Complex learning happens when people solve real problems instead of just memorizing facts. Think about the difference between reading about how to ride a bicycle and actually learning to ride one. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle just by reading about it – you need to practice, fall, adjust, and try again until your body understands how to balance. Health challenges work the same way.

Networked learning happens when people learn through connections with others facing similar challenges. Think about how market traders learn their business – not through formal classes, but by connecting with other traders, sharing tips, and learning from each other’s experiences. This natural way of learning through relationships is what networked learning tries to support.

This article explores and analyses the paper 'Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models' by Shehzaad Dhuliawala and colleagues from Meta AI & ETH Zürich. The paper was published on arXiv in September 2023.

Seamless image compositing with SDXL and ComfyUI

We are pleased to announce that BOSC and the newly-renamed Bio-Ontologies and Knowledge Representation (BOKR) will join forces for a day at ISMB/ECCB 2025!

Fausta Gantús, DR © Fotografía digital (exposición normal) 2019 Redes sociales de la artista X Esta es una reproducción digital, con fines de divulgación, de una obra original proporcionada por su autora o propietaria. Todos los derechos están reservados por la artista.

I gave a workshop on preregistration to honours students last Friday and mentioned that preregistration provides evidence that you created your hypothesis in advance of seeing the data. The students naturally asked how to prove that the data were collected after the preregistration. I pointed out that one can’t even prove that the data are real. At least, nobody has put together an accepted method for this.

Where the first workshop day had several talks about new and old features of the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK), the second day was a hackathon day. We hacked and we talked.

What is a complex problem and what do we need to tackle it? Problems can be simple or complex. Simple problems have a clear first step, a known answer, and steps you can follow to get the answer. Complex problems do not have a single right answer. They have many possible answers or no answer at all. What makes complex problems really hard is that they can change over time. They have lots of different pieces that connect in unexpected ways.

Joachim Schöpfel, Niels-Oliver Walkowski and I are excited to announce the Open Divide Lecture Series (2025–2026), a year-long exploration of the challenges, contradictions, and evolving landscape of Open Access and scholarly publishing.

Librarians have ceded our control of collections and collection-building in the digital realm to a few commercial vendors. Among other things, this has professional ethical implications. We must host our own digital resources or be subject to censorship and extortion.