In the first part of this series, I covered EBSCOhost’s new Natural Language Search (NLS) which uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to expand a user's input query to a Boolean Search Query and used to run over the conventional search system. In this article, I will focus on Web of Science’s Smart Search first launched in April 2025. Similar to the offering from EBSCOhost, this is bundled with your product at no additional cost.

I recently attended a workshop on research funding and what can be done to improve public funding of research. In this blog post, I share why I consider the political dynamics of research funding an increasingly important lens in understanding the influence of research funding on research itself. In its most basic form, research funding is a tool used for a variety of purposes.

A strange and interesting aspect of MOND is the External Field Effect (EFE). If physics is strictly local, it doesn’t matter what happens outside of an experimental apparatus, only inside it. Examples of gravitational experiments include an Eötvös-style apparatus in a laboratory or a dwarf galaxy in space: in each case, test masses/stars respond to each other’s gravity. The MOND force depends on the acceleration from all sources;

“It’s like putting two insects together in a jar and seeing what happens…” (Hill, 2014: 3). When we are asked to define reality television this is often the analogy that comes to mind;

This week’s recap highlights an interesting new model of deep ancestral structure shared by humans unearthed using a new coalescent-based HMM (cobraa), a genomic language model for predicting enhancers and their allele-specific activity, atom-level enzyme active site scaffolding using RFdiffusion2, and a new perspective article on multimodal foundation models in biology.

Ever since Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, physics has been grappling with the unsettling realization that the universe does not function like clockwork—a metaphor Newton introduced and which held sway for centuries.

One more Positron-related post! It’s a quick one, just to highlight one feature I think is really neat and helpful: the Connections Pane. In a newer research project I’m working on, I have geocoded data for every foreign aid project run by most donor countries since 1989.

The past is powerful evidence for arguments about the present.

Warning: I do not specialize in digital literacy and my understanding of such matters is limited.

I am not a staunch advocate of Bayesian methods — I can totally see how for some questions a frequentist approach may provide more satisfactory answers. In this post, we’ll explore how for a simple scenario (negative binomial regression with small sample size), standard frequentist methods fail at being frequentist while standard Bayesian methods provide good frequentist guarantees.

This is the sixth and the final blog post in a series on spatial machine learning with R. You can find the list of other blog posts in this series in part one.