New podcast, Doodles and Shown & Told
Tales from the Engine Room, Doodling joy, and Show & Tell talks
New podcast: Tales from the Engine Room
We have a new podcast! Tales from the Engine Room is interviews with members of The Skiff and lets you get to know who they are and what they do.
In the first episode, Caroline Beavon interviews Alice Dewar-Mills, experienced commercial director for hire and founder of Looking Glass Solutions. Find out how she got her start with Rolls-Royce through quite a fraught interview, how her career developed and how coworking at The Skiff helped her handle risks she wanted to take. Now she’s helping small business owners make better use of contracts.
Doodles!
Jo Harrison and Caroline Beavon hosted the first Doodle Club this week, and it was a great success. Jo says:
“It was lovely, chilled out and creative, with added weird (including collages of Kings battling in hovering trainers, a swearing Disney homage and the recesses of Tom’s brain made visible), plus chats about cult TV shows, podcasts and books, obviously. Looking forward to the next one.“
Everyone absolutely loved it, thank you Jo!
Shown and Told
Caroline Beavon and Tom Parslow put on a bijou Show and Tell on Wednesdays with three talks by members and some interesting discussion. One was on something not ready to be public yet, here are the others:
Tom Parslow showed us the first stages of how an AI Large Language Model like Chat-GPT is created, through the medium of his trying to make a version of Talkie Toaster from TV series Red Dwarf.
Trying to summarise the tokenizing of text in a five minute talk was quite the rush, but I think he pulled it off. Here are his slides, and code so far.
Jo Harrison showed us work she’s done in collaboration with other Skiff members.
For the Scottish Women’s Budget Group she is collaborating with Joyce, with Jo creating the illustrations that Joyce is animating. For Rape Crisis Scotland she’s working with Caroline on a data timeline to best show the effect government decisions have on the work of the organisation.
She talked about the difficulties of working in an area where you have to take great care to not include triggering imagery within work you are making to try to help people who have been through terrible experiences.
Special thanks to Caroline!
You’ll notice all three stories in this newsletter are down to Caroline Beavon’s work. Thank you Caroline for being such a powerhouse of energy in The Skiff!
