Regular readers will have heard the news that TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, GBIF and GigaScience Press have announced a third call for authors to submit Data Release papers on vectors of human disease for inclusion in a thematic series published in GigaByte Journal.

As my title suggests, the focus of this essay is not drones per se, but rather the wider turn to algorithmic warfare that they enable and of which they remain a key part, from surveillance operations to targeted assassination.

Somewhere in Germany there is a securitized data server that holds one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of propaganda videos produced by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), an extremist jihadist militant group that gained international notoriety in the mid-2010s for its sensationalist use of media violence to spread its ideology.

Last week, Kim Akass blogged about how the US press response to Adolescence (Netflix, 2025) made visible certain blind spots in a culture seemingly unable to identify that a particular kind of masculinity might be a problem. Akass read this very much through a prism of Trump, and I here want to continue this focus in order to add further consideration to the question of why a convicted felon was elected president by the American people.

Franziska Boehm, Ellen Euler, Paul Klimpel, Fabian Rack, John Weitzmann (Hrsg.): Creative Commons Public License (CCPL). Kommentar und Handbuch für die Rechtspraxis . Berlin: Carl Grossmann Verlag, 2024 (direkt zum PDF-Download) Die richtige Anwendung von Creative-Commons-Lizenzen für offene Inhalte ist eine der häufigsten Fragen, die in der Open-Access-Praxis auftauchen.

The Invisible Hands It wasn’t the speed that surprised me—it was how natural it felt. For years, regulatory submissions had been a slow and painstaking process. Teams of specialists labored over every sentence, every data table, every response to agency questions.

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand. Two months ago, Stephen Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct.

The two scales that lead to questionable research practices.

This is a quick post to announce that on Monday, April 7 there will be a virtual panel discussion about dark matter and MOND involving Scott Dodelson and myself. It will be moderated by Orin Harris at Northeastern Illinois University starting at 3pm US Central time*. I asked Orin if I should advertise it more widely, and he said yes – apparently their Zoom set up has a capacity for a thousand attendees.

DOI 10.60804/82EM-7E16 Views from Kai Li, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee Please describe your previous research project(s) that related to data use, and the main findings from that research. I was trained as a scientometrics researcher.

Beim #OERcamp treffen sich Menschen, die sich für freie und offene Bildung interessieren und engagieren – seit der ersten Veranstaltung 2012 in Bremen. Neben einem jährlichen Barcamp gibt es inzwischen verschiedene Formate, zum Beispiel die #OERcamp Werkstatt. Gastgeber Jöran Muuß-Merholz beantwortete im Vorfeld einige Fragen. iRights.info: Jöran, erzähl uns doch bitte etwas über die #OERcamp Werkstatt.