We have the strongest evidence yet that life once existed on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance Rover drilled into Mars’s Jezero crater and pulled up a piece of mudstone covered in markings that resemble those left behind by metabolizing microbes on Earth. Obviously more investigation is needed before […]

Your article, On On Folk Epistemology, published in Inquiry, Volume 68 Issue 10, is now available

Good thread showing why the global cloud is basically what economists call a natural monopoly. From: @Mer__edith https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115445701583902092

🫳 🎤

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

Five preoccupied to protect the human ecosystem 4/5

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 3/5

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem. 2/5

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem. 2/5

Five principles to protect the ecosystem of human knowledge. 1/5 @tomstafford has argued that the infoglut we live in is like when densely populated cities made plagues more likely. We need to normalise new hygienic practices. @olivia et al set some out.

"But AI tools will be just like calculators..."

Students aren't generally looking to cheat, and most think LLM use should not be allowed in college education. Let's not allow salespeople to speak for them.

Why higher ed teaching is hard, and always will be. But we don't do it because it is easy, and we are trusted to do it well because we have hard earned expertise in our fields. Let's not undervalue that, hey?

It is vital that we don't overestimate our understanding of human cognition. Yes, there is reason to believe we have a better grasp of some things than when AI hype first appeared in the 1950s, but that better understanding is not clear, and almost certainly isn't on the basis of simple computation

Sigh. Paging Sam Altman.

The more I learn about history, the more I understand how important learning about history is. This is doubly important in my own professional field. @olivia and colleagues driving home the point against the inevitability of AI reminding us of this.

https://xkcd.com/2347/ recursion

I'm putting together a short bibliography of recent papers about #BigTeamScience, with emphasis on challenges and solutions for large social science projects. Am I missing any important papers? I'm in particular looking for any tools or checklists to use when […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

❝ The crazy thing is not that garlic isn’t grown from seeds; it’s that, for the most part, it can’t be. Ever since people began cultivating garlic — six millennia ago by some estimates, 10 by others — it’s primarily been done through asexual reproduction. In all those thousands of years […]

Email addresses are very simple, and you will score highly in this quiz. https://e-mail.wtf

New newsletter! "To not get distracted by the dizzying competence of the new AI models, we need to keep a steady eye on their surprising failures too." https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/ai-has-weird-edges

One of the reasons I have been a strong advocate for the use of persistent digital identifiers, especially ORCIDs, is because they facilitate trust in authorship while simultaneously supporting the personal life decisions of authors to change their name. #openscience @eLife […]

New off-topic newsletter from me! https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/annals-of-scholarly-profanity "I have collected three triumphant examples of scholarly profanity, pieces of writing with a swear word in the title which fill an important gap in our conceptual universe, not despite but […]

Microsoft marketing: “Your data stays in Europe.” Microsoft’s Legal Director (under oath, in French Parliament): “No, I cannot guarantee that.” Still think Microsoft Teams is a sovereign solution? Credit @ponceto91 for the meme […] [Original post on graz.social]

It seems pretty clear that we're well along the technology learning curve for batteries now. The Chinese government's single-minded focus on renewables, mostly solar and some wind, is going to change the global energy landscape in ways we can scarcely imagine. @TheAtlantic just published a […]

Nice, DuckDuckGo now has https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so you can entirely avoid their AI Search even when you regularly delete cookies. AI "search" not existing would be my preference, but functional opt-out is a solid second given current state of tech. (It's possible it's not new, but I only […]

This wasn't quite the effect I was going for, but it turned out rather nice.

*Memoirs of Mary Somerville, 19th-century woman scientist and mentor of Ada Lovelace. https://archive.org/details/b21960239

JOB : Join RoRI as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in Metascience https://researchonresearch.org/join-rori-as-a-research-fellow-senior-research-fellow-in-metascience/ Closing 9th of July, based in London/hybrid. Full time, fixed term until 31/12/2027 (apologies for late notice, full […]

There's no such thing as a completely neutral and dispassionate expert. Expertise requires context Context requires relationships Relationships require emotion Ergo... expertise requires emotion. Luckily this is not a problem! Emotions are good, actually. They do not have to get in the way of […]

Just out; my podcast with Alun Davies of @ripencc on where @robin.berjon.com and my Internet Rewilding idea came from what internet 'food webs' are and what they mean for browser sustainability what the technical community needs to do (hint: think like ecologists to protect and regenerate the […]

Friends at IU!?! Cog sci?!?! One of the most impressive units in this area?

Honestly, I would have thought this unfilmable. This does look interesting though. https://youtu.be/m08TxIsFTRI

A year ago, I saw someone open a book lamp in a bar. It was a pretty expensive product. Since I combine electronics and paper crafting, I had to DIY it and develop an easy-to-use circuit template and instructions for it. This educational project is perfect for […] [Original post on chaos.social]

Here an idea for Congressional Democrats: a read-in (all night and all day on the floor of the Senate) of all the cuts in the "big beautiful bill" the Republicans are trying to push through Congress #uspolitics #democrats #budget

Pro-West independent candidate Nicusor Dan has staged a dramatic comeback to win the Romanian presidential election. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/05/18/nicusor-dan-leading-in-romanias-crucial-presidential-elections-exit-polls-project

I think I must be their strangest teacher. Half of the time I'm asking them to convert numbers to other bases, crack encoded messages, write short programs. The other half I'm like "let's relax and draw a billion circles and think about how lovely the patters are." Using tools like the compass […]

There's a lot of framing of the anticipated exodus of US scientists as "a great opportunity for Ireland, Europe, etc" which I find deeply problematic. It is not a zero-sum game where one party's gains balance another's losses, but a global tragedy for science and scholarship. Better to think of […]

🎉🔬 More news this weekend. @sciety (eLife's preprint evaluation platform) has secured funding from @nlnet to build a Bonfire flavour for federating preprint reviews and discussions. This means federated, community-governed spaces for open discourse around scientific preprints outside […]

Wow, researchers at the Uni of Zürich have basically pulled the same shit as Facebook did with their emotion manipulation experiment: they let loose a group of LLM bots on r/changemyview to see if it would change people's minds. And the ethics board of the UZ didn't see any issues with that… […]

I've got a quick favour to ask. If you're reading this post on Mastodon (or the Fediverse), please click share. How come? I recently moved across to my own self-hosted single-user server (using GoToSocial.org). For a bunch of reasons, including visibility across the Fedi, it would really help out.

Does anyone *really* like "touch controls" on anything? When you see "touch controls" on earbuds, lights, appliances... are you like "heck yeah! no buttons!" I just think they are cheaper to make IPx4+ than other methods of control. But, they are always highlighted like it's a feature. (Why […]