• Question: whats the most secretive thing you have ever worked on?

    Asked by Rhys M to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 4 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Yo Yehudi

      Yo Yehudi answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      I could tell you, but then I’d have to… nah, just kidding.

      Recently I participated in a data study group, looking at some healthcare data. Because it was data about personal private details, I wasn’t actually allowed to look at the data! They described what it looked like to me by going over the names of column headers on spreadsheets, without actually telling me what values were in the spreadsheet rows.

      I had to try to write code to process and visualise this data in a meaningful way even though I couldn’t see it, which was a little bit crazy and quite honestly rather frustrating. Working on “secret” stuff isn’t nearly as much fun as working on open data / science / code, because you have to be so careful not to let it leak out and you probably won’t have access to all the tools you need. I’ll prefer nonsecret work every time!

    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 5 Nov 2017:

      All unpublished scientific work is somewhat secretive. This is because you don’t want anyone publishing your work before you do! Sometimes this might mean that you work on something, it works great, and then before you can share it you have to wait for patents and published paper to be created first. Other than that, I’ve not worked on anything particularly secretive!

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