Steve Scott

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Flying home to Edinburgh seldom lacks visual impact.

🌟 Can you visualize a future in which you’ve won a grant of up to £25,000? #CatalystGrant

💡🌱 Digital Science’s 2025 Catalyst Grant is now open for applications - with the theme of #DataVisualization.

🔗 See more about our Catalyst Grant - and apply here: www.digital-science.com/investment/c...

The 2025 Catalyst Grant is now live. Our theme this year, Data Visualization, relates to any technique that helps automate the way people interrogate, interpret and act on research-related data. If you have an idea, or an early prototype, we want to hear about it.

Please share!

If you'd like to know more, feel free to ping me...

I was 50% right here...

Arrived home after a three day course on AI. Of all the facts, this stuck with me:

Generating an image using AI = charging a smartphone, or driving 4.1 miles

Generating a 100-word email with GPT-4 = 519ml of water (basically a standard bottle).

There are mitigating factors, but still. Ouch.

Discuss.

#cycling #tourdefrance

When Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, it triggered the loss of 20,000 subscriptions to the Strand Magazine.

To recoup lost revenue and placate outraged readership, the magazine serialized a new Holmes adventure as a “prequel.”

For some reason, this reminded me of Fox News and Dominion.

Anyone involved in publishing, reading, writing or editing scientific papers should read this argument against generative AI carefully.

"LONDON drops down wealth list as super-rich move out," blared a Times splash on 9 April, reporting that there are supposedly 11,300 fewer "dollar millionaires" in the British capital than there were last year - the fastest fall of any global city except Moscow, as the wealthy move their money abroad. The story was also reported by the Telegraph, Express, Daily Mail and Evening Standard, while the Times returned to the subject next day in a 1,300-word feature. Even culture secretary Lisa Nandy responded to the alleged exodus, blaming it on Brexit, not the Labour government. But how accurate are those remarkably specific figures? They come from South Africa-based outfit New World Wealth, commissioned by "advisory firm" Henley & Partners. As pointed out by the New Statesman's Will Dunn back in January, but not mentioned in the Times, Henley & Partners sells advice to rich people about financial planning, and consults governments on "investment migration" policies - so is opposed to higher taxes on rich people. And while New World Wealth puts out seemingly definitive figures, they come up with them using "models" based on tracking the online footprints of a far smaller number of people, without actually knowing where they pay tax. Moreover, when contacted by the Eye, the company offered another important caveat, saying it was "important to note" that "most of" the decline in wealth in London over the past decade was not actually down to people leaving the UK, but poor performance of local businesses and a decline in the FTSE 100, which it also uses to collate its reports estimating relative global wealth. So the super-rich in question may well still be here, just not so super-rich any more. The unreliability of New World Wealth's "data" and what it actually means hasn't stopped hacks reporting on a mass evacuation by the rich over government policies, which has become an accepted truth. Those figures seemed to have an effect on the chancellor: soon afterwards Rachel Re…

thank you Private Eye for taking apart this flakey headline-grabbing research

Gliders gliding in the park this afternoon. Amazing machines.

Every journalist today looking at their boss.

Today’s news reminds me of the time the HR department of a company I worked at (not my current one!) sent a send:all email to staff outlining who was to be made redundant.

This could be used as a monitor to track population health*.

*Said as a Scotsman.

Getting to the stage where I ask an LLM to do something ambitious, hit submit, and think "I really hope you aren't able to do a good job on this...".

Supporters Praise Trump For Upholding Traditional American Value Of Supporting Murderous Dictators For Political Gain

Supporters Praise Trump For Upholding Traditional American Value Of Supporting Murderous Dictators For Political Gain

4 weeks after preprint "Understanding the importance of SHAPE to the UK research ecosystem" by @britishacademy.bsky.social, @jameswilsdon.bsky.social , and @digital-science.com I checked Bluesky reach on @altmetric.com: Phenomenal with an upper bound of 121550 followers! doi: doi.org/10.48550/arx...

Artwork with stylised image of a white woman with long hair bending back with eyes closed among purple roses and silver organic lines on a silver background

Detail from the Art Nouveau gesso panels by Glasgow School artist Margaret Macdonald, c.1907 #WomensArt

America still needs Canadian oil. Here's why And why the tariffs on Canada could plausibly lead to America doing deals with considerably more shady countries. A dive into the weird and wonderful world of heavy oil

✍️Despite being the world's biggest oil producer, America is v reliant on Canadian oil. And getting MORE reliant, not less.
So what happens when tariffs get imposed on Canada?
The answers are quite unsettling, for the American people... and for everyone else edconway.substack.com/p/america-st...

Ah no. Not David Lynch. Here’s to the weird ones. RIP.

Such a great writer - RIP.

Big tech firms know us better than we do Keeping to new year’s resolutions looks doubly hard when you realise how insistently our free will is undermined

What if we don’t really have free will? Terrific, thoughtful column by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on a terrific, thoughtful book:

Back home in Scotland for Christmas, I always check in on the local Facebook group - never fails to impress me how community-minded my small town is. ❤️

Scotland doing Scottish well.

Me this morning.

Our home for the next 3 weeks. Scottish borders - peace.

Good question! I did say 'ex-principal designer'. He left the company many years ago, but knowing him I'm sure he'll have an opinion about that.

If you were going to have dinner with the ex-principal designer at Jaguar, what would you ask them?

It's still available - yours for around £285.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_...