R updates (R Data Scientist, R+AI conference, RWeekly, rOpenSci), Posit open source investments, AI in academia, science, biology, and labor, science funding cuts, bedder bedtools, many new papers

I am pleased to share a new preprint that has just been posted on arXiv: “Who Owns the Knowledge? Copyright, GenAI, and the Future of Academic Publishing.” The text grew from my contribution to the 20th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics and is now substantially expanded, both in terms of legal analysis and policy implications.

Ha ha, I lied. Book Week will continue until morale improves. Mike has made the point to me more than once that there are papers I could and probably should write, but haven’t, because they’re things that I just assume everyone else knows.

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive started work on improving the subject classification of blog posts, using an open approach to subject classification developed by CWTS and OpenAlex.

I have been a fanboy of prominent animal physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen for a long time. I first encountered his papers back in the late 90s, working on my MS thesis at OU. I realized that vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods implied, among other things, that I had better get to reading about birds.

This contribution centers refugees as political actors and knowledge producers. Refugees and asylum seekers challenge dominant perceptions of them as mere, apolitical beings, as dangerous individuals, or as exploitable labor. They accomplish this by creating their own counter-knowledge, in which they narrate a different story about themselves.

Appalachian Figures A Football Captain Who Followed The Coal On a chilly fall afternoon in 1896, students at the Maryland Agricultural College watched a stocky fullback named Grenville Lewis lower his shoulders and plow through an opposing line. He was not just a player. He was the captain, the de facto coach, and one of the first stars of Maryland football.

Appalachian Figures On the night of May 28, 1977, when fire tore through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, one of the 165 people who never came home was a coal camp quarterback from Harlan County.

Appalachian Figures South Carolina “Carrie” Bronson started life on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork and ended it as a former first lady of West Virginia, living quietly in Huntington. Her name nods to a South Carolina family past, her life unfolds in the coalfields and courthouse towns of the Central Appalachians, and her paper trail runs from the Big Sandy News to the Governor’s Mansion in Charleston.

Appalachian Figure On a hot August day in 1886, a tall, fashionably dressed engineer rode his horse up the Tazewell Road, crossed Cumberland Gap, and looked down into the Yellow Creek Valley. Where local farmers saw timber, shallow coal banks, and floodplain, Alexander Alan Arthur saw chimneys, rail lines, electric lights, and a planned city of 250,000 people in the middle of the mountains.

Appalachian Figures On a cold January afternoon in 1900, gunfire echoed through the Capitol Hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky. When the smoke cleared, three men lay dead. At the center of the chaos stood Colonel David Grant Colson of Middlesboro, a former congressman and Spanish American War officer who had once argued for “Free Cuba” on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.