On the 9 ^th of October, ¹ I attended the Snowflake World Tour event in London. I was curious to learn more about Snowflake as more and more of the industry people I talk to seems to be using it. I also wondered if there was a use case for it for myself. Finally, I wanted to figure out if I should talk to my data analytics students about it. I went there and had an enjoyable day, but what did I learn?

I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want.

Appalachian Figures A Lewis County story that briefly touched the majors For two crowded weeks in June 1913 the St. Louis Cardinals handed the ball to a right-hander tied to a small Tennessee town with Swiss roots. Walter William “Walt” Marbet’s major-league line is short. Three games. One start. An 0–1 record with a 16.20 ERA.

Appalachian Figures In the 1970s a hardware-store plainspoken delegate from Maryland’s mountaintop counties learned how to work the levers of Annapolis without losing his Oakland accent. DeCorsey E. Bolden represented Garrett County in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1971 to 1982, sat on Appropriations, and became a reliable voice for local control.

Appalachian Figures William Gay wrote himself out of the backroads around Hohenwald, Tennessee, and into American letters with a voice equal parts lyric and flint. A construction worker for decades who didn’t publish until his mid-fifties, he turned the creeks, hollows, and hard bargains of Middle Tennessee into a personal territory readers now recognize on sight.

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.

Welche Regeln des Urheberrechts gelten für die freien darstellenden Künste? Was müssen Personen beachten, die Aufnahmen aus diesem Bereich beim Digitalen Archiv der Freien Darstellenden Künste hochladen oder nachnutzen wollen? Diese und mehr Fragen beantwortet die neu erschienene Handreichung. Über die Inhalte gibt es hier einen kurzen Überblick.

R updates (R Data Scientist, R+AI conference, R weekly), Claude 4.5 Opus, Genesis Mission, AI+science, AI updates (Posit, AI Data Scientist), missing heritability, AI+edu, biotech, AIxBio, new papers

A question of optimism

Israel and the US have accused the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) of being an ‘obstacle to peace’. But many of UNRWA’s shortcomings are a deliberate product of its original set-up – which was engineered by the US itself and supported by Israel.

Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries.