My blog focuses on the two primary ways "AI"—or more accurately, transformer-based models—are impacting academic search.

KI-Agenten erweitern die Möglichkeiten von KI-Systemen erheblich, doch die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen dafür sind noch im Aufbau. Dadurch ergeben sich neue Fragen zu Verantwortung und Kontrolle. „2025 ist das Jahr der KI-Agenten“, prognostizierte Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer von OpenAI, Anfang Januar beim Weltwirtschaftsforum in Davos.

Edward G Robinson’s gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948) seems uncertain when asked by Humphrey Bogart and Lionel Barrymore’s sequestered characters what he wants. But after some prompting, he comes up with ‘That’s it. I want more.’ Mindless acquisitiveness matches his mendacity and violence. And that’s the story with the discreditable alliance between pro sports and the screen.

This week’s recap highlights the Rust-based wgatools for manipulating alignments and visualizing in the terminal, the nf-core scnanoseq Nextflow pipeline for ONT scRNA-seq, sawfish for better SV discovery and genotyping with long reads, the BINSEQ high-performance binary formats for nucleotide sequence data, and a unified analysis of atlas single-cell data.

The National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) is an inter-university research institute based in Japan. NIFS promotes academic collaborative research and also strives to meet the expectations of the industrial sector, which is beginning to engage with fusion energy development, as well as students, including those pursuing recurrent education.

I say “semi-spoileriffic” because I’m not going to go out of my way to give away any plot points or creature details you couldn’t get from watching the trailers and TV spots, but if you want to keep yourself pure as the driven snow, you might want to save this post for later.

Positron’s Quarto support is really quite robust and it’s full of nice little features like previewing a citation using whatever bibliography style your document is using (Chicago, APA, etc.) when you hover over a citation key: …or knowing about the different headings inside your document for tab-completed cross references: …or even knowing about those headings in other documents in a project: That’s all neat, but for long-form writing, like

We’re very excited to introduce the new rOpenSci Champions! This cohort will participate in the program and carry out their work in Spanish, allowing us to continue strengthening the open science and research software development community in this language. We’re excited about the projects they’ll be developing, which tackle real-world challenges across diverse disciplines and regions of Latin America.

Nos alegra muchísimo presentar a las nuevas personas que se suman como Campeones y Campeonas de rOpenSci. Este grupo experimentará el programa y trabajará en español, lo que nos permite seguir fortaleciendo la comunidad de ciencia abierta y desarrollo de software de investigación en este idioma. Nos llenan de entusiasmo los proyectos que van a desarrollar, que abordan desafíos reales desde distintas disciplinas y territorios de América Latina.

Here are some of the most interesting R packages I’ve discovered among the 2025 releases. These are especially useful for demographic statistics, teaching, and time series correlation analysis.

All your dreams are made, when you’re chained to the lesson and the teaching trade. Was that lecture, lab or lesson just a dream? Exactly what did you learn from the experience? When you reflect on it, how will you tell yourself and others the stories of your study? The stories students tell about what they have learned, the teaching they experience and research they are exposed to are a key part of the story of every University.