Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 1d

Few graphics are as significant as this one, on the difference between the realities of US deaths and the media coverage, which is out of all proportion (deliberately?)

Leah Shaffer @leahshaffer.bsky.social · 1d

👀Notable context in times when medical research funding is being destroyed. And Funding for the police state increases. 🩺 🧪

Timothy McBride @mcbridetd.bsky.social · 1d

What Americans Die from?

And what the media reports on...

Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/does-the-new...

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 2d

The Japan Prize is meant to be a big deal

Nature Portfolio @natureportfolio.nature.com · 2d

The Nobel prizes will be announced starting Monday, and they’re considered the most famous awards in science. In the past few years, though, a number of other prizes have popped up. Nature examines how these prizes compare with one another. 🧪

These science prizes want to rival the Nobels: how do they compare?

Being named as a Nobel laureate is the ultimate prize for many scientists, but how do other science prizes compare?

go.nature.com

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 3d

I do wish I could edit this

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 3d

Unlike Alanis Morrissey she knows what irony is.

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 3d

Yeah, but you also voiced a psychopath killer clown. For all we know you’re a Republican

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 3d

If it works, it may not again.

Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Democracy Docket @democracydocket.com · 3d

📽️A MUST watch from Marc Elias: It's easy to disengage with the constant stream of bad news flowing out from the Trump administration. But when we become immune — when we stop being outraged — our democracy crumbles.
https://bit.ly/48aleVG

There Are No "Good" Republicans

YouTube video by Democracy Docket

youtu.be

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Vanessa is the name of the Doctor! @hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 4d

I only ever heard second-hand from my German relatives what the 1930s were like but it sounded like this. You see the story, it feels wrong, but everyone else around you is just carrying on, shopping, working, going to the cinema. So you do the same. Keep your head down, maybe this is fine? Normal?

CNN @cnn.com · 4d

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken. https://cnn.it/4pPCXIt

37 people arrested and American kids separated from parents after ICE raid at Chicago apartments | CNN

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.

www.cnn.com

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Thomas Spiteri @tespiteri.bsky.social · 5d

I sat down with Prof. Cordelia Fine for an in-depth discussion about her wonderful new book “Patriarchy, Inc.”

She critiques two dominant stories of inequality — the “different but equal” view and the “business case for diversity” — and sets out a richer vision of what equality should mean today.

S5 E10 - Cordelia Fine on

Podcast Episode · The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science · 03/10/2025 · 53m

podcasts.apple.com

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Richard D. Morey @richarddmorey.bsky.social · 4d

Also - contrast b/w the response when I advocate teaching R instead of SPSS -- "No hurry, let's not rush into it" (still waiting) -- & others re: use of LLMs -- "It's inevitable, we're behind; need it implement it ASAP!" -- is telling. Learning to code is freeing. Overhyped LLMs create dependency.

Excerpt from Guest & van Rooij, 2025:

As Danielle Navarro (2015) says about shortcuts through us-
ing inappropriate technology, which chatbots are, we end up dig-
ging ourselves into “a very deep hole.” She goes on to explain:

"The business model here is to suck you in during
your student days, and then leave you dependent on
their tools when you go out into the real world. [...]
And you can avoid it: if you make use of packages
like R that are open source and free, you never get
trapped having to pay exorbitant licensing fees." (pp.
37–38)

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 4d

I don’t know about intentions, but apart from averaging I don’t think groups have interests.

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 4d

I have come to the view that AI is a trade off between error and convenience. The inflection point is when the time taken to manually correct the errors exceeds the time saved by using AI

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Black Aziz Anansi @blackazizanansi.blacksky.app · 4d

ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE TO BLACKSKY, RIGHT NOW!!!!

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Riley Black 🦕 🏳️‍⚧️ @restingdinoface.bsky.social · 4d

Fuck your discourse. I want myself and my community to have *a* place where we don’t have to fear being doxxed and banned for being ourselves.

Have you ever considered our outrage is justified? We’re not letting this go.

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 4d

If the moderation on Bluesky is starting to make you all Meta inside, read this

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc) @shengokai.blacksky.app · 4d

These are the directions I followed and they worked pretty well:

So, You Want to Leave Bluesky...

The most important thing you need to know is:

leaflet.pub

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 4d

No, that’s Fezzick and Inigo Montoya

Reposted by John S. Wilkins

FeM - Funghi e Micologia @funghimicologia.bsky.social · 10d

Morpho-phylogenetic evidence reveals new species and records of Beltraniaceae (Amphisphaeriales, Sordariomycetes) from southern China

#Beltraniaceae
#Amphisphaeriales
#Sordariomycetes
#Beltrania
#Beltraniella
#morphology
#newtaxa
#phylogeny

mycokeys.pensoft.net/article/1603...

Morpho-phylogenetic evidence reveals new species and records of Beltraniaceae (Amphisphaeriales, Sordariomycetes) from southern China

Beltraniaceae comprises mainly saprophytic fungi that occur on various substrates in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. In our ongoing survey of terrestrial plant fungi in southern China, we ...

mycokeys.pensoft.net

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 7d

B-tree algorithms are not exactly new in IT. Who allowed that patent?

John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 8d

The one person an atheist would pray for.

John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 8d

Yes! Yes, please!!!!

John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 8d

Redefine productivity to mean "number of words handled"

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John S. Wilkins @jswilkins.bsky.social · 9d

The leprechauns have won.

Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 9d

nooooooooooo, he never got to eat that leprechaun

@brendelbored.bsky.social

post by @bredelbored.bsky.social, "Eric Adams is amazing because when he won every media person was leaping over each to go "this is the normal sane leadership the political left doesn't understand normal sane Americans crave" and then every day since that Eric Adams has been like "Leprechauns are real and I'm going to cook one"

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Dan Falk @danfalk.bsky.social · 9d

Philosopher John Searle has died. He was known for his work on the philosophy of mind (including the famous Chinese Room thought experiment); he was also stripped of his emeritus status at Berkeley for sexual harassment. A brief write up from the Daily Nous:
dailynous.com/2025/09/28/j...

John Searle (1932-2025) - Daily Nous

Philosopher John Searle, well-known for his work on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, has died. John Searle wrote extensively consciousness and the mind, intentionality, and speech act theory. He is especially well known for his Chinese Room Argument on artificial intelligence. He has also made contributions to philosophical work on social ontology, rationality,

dailynous.com

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 18d

“Although some differentiate AI and non-AI systems by appealing to generative models versus other types of AI, we are convinced that this does not bring clarity …, and we can fall head first into misuse of terminology and fostering industry hype (see … Figure 1)”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

7/🧵

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative ad- versarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discrim- inant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

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Reposted by John S. Wilkins

Thony Christie @rmathematicus.bsky.social · 9d

Michael Servetus (Span. Miguel Serveto) who, discovered the small or pulmonary blood circulation, was born 29 September 1511 #histsci #histmed
thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/n...

Not a martyr for science.

Those who still mistakenly subscribe to the White-Draper hypothesis of a war of religion against science, and these days it is mostly gnu atheists and their ilk, invariably produce lists of the mar…

thonyc.wordpress.com

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