tl;dr: People’s motivations to engage with online citizen science are complex and change over time Apparently, last week iNaturalist released a blog post, demoing their mock-up of how they envision using LLMs to process user-contributed wildlife observation data.

Appalachian History A feud comes to the railroad On an April morning in 1921, a long running mountain feud flared beside the tracks at Heidrick in Knox County, Kentucky. Businessman Beverly P. White stepped off the train that had carried him back from Manchester and walked toward the small restaurant at the Cumberland and Manchester Railroad stop. John Bailey, a member of a rival family clan, shot him multiple times.

This month, a quiet yet momentous event occurred in DataCite infrastructure: the registration of our 100 millionth DOI.  100 million is a huge number. And it says a lot about global adoption of DataCite and the scale of our community and infrastructure.  But the bigger story behind this exciting headline is about what this number represents. So we are marking the milestone with a few reflections about its broader significance.

With this blog post, the science blog archive Rogue Scholar starts the formal process to adhere to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). To do so, an organization has to perform a self-audit of its compliance with the principles, with a focus on principles and not hard rules. POSI was updated to version 2.0 this October, with the changes marked up in a separate document.

Back at the start of October I posted Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying, which included Coy Pearson’s beautiful photo of a Cooper’s hawk from behind, with its neck twisted a full 180 degrees to look at the camera.

Nihon, noted

Polyhedral optimization is a tool used in compilers for optimizing loop nests. While the major compilers that use this implement polyhedral optimizations from scratch,1 there is a generally-applicable open source C library called the Integer Set Library (ISL) that implements the core algorithms used in polyhedral optimization.

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In 1790, the French Academy of Sciences commissioned a rather ambitious survey. The goal was to measure the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian passing through Paris, then use that measurement to define a new universal unit of length: the metre.

A diversity index is a way to measure the prevalence species in an ecosystem. Although these arise naturally in ecology, diversity indexes show up elsewhere as well.

Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last year I announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.