Christina Pikas

Really appreciate this thoughtful post by @laurenpressley.bsky.social on what librarians are particularly ready to contribute to the conversations in higher ed about how to address AI. laurenpressley.com/library/2026...

fleece tights if <32F . windbreaker vest. merino wool undershirt. convertible gloves - have a little elasticated windbreaker mitt that goes over the fingers.

That's a great article! Thank you for sharing the archive link. It was really interesting and I learned a lot

What Happens When an Entire Scientific Field Changes Its Mind Total reversals in scientific thinking are rare—but earth-shattering

My thanks to the generous people at Scientific American, who asked for a piece on the overturning of scientific paradigms and didn't blink when they got a piece about relativity, malaria, surveys of the Great Plains, mammograms, LLMs, climatology, COVID, Back to the Future, and some other stuff.

Have you found AI slop in your library? / inkblot / LET US KNOW / Library Futures logo

AI slop spotters--we have a mission for you, should you choose to accept it. Have you found AI slop in a library collection? Report it here!

nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Whew!

So... um... is it a seveneves situation?

I didn't want to bug you - since you're in all the papers.

NASA raises the odds that an asteroid could hit the moon in 2032 "2024 YR4 is a tailor-made asteroid for planetary defense efforts — it has everything it takes to get our attention."

I hope this isn't a Seveneves type situation www.space.com/astronomy/as...

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

This is fun as someone interested in social studies of science and science history. Also as someone who works with AI researchers and works with some (over) exuberant technologists www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

We just got our electronic access - woo hoo!

AI bots are destroying Open Access There's a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, ...

This: go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-b... I need everyone who is considering "scraping" or siccing a bot on a library, scholarly publishing, or museum site to understand they are ruining things for everyone.

If they had the rule that no females could use facilities designed/built for males, I would not have been able to go on any ship as a midshipman or officer. That wasn't that long ago, there are still ships in the fleet that were not designed for female crew. What stupidity.

It has been brought to my attention that my article has been censored to exclude certain terms:

asm.org/Articles/202...

web.archive.org/web/20250114...

#MicroSky

Screencap of top of research article from journal Seismica, titled "The propagation of seismic waves, misinformation, and disinformation from the 2024-10-05 M 4.5 Iran earthquake" by Benjamin Fernando, Ross Maguire, Brianna Fernandez, Saman Karimi, Elizabeth Koenck, Göran Ekström, Tom Rivlin, & Celeste Labedz. Abstracts in English & Persian: "The 2024-10-05 Iran M 4.5 earthquake took place at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East. We perform a discrimination and moment tensor analysis and identify a shallow-dipping, reverse fault source commensurate with the compressional setting of the Iranian interior. Nonetheless, the event's aftermath saw widespread dissemination of misinformation, and potentially active disinformation, concluding that it was in fact a test of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The `evidence' for many of these claims was based on inaccurate interpretation of seismic data. In this paper, we analyse how geophysical `fake news' propagated through social media (mainly Twitter/X) following this event, eventually gaining traction in mainstream, earned media. This event is an illustrative warning of how seismic data can be misinterpreted and/or manipulated in public discourse." "هنایمرواخرداهشنتنتفرگلاابنامزرد،دادخرناریارد۲۰۲۴لاسربتکامجنپخیراترد۴.۵یگرزبهبهکیاهزرلنیمزویراشفراتخاسابهکمیدرکنیعمدادیورنیاعبنمناونعهباریقمعمکسوکعملسگ،هدادماجنارواتشگیروسناتلیلحتام.داتفاقافتاتروصهب)هنادماع(طلغتاعلاطاو)هنادماعریغ(تسردانتاعلاطاهثداحنیایپرد،دوجونیااب.درادتقباطمناریالخادیمکارتنیازایرایسبردهدشهیارادهاوش.تساناریاردیاهتسهحلاسشیامزآهبطوبرمهثداحنیاهکیریگهجیتننیاابدششخپیاهدرتسگرابخاهنوگچهکمیهدیمناشننامیاهلیلحتردوهلاقمنیاردام.دوبهثداحنیاهبطوبرمیاهزرلیاههدادتسردانریسفتساسارباهاعداردوتفرگرارقهجوتدرومروطچ،)سکا/رتییوتردصوصخلایلع(دششخپیعامتجایاههکبشردهثداحنیاهبطوبرمیکیزیفوئژیلعجایوهابتشاروطهبدناوتیمیاهزرلیاههدادهنوگچهکدشابیرادشهدننامهبدناوتیمهثداحنیا.دیسراههناسروتاعوبطمهبروطچتیاهن.دوشهعماجیمومعناگمتفگدراووهدشیراکتسدهنادما"

New paper alert! 🧪⛏️

Led by the amazing @spacequakes.bsky.social, here's a seismologically ordinary earthquake that got outsized attention due to some misinformation. It was cool to be a small part of this work!

Open access in @weareseismica.bsky.social :
seismica.library.mcgill.ca/article/view...

That's my new senator and former county executive. I'll leave it to many others who have done a great job refuting the reply to her question.

A bunch of my sewing peeps are coming over - hi! I am actually pretty quiet here and now will have context collapse, lol. It's good.

If you feel that BlueSky is “different“ from X, the data supports you :)

Using a network of 15M users (56% of the platform) we find that the probability that the log-normal law is wrong wrt to the power-law is just ~7%

Why that matters? Pop 🧵 follows!

1/

#scaling #NetSky #ComplexSystems 🧪

Resignation of the Journal of Human Evolution Editorial Board: We are saddened to announce the resignations of The Joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor. Press release below.

📌

Gala is good but we recently tried some of the cosmic ones and they are so crunchy. really good

screenshot showing topic2 and words under it like "springer" "nature" "license" "ltd"

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrgh

but is bacon-topped anything really a fail?

It's so peculiar that this vendor e-mails us at my place of work starting with Dear Jon, .... like... huh?

China China's status at the summit of the Nature Index remains unrivalled as the gap between it and the United States grows.

Nature has a special supplement this month about the state of science in China with data from the Nature Index: www.nature.com/collections/...

So, um, are the weird random men from i-gram coming here now? I only usually block them if they try to talk to me but SIGH.

Via a work colleague who noted some of the error comes from a bug in a Python library (Seaborn 0.11.2) arxiv.org/pdf/2402.145... ... the decline of "disruptiveness" reported in a Nature paper is due to including papers with zero references (which should have a cd of "undefined")

My Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics colloquium at APL! Back in January of this year, I gave a talk about Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and it was one of my favorite presentations on the subject, n...

New blog post: My Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics colloquium at APL!

skullsinthestars.com/2024/03/06/m...

E-Books for Us Demand for e-books is at an all-time high, but library collections are being hijacked by corporations.

A fun and informative site on e-book licenses in libraries ebooksforus.com

It was great to see you! I really enjoyed your talk, too.