iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Which, incidentally, would have saddened Hugh Kenner…

A paperback of Hugh Kenner, The CounterfeitersI remember it as a zany romp, with a brilliant and unsettling combination of learning and telegraphic impatience. A little like McLuhan. Some Swift, some Babbage. I respected its verve and eccentricity, but (aside from some remarks about scale in Gulliver) it made little lasting impact. I need to reread it.

Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Never read Timothy Donnelly before. But I’m very much enjoying the loping, looping fluency of poems in The Problem of the Many

Paperback copy of The Problem of the Many, by Timothy Donnelly

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

This is James J. McCarthy at the Univ of Illinois, instructing the instructors of the deaf in psycholing. advances: "The essential distinction between the mech. communication model and the psycholing. model of lang. function is that the former fails to take into account the 'meaning' of signals"

The term "language model" as used here means a sort of wiring diagram which describes how human language works. It describes the relationship of different systems, used in language, to each other. Since this relating of systems is basic to the understanding of human language, the construction of a model was one of the first things done by psycholinguists.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

It'd be fascinating to pursue the history of usage of the term "language model". Not the familiar pedigree of LMs qua probabilistically-constrained-token-sequences (ngrams, audio signal processing, embeddings, transformers), but the variety of efforts called 'LMs'. E.g. this from 1957:

THE LANGUAGE MODEL

Prof. Charles E. Osgood, of the University of Illinois, formulated the theoretical basis for this language model by extending and elaborating the mediation hypothesis. The model includes (1) 3 language processes, (2) 3 levels of organization, and (3) 2 channels of transmission. [followed by figure showing two decoding -> encoding channels, each with similar flow between semantic grammatical & integrative levels: channel 1 'Perceptuo-actor'; & channel 2 'Audio-vocal']

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Not so systematic, but here's a literary flourish from Scientific American, 1900, reporting on T.J.J. See's improved estimates of planetary sizes:

In the case of Uranus the diameter is diminished from 34,000 to about about 28,500 miles. Saturn has his diameter diminished over 1200 miles; while that of Jupiter is reduced some 300 miles.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Apparently they were still at it in 1876! Here's the gendering on a page from the 1876 Baltimore Sun Almanac: He/him: The Sun, Mars, Jupiter She/her: nature, Venus, The Earth, The Moon Indeterminate: Mercury

Baltimore Sun Almanac (1876), page 10: The Planets Described
Includes text about The Sun, Mercury, Venus, The Earth, The Moon, Mars & Jupiter

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

Arrived by post earlier this week! Tiny correction to p168 n14 - the entry on 'mediation' in Tom Bottomore (ed.) 'Dictionary of Marxist Thought' is by István Mészáros. Went there from your v. elegant one-sentence summary. I'd never thought of Aristotelian mean as background here - thinking on it.

Photo of Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism and Social Forms, page 6: "...Mediation marks the dialectic proper to aesthetics. Just as materialist dialectics considers the history of social relations in the interest of their future, it appraises cultural productions in their relative autonomy. From origins in Aristotle's esteem for the virtues of the intermediate, to articulations in Hegel's project for self-reflective epistemology, mediation names for Marx the materialist critique of immediacy in Hegel, and ultimately synonymizes labor itself, that social activity of reciprocal transformation between nature and humans..."

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Arrived in the post today. One of the odder little tributaries in the history of word embeddings: Richard League’s 1977 Psycholinguistic Matrices. With no little hippy enthusiasm, the author uses Charles Osgood’s 1950s semantic differential embeddings to study semantic satiation.

A photograph of a green ex-library paperback, Richard League (1977) Psycholinguistic Matrices

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Some crazy shifts in the global distribution of science over the last decades.

Graphs showing changes in geographical distribution of scientific articles, between 1980 and 2022. There are three graphs: (i) a full sample of journals; (ii) the top 5% journals; (iii) the top 0.1% publications. All tell a similar story: the decline of the proportion from the US, the increase in the proportion from China, and an overall increase in multipolarity.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

ROFL. Living in the eternal now.

Opus 4.5 - Claude Max

> can I search my claude history?

● Yes, you can search your Claude Code conversation history using the /history command. This lets you search through past conversations by keyword.

For example:
/history search term

This will show you matching past sessions that you can then resume if needed.

Would you like me to help you search for something specific?

> Unknown slash command: history

> You just said 'you can search your Claude Code conversation history using the /history command' but then said history was an unknown slash command

● You're right, I apologize for the error. I gave you incorrect information - there is no /history command in Claude Code.

Claude Code does not currently have a built-in feature to search through past conversation history. Each session is independent, and there's no native way to search across previous conversations.

If you need to preserve or search conversation content, you'd need to manually save transcripts or use external tools to log your sessions.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

#Wikimania2025 keynote: Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Vukasi Marivate, Selena Deckelmann and Job Meaura keynote panel on #AI: how should Wikimedia projects adapt, respond to and shape the AI landscape?

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

At Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi! A fantastic welter of conference activity here. Listening to Ruby D. brown and Nwonwu Uchechukwu Pascaline present their research on barriers to African women contributing to Wikipedia #AfricanWikiWomen

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Most of these women aren't yet in any of the different language wikipedias. Only 237 Malawian women have a wikipedia page (31% of all Malawians who do). But some exciting plans are brewing in Scotland & Malawi to generate more English, Chichewa and Chitumbuka pages about Malawian women.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Short 🧵today on Malawi: population 20.3 million. Wikidata currently knows of 1541 Libyans. 739 (50.93%) of them are women, including one trans woman. This high percentage of women is the result of some recent work, but it takes the long-running 50:50 campaign in Malawi as inspiration.

words in white on a purple background: 50:50 Campaign Malawi

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Each day this July I'll survey Wikidata's coverage of women in a different country. I'll focus on 30 countries, amounting to half the global population, where women are under-represented relative to the country's population. Just Wikidata? Or a more general digital problem? #1Day1WikidataCountry

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Similarly. the writer Kawthar Al-Jahmi (كوثر الجهمي) is only there in Arabic Wikipedia, and not yet in any other language wikipedias.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

The actress Khadija Sabri (خدوجة صبري) is another Libyan woman who has her own page on Arabic Wikipedia, but doesn't yet have one in English.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

For example, the politician Saniya Ghouma (سنية غومة) has a page in both the Arabic wikipedia and the French wikipedia. But there's not yet a page about her on the English wikipedia.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

All kinds of remarkable Libyan women are on this redlist, from peacebuilders to powerlifters: academics, activists, actors, athletes, chess players, deminers, doctors, fashion designers, filmmakers, journalists, judges, karatekas, lawyers, local politicians, marine biologists...

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

🧵today on Libya (ليبيا) : population 7.3 million. Wikidata currently knows of 1096 Libyans, of whom 306 (29.5%) are women. Unfortunately, most of these women aren't yet in any of the different language wikipedias. Only 91 Libyan women have a wikipedia page (12.3% of all those Libyans who do).

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Here's a bubble chart of Malawians in Wikidata by gender and occupation. (Men in orange, women & other genders in purple.) Not quite 50-50, but getting there! #Malawi #50-50Campaign #DigitalRepresentation

male politician: 271
female politician: 158
male association football player: 100
female association football player: 54
female netballer: 45
male diplomat: 30
female researcher: 26
female journalist: 24
female academic: 22
female judge: 19
male economist: 19
male writer: 17
female diplomat: 17
male boxer: 16
male Catholic bishop: 15
male athletics competitor: 14
male Catholic priest: 14
female civil servant: 13
male singer: 13
male poet: 13
female activist: 13
male lawyer: 11
female cricketer: 11
male sport cyclist: 11
female lawyer: 9
female teacher: 9
male musician: 9
female writer: 8
male athlete: 8
male judge: 7
female singer: 7
female entrepreneur: 6
female coach: 6
female businessperson: 6
female nurse: 6
male swimmer: 6
female swimmer: 6
male journalist: 6
female sports executive: 6
female human rights activist: 6
male researcher: 6
female actor: 5
male composer: 5
female assistant coach: 5
male artist: 5
female radio journalist: 5
male actor: 4
male long-distance runner: 4
female midwife: 4
male civil servant: 4
male record producer: 4
female economist: 4
female athletics competitor: 4
male songwriter: 4
female women's rights activist: 4
female beauty pageant contestant: 4
male human rights activist: 4
male rapper: 4
female athlete: 4
female fashion designer: 3
male sprinter: 3
female nun: 3
female librarian: 3
female local politician: 3
female lecturer: 3
female philanthropist: 3
male historian: 3
male association football manager: 3
female association football manager: 3
female gospel singer: 3
male jazz musician: 3
female educator: 3
male banker: 3
female theologian: 3
male theologian: 3
male university teacher: 3
female pedagogue: 3
male guitarist: 3
female aircraft pilot: 3
male mathematician: 2
male teacher: 2
female model: 2
male dancer: 2
male philosopher: 2
female environmentalist: 2
female physician: 2
male television actor: 2
female chess player: 2
female poet: 2
female boxer: 2
male linguist: 2
female novelist: 2
male comedian: 2
female politica…

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Yay! I've reached my first #Wikidata global representation goal! Women from the countries shaded red are 25% of global population, but in Dec '24 were only 0.83% of Wikidata bios. I set a target to increase this to 1%. Four months later, with 10,000 women added, they're now 1.01% of Wikidata bios!

World map with 30 countries under-represented on Wikidata shaded red:
Sudan
Niger
Ethiopia
South Sudan
Pakistan
Yemen
Chad
Bangladesh
People's Republic of China
Laos
Madagascar
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Somalia
Cambodia
India
Malawi
Tanzania
Burundi
Myanmar
Central African Republic
Turkmenistan
Vietnam
Burkina Faso
Afghanistan
Mauritania
Mozambique
Libya
Tajikistan
Angola
Sierra Leone

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

🧵reporting February progress in improving #Wikidata global representation. Women from the countries shaded red are 25% of global population. In Dec '24 they were 0.83% of Wikidata bios. This February I added almost 2000 more women, mostly from Pakistan, Yemen, Chad & Bangladesh.

Countries under-represented on Wikidata shaded red:
Sudan
Niger
Ethiopia
South Sudan
Pakistan
Yemen
Chad
Bangladesh
People's Republic of China
Laos
Madagascar
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Somalia
Cambodia
India
Malawi
Tanzania
Burundi
Myanmar
Central African Republic
Turkmenistan
Vietnam
Burkina Faso
Afghanistan
Mauritania
Mozambique
Libya
Tajikistan
Angola
Sierra Leone

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

🧵on global digital representation. Countries marked in red on this map contain 50% of global population. But people, especially women, from these countries are digitally under-represented. Women from these countries - a quarter of humanity - were just 0.87% of #Wikidata biographies in Dec 2024.

World map, with the following countries marked in red: Sudan, Niger, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Chad, Bangladesh, China, Laos, Madagascar, DRC, Somalia, Cambodia, India, Malawi, Tanzania, Burundi, Myanmar, Central African Republic, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mozambique, Libya, Tajikistan, Angola and Sierra Leone

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

I've read people alleging that this cybertruck is on fire. Even in the heat of the moment, let's not rush to hasty conclusions! All I can see here is an awkwardly expansive exuberance, an impossible warmth of heart, an oddly dramatic gesture of oxidization.

A very pixel-y image of a Cybertruck on fire and smoking in front of a Trump hotel.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

The Levi-Strauss remark btw (in case anyone else was wondering) is within a sequence of paragraphs where he's trying to rebut imagining criticisms in the introductory 'Overture' to The Raw and the Cooked (p7 of my 1970 Harper Torchbook paperback edition)

Photograph of a page of The Raw and the Cooked, including the following paragraph: 'I do not doubt for a moment that further information already available or as yet unpublished will affect my interpretations. Some that are no more than tentative will perhaps be confirmed; others will be abandoned or modified. No matter; in a subject such as this, scientific knowledge advanced haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt. Unlike metaphysics, it does not insist on all or nothing. For this book to be worthwhile, it is not necessary in my view that it should be assumed to embody the truth for years to come and with regard to the tiniest details. I shall be satisfied if it is credited with the modest achievement of having left a difficult problem in a rather less unsatisfactory state than it was before. Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths. The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.'

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

I did wonder how old this sense of 'riveting' was, though - so here's the OED. Start's with Dibdin's Complete History of the English Stage, and ends with Law and Justice As Seen on TV...

OED on 'riveting, adj.', 2. (1800–) That holds one's attention; compelling, enthralling, fascinating.
1800 Hamlet,..with all its transcendent beauties, its prodigious strength, its fascinating charms, its rivetting interest, and its extraordinary variety, has more faults than the critics have time to tell.
C. Dibdin, Complete History of English Stage vol. III. iii. 54

1854 Riveting as were these narratives when we first read them..those who now read them for the first time are generally disappointed.
Rambler February 198

1899 His brilliant, original, riveting, but most censorious conversation.
Dictionary of National Biography vol. LVII. 178/1

1967 Her smart friends..said things like: ‘Absolutely riveting’ and ‘Loved your play’.
N. Marsh, Death at Dolphin v. 129

1979 ‘Some 2500 years ago’—Kurz sums up his riveting article—‘a Greek artist conceived the strange idea of putting a movable ring into the mouth of a lion.’
E. H. Gombrich, Sense of Order x. 271

2003 It was indeed riveting television. Americans, I among them, were glued to the edges of their own front-row seats.
E. Rapping, Law & Justice as seen on TV iv. ii. 115

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

At the other extreme, 19 countries have fewer than one per 100,000 population. Together, these countries amount to 46.9% of the world's population. But they only provide 3.3% of Wikidata's women. We're a long way from #WorldWideWikidataWomen

Stats for women on wikidata: Bangladesh 1,224; Burundi 125; Cambodia 152; Chad 129; DRC 907; Ethiopia 1,647; India 12,979; Laos 62; Madagascar 258; Malawi 190; Myanmar 559; Niger 128; Pakistan 1,511; China 10,294; Somalia 166; South Sudan 85; Sudan 219; Tanzania 579; Yemen 205.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Looking at the uneven global distribution of women on #Wikidata, comparing wikidata numbers by country to population. Some European countries (Iceland, Slovenia, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark) have more than one woman in Wikidata per 500 population. humaniki.wmcloud.org/gender-by-co...

Wikidata stats: Iceland has 3,499 women on Wikidata; Estonia 6,811; Norway 18,309; Slovenia 15,749; Finland 20,787; Sweden 27,856; Denmark 14,152.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

After a few evenings work, I've increased the # of Libyan women in Wikidata from 91 to 260 :) Here's a query to visualize Libyans in Wikidata by gender (men in green; women & others in purple) & occupation. (Hard to stop. Anyone have a list of the 33 women elected as GNC members in 2012?)

Bubble chart showing Libyans in Wikidata by gender and occupation. Largest bubbles: writer men; politician men; association footballer men; poet men; politician women; diplomat men; military personnel men; writer women; journalist men; sport cyclist men; actor women; singer men; taekwondo athlete men; actor men; academic women; historian men; activist women; journalist women; lawyer women; university teacher men; futsal player men...

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Yay! English Wikipedia has finally made it! 20.003%! At long last, over 20% of biographies on the English Wikipedia are for women. It may not seem much of a milestone, but a decade ago, that proportion was down at 15.53%

Table showing the number of biographies broken down by gender, in different language wikipedias: English wikipedia has 2,040,570 biographies in total, and 408,183 (20.003%) of them are female.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

No reason why you should! Global differences in representation are fairly stark, as one might perhaps expect. humaniki.wmcloud.org/gender-by-co... has stats on biographies broken down by country. Here are the numbers for MENA regions:

Wikidata stats for biographies from 20 MENA countries, ordered by female percent from 11.3% (Libya, 91 women of 805 total) to 28.0% (Lebanon, 1168 women of 4167 total)

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

When you load the page of an item who is marked researcher or who has an ORCID id then it looks for papers to match them to, e.g.

The wikidata page of the researcher Sarah Anne J Guagliardo, with additional checkmarked suggestions of wikidata articles inserted (by the author strings tool) so that she can be added as author of these papers if appropriate

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Barr picks up the pace, met by some very blanket denial from Lambert. And here's a rather nice poster.

Poster for Animal Rights Benefit night in Slough, Sat June 13th 7.30-1am, for the Animal Liberation Front and the Hunt Saboteurs, at the Orchard Youth Club, Stoke Poges Lane. Featuring The Company, Urgh Leave it Out & sounds from the Disque Co. £1.50 adv £2.00 door

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 10/09/2024

Hasn't there been a spate of recent scholarship on gender, kinship & colonial trade? Looks as if Susan Broomhall, & the novelist Samantha Rajaram, aren't on here. But hopefully together we can stop this page being such a weirdly concentrated little patriarchial hub in the wikigraph.

Cover of Samantha Rajaram's novel The Company Daughters. 'A heart wrenching colonial love story. Young ladies wanted. Orphans preferred.'

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 28/07/2024

Not strange, but moving: inked circling of Switzerland and Turkey in a looseleaf map insert to Who’s Who in Central and East-Europe 1933/34, Ed. by Stephen Taylor, R.P.D. Publ. by The Central European Times Publishing Co. Ltd., Zurich.

Insert map with Switzerland and Turkey hand-circled in blue ink, resting on pp. 360-1 of the Who’s Who

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 12/07/2024

Potentially! I just scraped from the website author lists and for convenience put those without WD ids listed there into Excel, to either add links to existing WD items or create new WD items:

spreadsheet showing PoeTree Spanish-language authors, with columns for language, name, born, dies, wikidata & VIAF

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 08/07/2024

This mini-🧵 quickly drifted into more psychoanalytic territory than expected. On the strange terminologies of AI as cutting the womb from the body, breeding without women. Corpus, matrix, generative AI.

anatomical figures of a womb in The Byrth of Mankynde.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 26/06/2024

@redstreamnet.bsky.social on the musk site: BREAKING: Bolivia's union confederation announced indefinite general strike against the coup, effective immediately. The Central Obrera Boliviana of workers and peasant unions is mobilizing workers and social movements to La Paz to repel the coup.

tweet with this text and a still from a video of the call

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 26/06/2024

@progintl.bsky.social on the musk site: BREAKING: 🇧🇴 Bolivia's trade union confederation COB has called for an emergency mass mobilization and a general strike in response to the ongoing coup attempt

BREAKING: Bolivia's trade union confederation COB has called for an emergency mass mobilization and a general strike in response to the ongoing coup attempt

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 09/06/2024

Just finished The Atomic Human by Neil Lawrence, Cambridge DeepMind Prof. The title (& a strained reference to Democritus) does it no justice. Ditto publisher's blurb: "slicing away at the facets of human intelligence, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity..."

Photograph of the book The Atomic Human with a bunch of post-it notes used as bookmarks

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 06/01/2024

Oh no! Here is Herbie. A minority view in our house is that he takes his name from the English poet George Herbert. My elder daughter, by contrast, regards his name as honouring the convivial properties of 'da herb'.

Picture of a grey and white cat looking characteristically quizzical.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 06/01/2024

This doesn't correspond particularly well to the current Wikipedia page for Computer-aided design. But it does correspond to the state of that page between 24 April 2009 and 18 June 2010. "often must convey" or "must convey" has been paraphrased to "typically conveys". And the distinction between 2/

The use of computer technology for the design of objects, real or virtual, has been supported by the plethora of applications associated with computer-aided design, also known as CAD. Developed pri- marily as a digital substitute for manual drafting of technical and engineering drawings, the output of CAD typically conveys symbolic information such as shape compositions, dimensions, and tolerances based on application-specific conventions.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

I find this too delightfully comic a piece of wikiprose to feel like emending it.

Writing style
Being that Caro de Mallén was a poet, a poetic style of writing was prevalent in her Dramas.

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 23/10/2023

Percentage of women's quotations in the OED, by category. From David-Antoine Williams, 'Women’s Words and the Words of Women in the Oxford English Dictionary', Review of English Studies 74:316 (October 2023), pp. 730–751. academic.oup.com/res/article/...

bar-chart showing proportion of women-authored quotations in OED3 by category, 1700-2022 (average 10%, Heraldry and Philosophy under 5%; Consumables over 20%) and 1950-2022 (average 19%; Philosophy under 10%; Craft & Trades and Consumables over 30%)

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Dave Palfrey @01factory.bsky.social · 19/10/2023

OED has this sense of hoover stretching back through the second half of the C20th outside the data context:

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