Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

I've collected a set of papers and articles that discuss errors in research due to software errors, in a GitHub repo: https://github.com/danielskatz/errors-due-to-research-software. I think this could be a useful resource for many purposes, and additional contributions are welcome.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115689198997943088

I’m proud to share my first blog as @Mastodon’s Community Director. Well the first one posted under my name at least 😉

Digital social networking is one of the most important threads in the fabric of our societies. Right now, we’re letting that thread be controlled by social media platforms that let advertisements for scams stay up because they’re profitable, and that use their algorithms to run human research experiments on us without our consent. That’s not the society I want.

“By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay. If we allow these conditions to continue, we will leave behind the voices that truly matter; the people and their public institutions. It is critical that those voices not be silenced forever. The promise of the #fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms built by and for people like you, where #SocialSovereignty is a right and not a privilege.”

In this thread, we asked folks to crowdsource a list of resources so you can find your local representative. Find them, contact them, and tell them this: if you care about a free and just future, and if you care about #DigitalSovereignty, you must leave X and join the fediverse.

#ItsTimeToAbolishX #SocialWeb #Mastodon #SocialMedia

Blogs deserve love too (and interoperability) ❤️

I just learned about Rogue Scholar @rogue_scholar, a repository that makes science blogs more findable and citable: full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs, metadata...

You can register your blog and search ~200 blogs already there.

Learn more about Rogue Scholar here: https://rogue-scholar.org/

And I wrote a bit more at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alelazic_roguescholar-openscience-openinfrastructure-activity-7403810948412641281-O2TA

#openscience #openinfrastructure #scicomm

European Twitter exploded following yesterday’s rants by US and Russian hardliners calling to “abolish EU”.

Lots of voices like “we need European social media!!”

And I said, “actually, you know what, we kind of have one for years…” 😆

Some people started complaining “but nobody uses Mastodon” and I once again had no choice but to explain that if “nobody uses” then how come I’ve got 3k+ followers here and engaging in truly interesting discussions not less often than there😁

There’s two data points where Fediverse can be indeed seen as less attractive than US cortisol aggregators:

• number of engagements, but granted that up to 60-70% of these on Twitter are generated by bots who cares? Maybe media advertising agencies do, but I don’t.
• presence of public persons - this is where Fediverse actually loses, because it’s a network that grows between them and can’t be “invited”

I just had to dig this up for something I'm writing, so here's the UN's space debris database (which has mostly turned from "space debris on the ground" to "garbage SpaceX dropped on other countries"): https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/treatyimplementation/arra-art-v/unlfd.html

What I would like is a citation search tool which divides citing work into a) direct replications b) direct extensions and c) stuff that is just citing for support while they do something completely different. And then I can ignore all of c). Does such a tool exist yet? #AcademicChatter

How do you think the brain "stores" our personal memories? 🧠

This is a question for everyone out there, especially for non-neuroscientists and regardless of education level or familiarity with biology.

I'd just like to hear all your ideas and theories, however crazy they may sound. Be as specific or vague as you like. Please do not look at the answers before giving yours so you are not influenced.
More specifically:

What do you think happens (in the brain) at the time of experiencing something that we will end up remembering?
What do you think happens (in the brain) when, later, we remember that thing?

Boosts welcome but answers even more welcome!

#Neuroscience #Memory #EpisodicMemory

Twenty streets of Paris before and after in one minute

GrapheneOS has shut down operations in France due to pressure from law enforcement and media, citing risks for privacy projects and demands for a backdoor. Servers are being moved to Toronto and Germany, and developers are barred from entering France https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/11/grapheneos-ceases-operations-in-france-amid-pressure-and-legal-threats-by-the-government/

Pleased to note my Cambridge lecture on how technical approaches to the right of explanation have gone haywire in the LLM era, is already up!

I discuss the spread of legal mandates of explanations of algorithmic decisions but at same time increasing unreliability of explanations offered by "reasoning" LLMs. Chain of Thought not = explainability!!

Many thanks to @CIPIL who um may not be here? And to @jennifercobbe for her v kind invitation!

https://youtu.be/wLxuq3I2d_s?si=h8vfHGaLhB7it3hG

Tout mon soutien à Elena Mistrello, dessinatrice italienne expulsée sans explications à peine débarquée sur le tarmac de Toulouse, où elle venait présenter sa BD au Festival de @Colomiers31.
Une nouvelle étape grave dans la criminalisation des activistes.
https://www.bubblebd.com/9emeart/bd/actualites/l-autrice-italienne-elena-mistrello-empechee-de-venir-a-un-festival-bd-en-france-par-la-police-nationale

Profound read on AI use and the influence on students.

"Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/history-professor-ai-cheating-students_n_69178150e4b0781acfd62540

#AI #teaching #academicChatter #academia

How do we make sense of the body of scientific literature that is growing explosively to the point where no individual could read all the relevant papers, and is contaminated with fraudulent and LLM-generated papers? I think that science is not currently equipped to deal with this, and we need to.

I think a critical part will be post-publication peer review. With such rapid growth and time pressure on scientists, pre-publication PR cannot maintain sufficient standards so we need a way to make the informal networked review (journal clubs, conference chats etc.) more transparent and shared.

We also need ways to summarise and make connections between many related papers. I know that many people are hoping that LLMs will step up into this role, but right now that seems very risky and I don't see that changing any time soon.

LLMs are too distracted by surface level presentation, and can be manipulated at scale by iterating over multiple presentations until the LLM summarises it in the way you want it to. In addition, they're known to have problematic biases, and it's unclear if this can be fixed.

I think we need to be experimenting with ways to distribute the work of summarising and making connections between papers, and aggregating that into a collective understanding. An individual can't read all the papers, but collectively we can and already are. We just need ways to integrate that.

In principle we could do this with a post-publication peer review system that allows reviewers to annotate with connections, e.g. in reviewing paper X you create a formal link saying that part of this paper is similar to paper Y, or uses the same technique, etc.

One issue is that these annotations might become corrupted or manipulated in the same way that papers, journals and peer review have been. How do we fix that? It's not ideal, but one option might be some form of trust network: I trust X, they trust Y and thereore I (to a lesser extent) trust Y.

This would mean our summary or evaluation of the literature would depend on our individual trust network. But, this isn't a bad thing in principle. Diversity of opinion is good: there shouldn't be one definitive reference summary because that's a single point of failure and target for manipulation.

All these ideas require experimentation, and both technology development and a cultural shift towards collectively taking responsibility for doing this work. I think we need to do it and would love to hear others' ideas about how to do it and how to convince everyone that we need to.

#science #metascience #academicchatter

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/