I’m a regular watcher of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, so in February I was looking forward to his take on “AI“ and the large language models and image generators that many people have been getting excited about lately. I was not disappointed: Oliver heaped a lot of much-deserved criticism on these technologies, particularly for the ways they replicate prejudice and are overhyped by their developers.

I wrote most of this post in June 2022, before a lot of us decided to try out Mastodon. I didn’t publish it because I despaired of it making a difference. It felt like so many people were set in particular practices, including not reading blog posts! My experience on Mastodon has been so much better than the past several years on Twitter. I think this is connected with how Twitter and Mastodon handle threads.

You may be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the global standard for representing speech sounds, ideally independent of the way those speech sounds may be represented in a writing system. Did you know that sign languages have similar standards for representing hand and body gestures? Unfortunately, we haven’t settled on a single notation system for sign languages the way linguists have mostly chosen the IPA for speech.

It’s well known that some languages have multiple national standards, to the point where you can take courses in either Brazilian or European Portuguese, for example. Most language instruction services seem to choose one variety per language: when I studied Portuguese at the University of Paris X-Nanterre it was the European variety, but the online service Duolingo only offers the Brazilian one.

Since the very start of GigaScience we’ve been strong proponents of Data Citation, helping promote and practice the procedure of affording data the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research objects such as publications (see examples of this in GigaBlog and BMC Res Notes ). These efforts by the wider community culminated

I’ve got great news! I have now released LanguageLab, my free, open-source software for learning languages and music, to the public on GitHub. I wish I could tell you I’ve got a public site up that you can all use for free. Unfortunately, the features that would make LanguageLab easy for multiple users to share one server are later in the roadmap. There are a few other issues that also stand in the way of a massive public service.

We have developed a novel data-driven approach to reconstruct precipitation patterns through geological time, since the supercontinent Pangea was in existence. Our approach involves linking climate-sensitive sedimentary deposits such as coal, evaporites and glacial deposits to a global plate model, reconstructed paleo-elevation maps and high-resolution General Circulation Models via Bayesian machine learning.

GigaScience Press and River Valley Technologies, with the help of Stencila, launch their first interactive “ Executable Research Article ” from their new scientific journal, GigaByte.

Viewers of the Crown may have noticed a brief scene where Prince Charles practices Welsh by sitting in a glass cubicle wearing a headset.  Some viewers may recognize that as a language lab. Some may have even used language labs themselves. The core of the language lab technique is language drills, which are based on the bedrock of all skills training: mimicry, feedback and repetition.

More and more R packages access resources on the web, and play crucial roles in workflows.Examples from the rOpenSci suite of packages include rromeo, GSODR, qualtRics, rnassqs, and many, many others.Like for all other packages, appropriate unit testing can make them more robust.However, unit testing of these packages can bring special challenges: dependence of tests on a good internet connection, testing in the absence of authentication