Apple gets into protein folding, parsing R/Markdown and Quarto, vibe-coding an R package, AI in biosecurity and writing, nothing about AI is inevitable, conservation applications of de-extinction tech
In a book chapter I recently had published (Beattie 2025) I discuss how seminal British sitcom Desmond’s (1989-1994, Channel 4) illustrates how barbershops function as both community anchors and as sites of cultural education for Black communities.
I sat in a conference hall in Rio Branco, Acre State, Brazil. My mind was in a sanatorium of Algiers, Algeria. This was where my mother was sent as a girl. They told her she got tuberculosis because she was an “indigène musulman”. In 1938, the year of my mother’s birth and after over a century of colonization, about 5 out of every 100 Algerian people got infected with tuberculosis each year.
As online culture has moved towards algorithmic social media and instant messaging it is harder and harder to keep this site updated. September is almost finishing and I haven’t documented here the work we did convening the Comics & AI: Critical Prompts one-day conference at City St George’s University of London, on Thursday 4 September 2025. Shortly after the conference I published a quick post about it on LinkedIn, here.
Historical learning processes are omnipresent. They affect all age groups, forms of media, and are encouraged in both formal and non-formal education. But how do we learn to internalize and classify historical knowledge, to evaluate and contextualize it? And how can this be supported in the face of a digitalizing society facing tendencies of increasing … „Learning about history in a digital world.
Vuelvo tras la pausa del verano. De paso, anuncio el cambio del día de publicación de las entradas: pasa de los miércoles por la tarde a los jueves por la tarde. En la última entrada de esta serie dije que la identificación de saltos y omisiones es una tarea relativamente simple hoy en...
El acercamiento a las redes sociales de Rosendo Pineda, un destacado político porfirista, operador clave del grupo conocido como “los científicos”, ofrece una oportunidad para asomarse a la mecánica política de la época.
I was looking at the different NFDI consortia in the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and found that the only two that have a parent relations to the NFDI (ror:05qj6w324) are NFDI4DS (ror:00bb4nn95) and MaRDI (ror:04ncnzm65). This felt strange to me, so I started looking around Wikidata to see if I could automatically make a curation sheet to send along to them.
Recap of the first R User Group event in Charlottesville VA
Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that Matt and I are both all in on open access. What is the point of “publishing” something that not everyone can read?
In everyday research, a lot of mostly heterogeneous data is generated, which is often processed and analyzed collaboratively.