iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

4. IBM Center for The Business of Government This org is a research institute funded by IBM that connects academic and practitioner research to the practical challenges of public sector management. Their eye-catching documents feature fascinating vignettes not normally found in policy. Such as:

Reflections from the Author
I learned lessons about reality the hard way as a young National
Security Council staffer in the 1970s. My beat was Europe, and one
part of it meant keeping in touch with a Cold War Soviet ally in
Eastern Europe that should remain nameless. That entailed diplomatic lunches at mediocre restaurants around Washington. It turned
out that we had broken this country’s diplomatic codes and were
reading their dispatches. I was junior in the Washington scheme of
things but still, given my White House connection, I probably was
the diplomat’s most impressive contact. As a result, in his classified
reporting, he had attributed almost anything he learned to me,
which earned me a gentle scolding from my boss, National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, asking why I was talking out of school
about issues far from my European beat.

From p 11 of this document: https://delivery-p161909-e1920309.adobeaemcloud.com/adobe/assets/urn:aaid:aem:f42c49ea-49a8-424f-a18a-08d236192aab/original/as/learning-across-the-divide.pdf

3. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) The think tank and policy org world is currently rethinking its place in the modern landscape after the unpredictable cuts of the last few years. Chief among their continuing roles is that of defenders of human rights when no-one else does.

The Other New York: The Legacy of Slavery in the Case for Reparations Now

2. Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) EPIC by name, EPIC by nature - this policy org publishes documents that go supremely hard. Such as: epic.org/wp-content/u...

Five television sets in black and white with "Who's Got the Power?" with the subtitle "Restoring Worker Power in the Age of Algorithmic Union Busting"

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 25/09/2026

We added 19 new policy organisations to our tracking last month! Here are five of them, interspersed with YouTube videos that will also make your day. You should totally check them out.

Reckless Ben's first video on Bricks & Minifigs

Pure Mitch Hedberg. What could be nicer? Nothing, that's what.

121

What an absolute peak image generator

I never knew love until I went to Greggs. Now I can't live if living is without a lukewarm steak bake

010

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 21/09/2026

So it’s looking PRETTY MUCH like it’s between us and @dril.bsky.social

No votes for us actually but there’s STILL A CHANCE

160

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 21/09/2026

That's a very old Q&A mention extending the graph! But it's not clear, I'll ask the Altmetric elves to consider making singular entries more clear. Might be a limitation of scaling though.

2015-09-10
5:49 PM UTC
Why did human lifespans drop after the Flood?
Q&A post
In Genesis 5, a brief account of the lives of Adam's descendants is narrated. All of them had long lives, for instance, Adam lived 930 years, Seth lived 912 years, etc. But in Genesis 6:3, God seems to shorten the lifespan of man to 120 years or at...
Cites the following from your search query:

3557
Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition
Article in Science, August 2023

100

Yes we took Matthijs's en-Dorst-ment literally and started a slow and rather ill-advised rebrand.

0142

NEW ATTENTION SOURCE From today Altmetric is tracking when research is cited within @cassyni.bsky.social recorded video seminars. Altmetric tracks both mentions of research in seminars, AND the seminars themselves as they are shared and cited.

1125

We have news. More shortly...

5130

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 09/09/2026

Weirdly actually had a dream about the Twitter logo last night. It was about the circular design language. Probably need to touch grass or go to the #moss feed…

1210

We gave our Details Pages a facelift today. Now when you share actual details pages of attention an article has received, you get a much nicer layout.

Drake does not approve of our old sharing panels. He does approve old the new ones.

282

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 09/09/2026

Good morning, and welcome to our new followers! We can’t wait to disappoint and bore you with our dad-joke inspired nerd memes.

Cheers and welcome. A black clad Victorian lady raises a glass like some flaneur, against a neutral background.

2250

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 08/09/2026

HELLO YOU, long time. We think Mastodon and LinkedIn (and maybe other smaller social nets we don't track) took some of the traffic. Also, 2023 might still have some Covid research which will have naturally ebbed since then. 2019 hands off to 2025 neatly. We'll see where 2026 ends up though!

Timeline of research mention volumes, pre and post pandemic.

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 08/09/2026

One of my favourite moments in our timeline. December 4th, 2024.

Explosion of research sharing on Bluesky, December 2024

020

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 08/09/2026

Update: The academic flight from Twitter is now complete and appears permanent. April 2023, after the pandemic research surge, we recorded 2,234,307 posts sharing research on Twitter. As of April this year, "X" had 896,741 posts about research. That's a 60% drop in traffic.

Graph showing cumulative research sharing across platforms, including Twitter - April 2023

Graph of April 2026 cumulative research sharing including "X". One third of what it was.

9318136

The mutation varied minutely between the women, hence the differing expressions of their bodies. With no formal scientific post, Viles correctly diagnosed an Olympian by sight, from a PHOTO, and a genetics lab confirmed it. Viles died last year. What a LIFE. 21/25

Side by side photo of Priscilla Lopes-Schliep and Jill Viles, who could not look more different. Lopes-Schliep is a rippling mass of muscle, mid-stride, while Viles, sitting in sand by the ocean, is practically disappearing into the ground.

4. Jill Viles This one is astonishing; here's how a housewife with a rare form of muscular dystrophy correctly identified FROM A PHOTO that a muscly olympian shared a single genetic mutation with her. 17/25

Shot of dearly departed Jill Giles, an utter legend when it comes to self-study in all senses.

3. Beal's Conjecture Andrew Beal isn't a household name, but Beal Aerospace occupied what today's SpaceX calls its McGregor, Texas home. Beal is a banker by trade, and a self-taught mathematician. Inspired by Fermat's Last Theorem (the theorem, not the book), he created his own conjecture. 15/25

Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel discovered the ionization echo now known as Hanny's Voorwerp. A systematic hunt turned up forty further such echoes. Hhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp 13/25

Hanny van Arkel against a shot of the night sky. She looks out, as if to discover YET MORE things in the stars for us.

The team privately hoped that maybe 30k people would help out. The public was so keen that they crashed the site's servers, and 150k people signed up in year 1. Crucially, the results were as reliable as astronomers at classifying spatial bodies. Then they started making new discoveries. 12/25

The precursor for FoldIt was Rosetta, which used BOINC at Berkley to run folding algorithms on public computers. Some users got frustrated - they could see a solution which the program itself couldn't solve but couldn't interact. And so a fully interactive FoldIt was born as a video game. 5/25

1. Video gamers did in a few days what scientists couldn't do in 15 years In August 2010 Nature published a paper that credited @uwnews.uw.edu and "FoldIt players" for solving a protein folding problem that had evaded the scientific community for years. This all began as a screensaver... 4/25

nature letters article
Letter
Published: 05 August 2010
Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game
Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popović & Foldit players
Nature volume 466, pages756–760 (2010) Cite this article

Save article
30k Accesses

1090 Citations

526 Altmetric

Metricsdetails

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09304

Here, in no particular order, are the recent gains humanity has made from people who were NOT scientists. Because research impact isn't just your altmetric score, or your citation count. It's what shifts in the world thanks to your work; whether you're a PhD or good at Elden Ring. 3/25

Elden Ring. Tarnished Edition, which ironically is the luxury edition. Even though it's tarnished.

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 01/09/2026

*David Attenborough Voice* And here we see the humble podcast, earliest of its kind, published in 1903. This is definitely real and not a site metadata issue. The tell-tale beak tells us this is the Ur-Podcast.

Change Happens podcast, which features incorrect metadata on its original site, for 1903.

250

The establishment scientists favoured the "lunar distance" method, based on complex celestial observation and tables. Harrison claimed that that if you knew exactly when noon is in Greenwich, you can work out where you are based on the sun's position locally vs at Greenwich. Could it be done? 19/25

The complex lunar distance model in image form, rendering it even less accessible somehow.

John Harrison's H4 watch, on display at the Greenwich museum. https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-79142

In 1714 the British government passed the Longitude Act, offering a prize of up to £20,000 (an enormous sum, many millions today) for a practical solution, and set up a Board of Longitude to judge it. Harrison went up against that era's great astronomers and mathematicians. 18/25

Text of the Longitude Act of the British Parliament

5. John Harrison Yorkshire-born Harrison was from a carpenter family, and taught himself mechanics and clockmaking. His pieces were made almost entirely of wood and were so precisely machined they didn't need lubrication! This itself is enough to put him in the books as a peak engineer. 16/25

Black and white etching of John Harrison who was born near Wakefield. He looks concerned that you might not be "keeping up", and begs you to focus a little more.

5. William Herschel Herschel discovered Uranus with a telescope he built while he was not doing his day job of being a 2nd generation professional musician. He taught himself astronomy and he even ground and polished his own telescope mirrors, unable to afford to buy such specialist equipment 14/25

William Herschel, pictured with his homemade telescope, with a much larger one shown in a superimposed background.

4. Mary Anning The role of most of the women in science before the 1970s would actually be enough to make the case that those excluded/banned from learned circles have masses to contribute. Anning was an amateur paleontologist, and made fundamental contributions to the discipline. 11/25

Mary Anning, a major foundational person in palaeontology, and completely self taught. She is pictured next to one of her discoveries.

183

Ramanujan actually FAILED his college degree twice and lost his scholarship because he spent every waking moment on maths. Literally not of the academy. After Cambridge don G.H. Hardy received his advanced proofs, he brought him to Cambridge and they went Full Good Will Hunting. 9/25

Tropic Thunder Meme with "Never Go Full Good Will Hunting" under Robert Downey Jr.'s character.

150

3. Srinivasa Ramanujan Born into poverty in southern India in 1887, Ramanujan showed an immediate aptitude for mathematics, but like Faraday was self-taught. At 15 he got his hands on this G.S. Carr book, and started filling out original proofs by himself, living in obscurity for years. 8/25

Black and white photo of the most amazing mathematician you might not have heard of, Srinivasa Ramanujan.

140

2. Gregor Mendel Oops again - only the man who kicked off the entire field of genetics, discovered the mechanics of heredity (that are named for him. "Mendelian"). Mendel was an Augustinan friar and life-long gardener. Modern science owes him vastly. 7/25

Gregor Mendel next to the spiral double helix that would eventually be discovered in the field he kick-started, genetics.

140

1. Michael Faraday Oops, only the greatest experimental physicist we've ever had; Faraday was a bookbinder's apprentice with basically no training in science. We won't rehearse his career here. Read the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page and marvel at the magnitude of his achievements 5/25

Michael Faraday, leaning his head against his hand and silently judging you for not being a good enough physicist.

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 13/08/2026

🧵 (Part 1) Science is Not Just for Scientists In a few short years we have seen the rise of scammers, quacks, unlettered politicians assuming critical health infrastructure roles (with predictably devastating results) and more. Should "Science" just be for scientists? 1/25

A large collage of notable scientists including Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein.

42114

NEW FEATURE Other than a desire for sentiment analysis, one of the main requests over the years has been for some sort of historical snapshot of the Altmetric score. From today you can see an interactive timeline of the score's rise and fall since 2022. 1/3

Altmetric details page showing a timeline of the Altmetric score trend

1143

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 07/08/2026

Jealous. I want bees in MY inbox NOW

Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

100

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 06/08/2026

5 (again.) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Switzerland) Our favourite kind of source because it's citing articles that have not been in any other source such and news or blogs. That makes a policy citation even more valuable.

Several publications of the organisation, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, where articles that are cited are only cited by policy and not by any other Altmetric-tracked source.

100

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 06/08/2026

1. Open Society Foundations (US). Founded by George Soros, their roughly 400 document archive cites nearly 3,000 pieces of research.

Uganda’s Future: Navigating a Precarious Transition
Policy document published by Open Society Foundations
Cites the following from your search query [show fewer]:

201
Government work in Idi Amin's Uganda
Article in Africa (Cambridge University Press), August 2021
135
Briefing: Contextualizing the Bobi Wine factor in Uganda’s 2021 elections
Article in African Affairs, October 2021
132
KONY'S MESSAGE: A NEW KOINE?THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY IN NORTHERN UGANDA
Article in African Affairs, January 1999
106
The curse of aid
Article in Journal of Economic Growth, July 2008
88
Military corruption & Ugandan politics since the late 1990s
Article in Review of African Political Economy, December 2003
84
Religious (de)politicisation in Uganda’s 2016 elections
Article in Journal of Eastern African Studies, February 2017
64
Authoritarian leaders and multiparty elections in Africa: How foreign donors help to keep Kenya's Daniel arap Moi in power
Article in Third World Quarterly, August 2010
62
When revolutionaries grow old: the Museveni babies and the slow death of the liberation
Article in Third World Quarterly, July 2017

100

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 03/08/2026

The original article is associated with VITO (you are the author! IS THIS GAMING THE METRICS LUC?) Cool thing to point out, hadn't noticed that quirk around The Conversation myself yet.

Screenshot of the Altmetric Explorer filtered to the original Elsevier article and then filtered by VITO. The resulting hit shows that it's affiliated correctly.

Altmetric @altmetric.com · 03/08/2026

Update - yes that's what it was. Articles in The Conversation don't have readily available affiliation fields in their metadata like many publishers do. So this item has no affiliations linked at all:

Screenshots showing the Conversation articles searched in the Explorer and filtered to show affiliations. There are none