Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

science needs to own its digital structure : that’s new, non-extractive, open publishing, data repositories, and new modes of peer review. But the glue that’s needed to tie that all together is communication tools owned and designed by scientists themselves. I really believe Bonfire can give us that …

if you can support their crowd funder, please do!

#OpenScience #science #OpenScienceNetwork

https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community

Universities should boycott the sleazy organizations that make money by ranking universities according to questionable criteria using non-transparent methods.

And they're starting to do it! The Sorbonne has just announced that it won't give data to the Times Higher Education rankings anymore. Columbia University and Utrecht University have also quit, as have the medical and law schools of Harvard and Yale.

700 research organizations, funders and professional societies have signed the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment in favor of making scientific research, data, methods, and educational resources transparent, accessible and reusable by everyone without barriers.

But we're a long way from getting there!

https://scroll.in/article/1087997/why-the-worlds-top-universities-are-abandoning-the-ranking-system

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

https://blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/attention-authors-updated-practice-for-review-articles-and-position-papers-in-arxiv-cs-category/

My work #EMR at now has integrated #AI that summarizes a patient's chart whether I want it to or not. This week it told me the wrong reason for admission, the wrong hospital course, and the wrong medications as compared against the human-written discharge summary. To review it and find the error took 3 minutes; to document the error and report it took another 10.

Anchoring bias exists. What we read stays with us, truth or lie, influencing decisions.

And I can't turn it off.

#LawsuitBait

I'm now also looking for a postdoc with strong Bayesian background and interest in developing Bayesian cross-validation theory, methods and software. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact information at https://users.aalto.fi/~ave/).

Others, please share

#bayesian

#rstats folks should think about supporting our friends at the #Python Software Foundation, who turned down a $1.5M NSF grant rather than cave to the administration's inquisition against diversity, equity, and inclusion. ❤️

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html

US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/24/baltimore-student-ai-gun-detection-system-doritos

“But Max, but Max, they did an experiment with an LLM and it refused to shut itself down, even to save the user, and—“

SHUT UP. That’s not what fucking happened.

They took a machine that generates plausible text sequences based on all the other text they could get their hands on, they fed it a bullshit story, and it gave a bullshit story in return. THAT’S ALL.

ChatGPT doesn’t want to hurt you. ChatGPT doesn’t want to help you. ChatGPT ISN’T AWARE THAT YOU EXIST.

@zackwhittaker In terms of profit:shitness ratio, Oracle has them beat by miles

The Guardian is reporting that since Israel and Hamas signed the ceasefire and full hostage exchange agreement, Israel has violated the ceasefire 47 times, killed 38 Palestinians, and wounded another 143 more.

Meanwhile Hamas has released all remaining hostages.

It Was Never About The Hostages.

In other news, we sometimes forget that Elon Musk did not buy Twitter on his own, but with money from Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia was already Twitter’s biggest shareholder before Musk bought it and reportedly planted engineer-spies inside the company to unmask dissidents.

After the acquisition, they gained more influence over the algorithm using it “to silence government critics and human rights activists, or to further state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/09/twitter-saudi-arabia-deep-ties-elon-musk-prince-mohammed

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.

A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out a fact sheet about them to a bunch of journalists, but very few are going to write about this. So, let me try posting it all here.

Here's what I know about Reflect Orbital and all the downsides:

The Scientific Method Illustrated

Oh, no! My R package {safespace} is in a broken state - won't someone (new to PRs) help me fix it???

I'm renewing my offer to guide newbies through the R package building / fixing / reviewing process during Hacktoberfest - see this post

https://jcarroll.com.au/2024/10/01/a-safe-space-for-learning-how-to-make-pull-requests/

Open a pull request on https://github.com/jonocarroll/safespace to get a mentored review of your submitted changes with zero risk of breaking anything valuable if you mess it up completely.

Please boost for visibility!

#rstats #hacktoberfest

Age verification laws haven't been around very long and they're already showing how dangerous they are https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/10/discord-s-recent-support-data-breach-exposes-user-info-id-photos-and-credit-card-details/

#AgeVerification #legal #privacy #Discord