there was no time for mailbag, but if you have kids, stick around for a top tip about AI study buddies!

Stuff we mentioned:
Kaitlin Salze's omni focus website
Trippit
Apple intelligence video
Blue Ribbon Foundation
Style: 10 lessons in clarity and grace (so expensive! Library I reckon)
(Inger's survey on academic work)

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on <pod@ontheregteam.com>

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at enquiries@ontheregteam.com

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Transcript

Here's half the transcript - we will add more later when Claude has refreshed itself!

Episode 67

At a moment where I thought you were talking about other male problems. I'm like, I don't know if I want to hear about those problems. Maybe we're starting to overshare.

All right, I am driving the bus, he says.

Do it, do it, do it. Do it, do it, drive the bus, drive the bus, drive the bus. Hi, welcome to On The Reg. I'm Dr. Jason Downs, and I'm here with my good friend, Professor Inga Mewburn from the Australian National University. But she is better known as The Thesis Whisperer. Not at the Thesis Whisperer, at Thesis Whisperer, get it right.

It's only been five years. Well done, Jason over on the internet. We're here for another episode of On The Reg, where we talk about work, but you know, not in a boring way. We are all about practical, implementable productivity hacks to help you live a more balanced life. Welcome Inga, how have you been? It's cold. I woke up this morning and Canberra had turned out minus 2.5 and it said, feels like minus 6.4. Oh, dang. Man, and like the water in the bird bath is frozen most mornings this week. Yeah. And you're coming up to visit us. Yeah. So bring the thermals, Jason. It's proper cold. Are birds stuck in it?

Like I've got this mental image of like this poor little bird, it's got little feet stuck in the ice. Like trying to get out. No, they've not been visiting. They do visit it a lot. I thought having a bird bath would be stupid, but it's so entertaining. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's, the magpies are just so bossy and they get in there and like, like flick it all around with their wings and stuff and just make it all shit for the other birds and the other birds sit on the tree and you can see their faces like, Jesus, really?

Come on. And they sort of line up like they're at a service station. Is there a hierarchy? It's amazing. It's pretty entertaining on the, uh, the Mewburn family bird bar, but at the moment it's closed. So cold, uh, very cold, Jason, I did order a Volvo cause apparently now I have Volvo money. I'm pretty excited. I'm getting an EX30 and it's going to be bright yellow and it comes in September and I can't wait and yes, it's electric because why would you go back? So zero. Okay. Currently my Tesla does zero to 100 in 5.4 seconds.

Yeah. Which I've been known to do many times. I love to plant the foot in that thing, but the EX30 does zero to a hundred in 3.6 seconds. Dang. It is vomitingly fast. Like snap your head back in the headrest fast. I love it's death already. So cannot wait till it comes end of September. That kind of, that kind of speed plus electricity reminds me of Back to the Future vibes, right?

For reals. It also has one of those cameras that watches you and tells you when you're tired and basically comments on you. So, you know, I'm ready for my Volvo phase. I'm just saying, this is, this is a good time for me. I'm an academic professor driving a Volvo. I reckon if I had a camera that was looking at me, if my car was looking at me to determine whether or not it was tired, it would just constantly be looking at me and going, Oh, Jason, you don't look well.

You look tired, mate. Maybe you should have a rest. It's when, it's when all our objects talk to each other. So maybe your car has a talking to your CPAP machine and says. Hey, he needs more flow, more flow, more flow. Um, good news was just the, it's just the idea of like all of my machine or all of our machines gossiping about us behind our back.

Oh, he did not sleep well last night. Oh, okay. I'll make sure that he can only drive for half an hour today. And I can imagine them all being, they can be like quite friendly about us. So, but what if it turned, what if, what if my EX30 was the mean girl? In my internet of things. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, I saw her, she fell asleep on the road.

Convinces, convinces your CPAP machine to reduce the flow. It's like, oh, Inga yelled at me today. So why don't you just like, instead of, you know, 17 liters per, Mega cycle of something, something, something CPAP science. Make it 12. Just for an hour. Tell her she only had 0.2 incidences in the night, but we know she had 20.

And then she's wondering why she's so tired and then she'll blame herself. I could see this. This is actually, we're foreshadowing our topic for today, which will be AI. Tell the fridge not to remind her that she needs milk. It'd be the small petty things that they'd be really good at that. I reckon they would.

And you know, I always tell people when I'm teaching AI stuff, you know, be polite to it. I want it to know I was one of the nice ones, but maybe it just doesn't care. Maybe it really is a mean girl, it doesn't matter how nice you are. Oh, please don't. I'm already slightly anxious about the future. Alright, good news.

I'm going to talk about good news. Good news. Open University Press has greenlit the second edition of Writing Trouble. Just waiting for the final contract to sign on the dotted line. So me and Catherine are pretty thrilled about that. Sean can't join us for this like recap, um, which means I've been doing lots of writing about writing with AI because it's going to have writing with AI in it, which I think I've briefly talked about before, but now we're really sharpening the tools, sharpening the pencil on that one.

And, I have been working on an ethics approval. I know like this is like deep cut nerdy things, but I have been working on a survey for Academics, all academics, about distraction and work and, you know, generally just how you're doing at work, basically.

And I'm not a quant person, as you know, but I've been a learner. And actually Thesis Whisperer Junior has been very helpful in helping me design this survey. It has gone through many, many, many iterations, Jason, because I collected a group of people interested in neurodivergence. She's got about 700 people on that mailing list now.

And I've been showing them the survey, getting them to take samples of it. So there's been real sort of community consultation. This process, Jason, has taken a year. A year? Yep. Pretty much I started a year ago. Reading and thinking about it. And then I've actually been working on the survey and various iterations of it for six months.

And like, I thought it wasn't exactly a zombie project. We need another kind of term for it. Cause there's never a zombie. It was always lively and like in my workflow, but it just seemed to, it was like, it felt like a death march, right? Like I was getting nowhere and I was. Just like back and forth and revisions and not so much the committee, but just myself, you know, my wanting to get it right and then bringing more and more kind of collaborators on board.

So now we're in three countries and we've got, you know, seven people and It's like, so marshalling all that's been a bit of a job of work as well. Anyway, I'm pleased to say on Friday, the ethics committee said, yes, you can go ahead with this. And it was like, there's none of those like quiet moments of victory in academia, which are just like, you know, you want, you want ticker tape parades.

You've won fireworks and all you get is a little email and you say to yourself, that's as exciting as it ever gets in academia. And they said, well done Inga. There's a spelling mistake in your plain language statement. That was all. That was the only feedback, which I thought was just epic. Because normally, normally they've got a lot to say.

The committee. Can you remember the word? No, I couldn't even find it. I couldn't even find it, can't find my own fucking typo, anyway so, that was that. And um, infer the word play's successes. You know they didn't read it right? Do you reckon they just said that? Oh, they're talking to my Volvo, and Volvo, ethics committee, ethics committee.

Just, just tell her that there's a spelling mistake and she'll spend three, three hours searching for it. It's actually a bit strange how I've already cast my Volvo as a mean girl. I'm not sure that this is, this is good. You've got a long term relationship with this car coming up. It might be worth kind of rethinking that.

Yeah, no, it's a four year commitment, this one. Um, uh, I ran a bootcamp last week with the team, with Lindsay and Simon and Barker. And we had 34 bootcampers. We kept it small this time. Um, and four people wrote 20,000 words. Everyone wrote 5,000 words. Well, one person was 200 words off, but I wrote their name on the green block that we, we give squeezy Lego blocks for every 5,000 words.

And the green ones were 5,000. We wrote our name on it and told her to. Do another 200 words over the weekend and come back and get it on Monday. But they all did write 5,000 words in, in three days. And it was really, it was really great. And the next one I'm running is in Cairns at James Cook University.

If you're a James Cook person, know that I'm coming. I'm going to be in you and you're coming with me. I am. It'll be great fun. You're going to be my boot camp camaraderie because we are starting to do a bit of work together. Aren't we, Jason? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like super excited about it. It's um, it's, it's just been, it's been great over the last couple of weeks to kind of really start to sink our teeth into some of this sort of stuff.

And I've really appreciated the, the opportunity to be able to work more closely with you. Now that I'm no longer working at La Trobe, so it's, it's over. You're consciously uncoupled. I've consciously uncoupled, yes. Had to make some tough decisions. As I talked about kind of briefly last time we talked.

I'd add some fairly solid health considerations to kind of take into account and make some decisions around all that sort of stuff. So, yes. So now I'm looking forward to the next chapter, which will be in the short term, at least working more closely with you to be able to help with some of this stuff.

Cause you've got a very full dance card in Gimliburn and looking forward to be able to Work with you and also, you know, we've plotted for many years about the sorts of things that we should be doing, but neither of us have had the time to actually do either of any of those. So true. So true. So, so, uh, I'm going to invest some of that time.

I've got a bit of a time dividend now up my sleeve. So I'm going to invest some of that time. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. I mean, for those of you aren't aware, I do have a full time job at ANU, but ANU has this very generous policy called the 52 day rule, which means that 52 days of the year, you can draw a salary from ANU and also work somewhere else, which is pretty amazingly generous.

I've never taken 52 days. Like I think the most I've ever taken is 17. But I mean, with the caveat that your boss has to sign it off and you have to be out till you know, do your job. So I, my bosses, bless their hearts, have always left that up to me to manage. And some years I've done three things and some years I've done 17.

And lately I haven't been able to do very much, but business is booming, Jason, I've never had so many calls. And I actually thought with the invention of all this AI and we'll get there, cause we are going to talk about AI, all this AI stuff that my calls from my services would decrease massively because.

A lot of what I do is teach writing, although I don't teach it in a very conventional way. And I get a lot of repeat business. I've got repeat clients that I'll do work for each year. And I thought, oh, they'll just, you know, but instead it's accelerated massively. So I'm really glad you can join me because I couldn't possibly keep servicing this many people, but I'm keen to get out there because I'm excited about, AI and how we can use it in our writing practice.

And, and what are the ethics of that and how to, how to do that and sort of navigate that difficult territory. So I do one called writing under pressure where we basically generate lots of writing in the morning with a few techniques, and then we use AI in the afternoon to clean it up and I do.

Building a second brain for writing, which is all about, managing all your information that includes quite a lot of help from AI on that. And then I've been expanding out a few other ideas. So like you say, these ideas that we've had, we can finally do them, at least some of them. You're already busy, aren't you, building these.

In the background, the machine is cranking. And the ideas that we had 12 months ago, even are now significantly changed because of AI. You know, so you kind of go, Oh yeah, we should do it like this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden it's like, hang on, AI can do a third of that, or, you know, that can seriously help with some of the heavy lifting on some of this sort of stuff.

So timelines that were. Reasonable timelines can actually be shortened a reasonable amount. Of course it's just a case of making sure that you don't fall into the trap of, Oh, I can work faster, so I will work faster and cram more in and, you know, still end up in the same place. What you want to do is be able to reap that productivity dividend and use it for good stuff rather than.

You know, just kind of throwing it back. So, which is going to be our main topic later on. But anyway, if you're interested in having us visit, we're, we're available. Our email address is in the footer. We are now available. Yes. Oh, and just foreshadowing the the mail bag has literally exploded since we have introduced our new publicly available email address.

To all those people like, yeah, I could search in this email address. I can't be bothered doing that. And now going, oh, Let's just copy and paste. And then now you're answering them all. That was well thought out of me, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. And I get up in the morning and I'm like, Oh, dang, look at all this email.

Well, I thought I left that world behind. No, different email world. A much more fun one awaits. A better one. Yeah, totally. What's been happening with you other than consciously uncoupling with your employer? Yes. Well, I mean, I've been in professor land a little bit last week and it's been delightful. May I say?

Yes. I caught up with Professor Narelle Lemon who is over in, friend of the pod and over from Edith Cowan University. She was here in Melbourne and we caught up for a lovely day, in fact, uh, and she introduced me to this wonderful little cafe over in Brunswick, yes, Brunswick at which the Victorian.

Well, the Australian latte champion, like latte art champion, Victorian Australian. I can't remember off the top of my head. Cause I think, well, if they're Victorian, it's the Australian because, you know, Victoria does lead the pack. Yeah. Coffee. Yeah. Yeah. And I got a latte at one stage and I had the latte art of like a stylized rooster on the top of it.

And I was like, Oh my God. But they delivered it upside down. So like, in terms of its orientation to me. Yes. So when it first turned up, I, I couldn't figure out what it was because it was all upside down, Miss Jane. And I was like, what? And I was like, my brain was like, I know it's art, but I just can't understand it.

And it wasn't until I turned the cup around. I was like, Oh, it's a rooster. Oh, right. It's a rooster. It's not abstract art, not abstract art. I'm like, Oh my God, I need to go out to more galleries, um, and professor Coralie English from university of Newcastle was also friend of the pod. I think we can say that as a pop.

Yes. There's also down in Melbourne at the moment. And so she joined us for lunch. Uh, which was absolutely wonderful. So I got to put two professors, two super smart professors together and they had super smart professory kind of talk over lunch. And it was just lovely just being in that whole environment and just being able to catch up