Don't do this, is my strong suggestion, in a microgrant. It doesn't immediately invalidate your proposal but neither does it suggest max impact from the funding which is what we're going for
We've been reviewing the Overton micro-grant applications (www.overton.io/policy-impac...). Short, concrete projects funded up to £5k. A not-insignificant num of people ask for the cost of a new laptop - what's the deal? Is there guidance out there saying "always ask for new equipment in any grant"?
et tu Notepad :(
CVE-2026-20841 - Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide...
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Dr's appointments mainly
I say all this as somebody who grew up in Belgium (where everybody has an ID card)
I can see a v valid "UK gov is not good at big IT projects" argument. Then again maybe it'll be like the new passport renewal service and we'll all be pleasantly surprised
I don't get the "tech companies are pushing IDs as a route to total gov surveillance" thing. Surely the lesson of the past two decades is that tech *already* makes it easy to track who you are and what you're doing without your opt-in. Not carrying an ID card doesn't make you an untraceable ghost
It’s Global Goals Week!
A week of action, awareness, and accountability for the Sustainable Development Goals. We’ll be sharing some discussions and insights around the SDGs, plus how our SDG classifier can help our users understand how their work has impacted policy around each specific goal.
to be clear: (1) not just STEM journals (2) for both commercial and non-commercial use (3) the abstracts or summary of the work, not the full output (for which if it's not open access you should pay, that's fine)
If the UK wants to cement itself as a leader in AI for scientific discovery it should create a text & data mining copyright exception for scholarly abstracts. It's frankly depressing that abstracts aren't by default open and readily available in the first place, but publishers are now rolling back
I realise that this isn't new news and that absolutely nobody was pinning any hopes on ResearchGate in the first place. It just felt apt. It's 2025, would be nice to have a bunch of success stories
What's the vibe like at the Royal Society Future of Scholarly Publishing conference you ask? We were told that after 16 years & $100M dollars with the ambition to 'revolutionize' science and win a Nobel prize ResearchGate... is pivoting to working with traditional publishers on journal homepages
When asked about controversial topics Grok 4 sometimes searches for what Elon Musk thinks as background info - not something explictly asked for or necessarily intended by its developers. Fascinating and slightly depressing in equal measure
simonw.substack.com/p/grok-4-sea...
Counterpoint: new Public First research shows every UK resident working adult (on a full time equivalent basis) is £466 a year better off on average as a result of international students. So let’s just publicise that instead of levying them
www.publicfirst.co.uk/calculating-...
Not sure article is correct - it’s 80% of grants from the ten funders the cited WHO study looked at data from, I think, rather than 80% of all funding (funding data is notoriously hard to collate / analyze). I mean, it’s got to be a big chunk, maybe even the biggest chunk - but not 80%
Anyway, please know that if I didn’t laugh at a joke you once told at a conference this was why
Genuinely though, it was like that feeling when your glasses prescription changes and you come out of the optician going… oh, I’ve actually been missing quite a lot
And that’s just me, etc.
I got hearing aids today - it turns out I’ve been moderately deaf since having chickenpox as a kid but our brains just compensate and get used to it. I feel a bit like those babies on Instagram who get their first pair of glasses and can suddenly see faces in focus. But with more farts and snorts
In case you forgot what the dotcom boom was like Ananova got bought by Orange for £95M
I was intrigued by this, but maybe predictably it looks a bit rubbish in practice (much more 2012 video game cut-scene than licensed deepfake) www.ubs.com/microsites/n... - getting strong Ananova vibes news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta...
Incredibly valuable read in @issuesinst.bsky.social for scientists and academics looking to do more related to policy...
🧪sociology 📉demography policysky polisky 🛟medsky episky
Again - full text is different. I can even see the argument for references. But abstracts! Come on guys
Moral angle aside, you just end up locking out academic, non-profit and open infrastructure use so that you can sell to a bunch of VC funded AI companies who are about a year and a half away from royally screwing you over
If you're a schoarly publisher not making abstracts freely available then you're failing at your job. Full text - license it. Abstract - open it. It's a straightforward scholary record / infrastructure vs nickel and diming call
Next on the list is people who don't put <meta> tags on webpages but suspect that ship has sailed
Two biggest dangers to scholarly web infrastructure:
1) AI bots
2) Impatient PhD students who've just learned to automate web scrapes
True DGAF behaviour
Really incredible story unraveling in this thread, where Amazon and other sites have seemingly been able to sell an academic textbook that was withdrawn in 2021 and never actually printed or published, without the knowledge of the press, editors or contributors. Something has gone deeply wrong!
