Leo Martins (he/him)

I'd also add, they should be willing to do it at 8am, and 8 at night (in Winter).

I don't know what LCC cllrs (especially Labour) are on here, but I'd come with you on a work commute of your choosing, or a School Run in your ward, and have a chat about what we found after.

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

Maybe a stretch, but does anyone here have contacts at Softstar or other video game companies in Taiwan? I'll be going on sabbatical in 2028 and will live in Taipei for a couple months, so I'm trying to establish the projects I'll work on! I already have Bioinformatics contacts, but not games

Study not valid since the N of only one arm group was high.

It may be even worse. Researchers and data generators don't know what is Open (data), thinking it might include restricted access (see GISAID, or the difference with FAIR "as closed as necessary").
A non-open solution may be to have registration, and most will keep on calling it "open".

This lawsuit seems appalling to me, honestly. I feel for people whose student experience was lousy due to Covid but that's not the fault of universities. "I wanted in-person study." I'm sure you did. Nobody gets what they want in a global pandemic

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Today is the National Day of Remembrance for US Executive Order 9066.

EO9066 illegally confiscated the property and possessions of all Japanese Americans, including my grandparents and other US citizens. It forced them into remote concentration camps for years.

I do think it’s funny that the USA broke from England to get rid of the monarchy so that no one would be above the law and yet only one of these countries has arrested a senior political figure in relation to Epstein and it wasn’t the USA

Just a reminder that faculty with intersectional privilege should be *actively* and *vocally* and *consistently* standing with marginalized colleagues. Just because you're not in the Epstein files doesn't mean you're making academia a better place. Use your privilege. Step into the gap.

is that babyspeak for "toilet"? I see they have toilets specific for babies.

Roots and Wings | Nasmille Liceth Larke-Mejía A tribute to women and girls in science

On Women and Girls in Science Day, I shared a reflection on strong roots, unexpected paths, and learning to grow into your own wings.

A little science, a little story, and a lot of curiosity.

nasmillelarkemejia.com/roots-and-wi...

#WomenInScience
#InternationalDayOfWomenAndGirlsInScience

from what I remember, we can be invited by our press officer to write about a recent paper we're experts on, or we can pitch an idea directly to The Conversation theconversation.com/uk/pitches (consultation with the press officer strongly suggested). Someone dropped the ball on this pitch.

I expect to see more of these promises of future research. Grant funding is getting fierce, their grandiose claims are less scrutinised bsky.app/profile/leom...

And yes, The Conversation should have brakes on this, passing through their editorial team and supported by a university press officer.

Palantir's Swiss Exit Highlights Global Data Sovereignty Challenge | NewsCase Switzerland's military has terminated its contract with Palantir Technologies Inc. following a security audit. The review concluded that U.S. intelligence ag

"Switzerland’s military has terminated its contract with Palantir… following a security audit… concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies could potentially access sensitive Swiss defense data… significant reputational warning for the data analytics firm"

www.newscase.com/palantirs-sw...

#R4Today

Nerds assemble! I need recommendations for a speaker who can talk not only about the growth in awareness of ADHD/autism in the UK, and the importance of accommodations etc., but also the sociological aspects of underdiagnosis/stigma in women/minority communities etc.

Pls repost for wider reach, ta.

esse é um belo caso do papel democratizante da IA, que consegue tirar o sotaque de quem não é versado na sintaxe shibboleth de DEI statements. Agora, me falaram q essas declarações podem ser usadas no caso do professor, no futuro, fazer o q ele prometeu não fazer. O abuso é usá-las prá _selecionar_

To do all this, we needed to reprocess all the public SARS-CoV-2 genome data in INSDC, and it became very apparent how dominated this data was by US/UK. The second half of this project became about working with teams across the world to help them get their data into INSDC.

"Inferring phylogenetic trees for all ~270,000 UniClust30 MSAs in the collection would require roughly 10 times the amount of patience most people possess." [no reference needed]

I like that I'm at the same distance from Biomedical Engineering Researchers and from Italian LGBTQ+ Community.

And it's more anonymous. It's more abstract. It's where all (not so unconscious) biases can play a bigger role, without fear of retaliation. Unfunded grants (as is) go to the trash.
We can verify why manuscripts were accepted or not (eg preprints); can we have a similar validation for grants?

I know it's tongue-in-cheek, but there's truth there. Many, eg institutional comms, don't celebrate results as much as the promise of research. Grants funded are shared more often and wider than papers.

Because the success rate is much lower, getting a grant is a greater feat than publishing it.

YouTube video by VinnieFarsheds Hal fixing a light bulb (from Malcolm in the Middle S03E06 - Health Scare)

In computer science we call it "yak shaving", and the visual representation is this scene from Malcolm in the Middle www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSe...

Kinda crazy:

If you haven't been keeping up, the total global capex to be spent on AI data centers in 2026 is going to be around $600B, depending on what you count. As far as I can tell, there's never been any megaproject with this rate of spending.

Hugging Face – The AI community building the future. We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Super excited to announce the release of gene and intergenic region annotation from the largest bacterial genome and MAG datasets available, including AllTheBacteria, GTDB, SPIRE, HRGM, mOTUs and MGnify - dereplicated and available from HuggingFace huggingface.co/AllTheBacteria

I was filling a biodefence survey once, where they asked what is IMO the greatest bio threat to the UK. My reply was "Palantir"

I stand by it.

article snapshot that reads: The situation at STFC is unique among the UKRI councils because its cost base has increased significantly due to the type of facilities and services it manages, the research it funds and some projects with higher costs than foreseen. Over the previous SR period, rising energy costs and unfavourable movements in foreign exchange rates increased STFC’s annual costs by over £50 million a year. These unforeseen costs and an ambitious programme from the previous SR have increased the pressure on STFC’s budget. Despite a record UKRI settlement for 2026 and 2030 and STFC’s core budget holding relatively flat from £835 million to £842 million over this period, a reset is needed as currently STFC’s costs will outpace the funding available and would eat into other parts of the UKRI budget.

Open letter from Ian Chapman to research and innovation community
www.ukri.org/news/open-le...
TL;DR: UKRI’s overall budget is rising, but not for you.

If I understood correctly the rising energy costs (AI?) and "type of facilities and services" are to blame.

but the floor *is* their proper place, even if it looks random to the untrained eye.

Completely unrelated, obvs, to this article claiming that more formal grievances being submitted by students and staff are evidence that the poor senior professors are being targeted, since the grievances are ultimately dismissed. www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/why-ar...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...