Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · 7d

I used to have one of these! Love the idea of "modding" an old casio watch! 🔧

You can upgrade a Casio watch with Bluetooth, step counting, and games | The Verge share.google/Zma7UEjgKPfp...

You can now upgrade a retro Casio watch with Bluetooth, step tracking, and games

Are these iconic Casio digital watches still as desirable with smart features?

share.google

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · 24d

Developed a pesky running injury. Not looking forward to working through the suggestions illustrated by ChatGPT, especially the straight leg raise...

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

MORPHSS @morphss.bsky.social · Aug 26

New open access book out from our MORPHSS project lead @samuelmoore.org:

"By deploying theoretical literature on science & technology studies, care ethics, & the commons, the book critically interrogates open access & reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing."

#OA #AHSS

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Aug 8

As with the post office Horizon bug, years of institutional coverup and mismanagement after the bug is exposed. This probably causes more damage than the technical bug itself.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Courts service accused of covering up IT bug that caused evidence to go missing

Sources say judges in courts and tribunals will have made rulings when evidence was incomplete.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Jul 21

An account of what is possibly the first "monkey tester" (or at least when the term originated) - a program to automatically generate random test inputs. Developed in 1983 to test MacWrite and MacPaint!

www.folklore.org/Monkey_Lives...

Folklore.org: Monkey Lives

www.folklore.org

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

Dr Howard Smith Reports @drhowardsmith.bsky.social · Aug 15

Tandem's t:connect iOS mobile app that controls monitors the t:slim X2 insulin pump and its battery causes a battery depletion and an unexpected pump shut down. #tandem #insulinpump #iOSapp #tconnect #battery #shutdown #hyperglycemia #recall
www.instagram.com/p/C-s-U3fxxBg/

Howard G. Smith MD, AM on Instagram: "A defective iOS (iPhone/iPad) app can rapidly deplete your Tandem insulin pump battery and trigger a dangerous shutdown The Food and Drug Administration and Tand...

0 likes, 0 comments - drhowardsmithreports on August 15, 2024: "A defective iOS (iPhone/iPad) app can rapidly deplete your Tandem insulin pump battery and trigger a dangerous shutdown The Food and Dr...

www.instagram.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Jul 10

I found this very interesting. Could be interesting to consider a variant of this for research paper submissions to Computer Science conferences, where the ballooning review burden is completely unsustainable.

Would need to devise different measures to prevent misuse though.

Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · Jul 1

How to speed up peer review: make applicants mark one another

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02090-z

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Jun 14

An odd licensing approach - hardly going to make Java the obvious teaching choice for higher education in years to come?

www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/j...

UK unis sign up to £10M Oracle Java subscription framework

: Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees'

www.theregister.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Jun 12

AALpy - a very elegant Python library (not by me!) implementing several finite state machine inference algorithms. Includes active and passive approaches, state-merging and observation-table based ones.

github.com/DES-Lab/AALpy

GitHub - DES-Lab/AALpy: An Automata Learning Library Written in Python

An Automata Learning Library Written in Python. Contribute to DES-Lab/AALpy development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Jun 10

Simple visualisations of code "survival" over time: github.com/erikbern/git...

Several groups of students have tried this on a variety of OSS projects. Anecdotally it seems that the "half-life" of the code for a given version is remarkably short! Would welcome pointers to studies on this!

GitHub - erikbern/git-of-theseus: Analyze how a Git repo grows over time

Analyze how a Git repo grows over time. Contribute to erikbern/git-of-theseus development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · May 19

Procedures for testing driverless cars (at least the underlying ML) are still effectively in their infancy, so it's interesting that these will be on UK roads so soon. Particularly interested in accountability (moral & legal) when accidents inevitably occur.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UK driverless cars unlikely until 2027 - Uber says it's ready now

The previous government had said autonomous vehicles were

www.bbc.co.uk

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

Hillelogram @hillelwayne.com · May 12

Blast from the past: "How Do We Trust Our Science Code?"

Most scientific research code is low quality and riddled with bugs, written by people who aren't professional software developers. And we shouldn't expect them to be!

(Written eight years ago, Jesus)

www.hillelwayne.com/post/how-do-...

How Do We Trust Our Science Code?

In 2010 Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published Growth in a Time of Debt. It’s arguably one of the most influential economics papers of the decade, convincing the IMF to push austerity measures i...

www.hillelwayne.com

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

Gregory Gay @greggay.bsky.social · Apr 28

Reminder: I am hiring 1-2 PhD students to research the use of LLMs to augment human-written test suites!

Interested? Apply here: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...
Reach out if you have questions!

#softwaretesting #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #LLM #AI #PHD

Vacancies

www.chalmers.se

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

Gregory Gay @greggay.bsky.social · Apr 15

I'm seeking 1-2 Ph.D. students, who will conduct research on how LLMs can extend and augment the software tests created by humans. Please apply, share, and get in touch if you have questions!

Apply at: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

Vacancies

www.chalmers.se

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

David D. Levine @daviddlevine.com · Apr 12

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

www.theregister.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Mar 8

3 from me!

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Mar 7

So impressed by the JOSS publication model. The whole process is run on GitHub! Reviews are submitted as issues! github.com/openjournals...

Who needs big publishers. If there were a way to introduce anonymity into the reviewing process (surely possible), this is the way forward imho.

[REVIEW]: The Causal Testing Framework · Issue #7739 · openjournals/joss-reviews

Submitting author: @jmafoster1 (Michael Foster) Repository: https://github.com/CITCOM-project/CausalTestingFramework Branch with paper.md (empty if default branch): Version: v10.0.1 Editor: @daniel...

github.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Mar 6

Our Causal Testing Framework, part of the EPSRC-funded CITCOM project, has just been published in @joss-openjournals.bsky.social.

joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...

Supports testing of "hard-to-test" systems with large input spaces, nondeterminism and long execution times.

The Causal Testing Framework

Foster et al., (2025). The Causal Testing Framework. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(107), 7739, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07739

joss.theoj.org

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Mar 5

I never play computer games these days. But I got to spend a couple of hours playing Enter the Gungeon (enterthegungeon.com) with my son (very much the gamer) , and it's fantastic. Retro and amusing - highly recommend!

Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon is a gunfight dungeon crawler following a band of misfits seeking to shoot, loot, dodge roll and table-flip their way to personal absolution by reaching the legendary Gungeon’s ultim...

enterthegungeon.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Feb 28

Especially short-sighted, given that so many key technologies that underpin the strong growth in the US economy, especially in AI, have emerged from these very research institutions.

Andy Zaidman @azaidman.bsky.social · Feb 27

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere

US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks.

www.nature.com

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Feb 19

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Be cited or perish? I don't recognise some of the worst practices in CS (hope I'm not being naiive!), but concerning nonetheless...

Does authorship mean anything when academic papers are simply citable tokens?

The bibliometric infrastructure of citations has become an inescapable organising feature of academic life. Drawing on a range of evidence of the use and misuse of citations data, Stuart Macdonald …

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Feb 5

This article claiming "no evidence" that mobile phone restrictions in schools have no impact on social media usage or wellbeing has been widely reported in the UK: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Worth noting the absence of any causal analysis, despite many confounding factors.

School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study

There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support ...

www.thelancet.com

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Reposted by Neil Walkinshaw

LSE Blogs @lseblogs.bsky.social · Feb 4

Why are universities ending their #Elsevier #OpenAccess agreements?

Peter Barr @tweeterbarr.bsky.social explains the reasoning behind these decisions and what it says about the wider academic publishing sector in the UK on @lseimpactblog.bsky.social 👇

Why are universities ending their Elsevier open access agreements?

After recent reporting that three UK universities had ended their transitional open access agreements with the publisher Elsevier, Peter Barr explains why academic libraries are making these decisi…

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Neil Walkinshaw @neilwalkinshaw.bsky.social · Jan 31

Delighted for my Ph.D. student Richard Somers, whose work on using a digital twin (of blood-glucose dynamics in a human) to test artificial pancreas systems for diabetics has just been published in STVR:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Configuration Testing of an Artificial Pancreas System Using a Digital Twin: An Evaluative Case Study

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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