iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 02/09/2026

First seen shared on Mastodon. Glorious. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26090...

An image of the sky in vertical segments, each advancing time as the sun lowers in the sky. Each time slice is a period of the recent solar eclipse waxing from left to right, so the segments darken and change colour. The full eclipse is a black stripe with striking bright ring in the centre of the image. The slices then continue, with the eclipse waning, into a red sunset.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 26/08/2026

Was literally about to reply with this...

Two novelty candles of the Nazi leader Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark, screaming. One of the candles is half melted like the character at the end of the film.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 08/07/2026

Just back from the framers: a wonderful print from @ciaraioch.bsky.social. Brendan the Navigator, and a line from the traditional prayer to him.

A framed print of a painting - dark sea at night, faintest hint of light on the horizon. The bright wake of a sailing coracle with St. Brendan's cross lights the lower third of the image, and in fine white paint in the night sky is a quotation from a traditional prayer to the same saint: "I will trust in the darkness."

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 11/04/2026

"Wind and solar, supported by battery arrays and e-fuels, are now the cheapest, cleanest sources of energy in history. Last year, Ireland alone added 1GW of new solar capacity, meaning we now have at peak a total of 8GW of green electricity, or the equivalent of five [nuclear] plants"

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 11/04/2026

Some progress but more to do on the psych's WEIRDness Martingano, A. J., Trivedi-Bateman, N., Gauger, L., Huggett, M., Allcock, B., Jackson, R. E., & Holschuh, G. (2026). Still WEIRD, still underreported: An updated benchmark for psychological science. American Psychologist doi.org/10.1037/amp0...

Psychological science has long been critiqued for relying on samples drawn primarily from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. The present study examines the current state of this critique by integrating three lines of evaluation: national sample origins, demographic representativeness, and adherence to American Psychological Association reporting standards. We analyzed all human subjects research published in 2024 in six leading psychology journals (k = 1,217) and compared their samples with previous reviews. While the proportion of U.S.-based samples continues to decline, U.S. participants remain vastly overrepresented (59% of samples in 2024). For demographic representativeness, we found substantial improvements in demographic reporting since 2014, but participants’ race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education are still frequently omitted. For reporting standards, we evaluated compliance with journal Article Reporting Standards for Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (APA, 2023). We ﬁnd wide variation across journals in the adoption of practices, with some, such as including sample justiﬁcations, almost unanimously adopted, whereas others, such as conducting analyses of diversity, are much less common. Overall, our ﬁndings show that psychology still depends heavily on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic samples, with only modest and uneven progress toward inclusivity and transparency. By combining three evaluation criteria, we establish a holistic benchmark that can be used to systematically monitor change in these research practices in the future.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 30/03/2026

Heading to Dublin on Wednesday and you should always have something sensational to read in the train. Looking forward to getting stuck into @tonychemero.bsky.social 's latest.

A physical copy Tony Chemero's new book, "Intertwined Creatures" sitting on a desk littered with mouses and trackpads. The cover is a complex image - simultaneously kaleidoscope, organic, and multi-symmetrical. An intricate radial pattern evocative of fruit and seeds, cells and nerve tissue, and the continually unfolding movement of a kaleidoscope.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 02/12/2025

Denzel bringing in home in Unstoppable and, arguably, Deja Vu too (though does the ferry count?).

The movie poster for the film "Unstoppable" featuring the faces of Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, amid action shots of them both between moving train carriages.

Movie tagline: "1,000,000 tons. 100,000 lives. 100 minutes."

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 12/10/2025

And one of the world's most famous statisticians.

Cover of the biography, "Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend" by Mark Bostridge.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 12/10/2025

I guess this one might count as a bit obvious, but was a book that turned me on to biographies in general.

The book cover of "A Beautiful Mind", by Sylvia Nasar

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

Responsibility precludes scientists from using AI products whose use is irresponsible, e.g. harmful to people, animals, and the environment, or otherwise in violation of legal guidelines (e.g. copyright, data privacy, labour laws, Butterick 2025; Cole 2025; Rijo 2025; Tafani 2024a). Minimizing harm is vital for both engineers (ACM Code 2018 Task Force 2018) and theoreticians (Guest 2024).

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Five preoccupied to protect the human ecosystem 4/5

Independence means that scientists ensure that their research is unbiased by AI companies agendas, and that any potential conflicts of interest are declared in publications and other public communications (this also follows from Honesty and Transparency; cf. Mohamed Abdalla and Moustafa Abdalla 2021; Atkin 2025; Forbes and Guest 2025; Knoester et al. 2025).

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 3/5

Transparency requires that the AI technologies are open source and computationally reproducible.
Here we must recall the technology industry’s obfuscatory tactics: “the name of the current producer of ChatGPT. ‘OpenAI’ sounds like it is engaged in open science, but as we have now seen, ‘open’ never really means what you think it does.” (Mirowski 2023, p. 738; see also Dingemanse 2025; Hao 2025; Jackson 2024; Liesenfeld and Dingemanse 2024; Liesenfeld, Lopez, et al. 2023;
Maffulli 2023; Maris 2025; Nolan 2025; Solaiman 2023; Thorne 2009; Widder et al. 2024)

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem. 2/5

Scrupulousness demands, among other things, that scientists only use AI products whose functionality is well-specified and validated for its specific scientific usage (cf. Kwisthout 2024; Kwisthout andRenooij2025).Thisincludesterminologicalprecisionaboutwhatformalisms,models,and/or technologies are used (recall Figure 1) and rigorous argumentation to motivate why these technologies are appropriate for the scientific purposes at hand.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the ecosystem of human knowledge. 1/5 @tomstafford.bsky.social has argued that the infoglut we live in is like when densely populated cities made plagues more likely. We need to normalise new hygienic practices. @olivia.science et al set some out.

Honesty implies that we do not secretly use AI technologies without disclosure, and that one does not make unfounded claims about the presumed capabilities of AI technologies (this also follows from Responsibility; see example from MIT Economics 2025, where perhaps too little too late was done).

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

"But AI tools will be just like calculators..."

we ban calculators when teaching children addition and other basic arithmetic operations for a reason (cf. Lodge et al. 2023). Otherwise, they would not learn these arithmetic operations, and calculators do not help to understand the basic mathematical rules. For the same reasons, we also do not allow the use of spellcheck software for children learning to spell, or keyboard typing when learning to write by hand

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Students aren't generally looking to cheat, and most think LLM use should not be allowed in college education. Let's not allow salespeople to speak for them.

Technology companies are not shy of falsely claiming that students are lazy or lack writing skills. Such a mantra serves only to sell products — or coverupandexcuseoverworkingthembyourcolleagues—withnoreflectiononreality.We condemn those claims and reassert students’ agency vis-à-vis corporate control.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

Why higher ed teaching is hard, and always will be. But we don't do it because it is easy, and we are trusted to do it well because we have hard earned expertise in our fields. Let's not undervalue that, hey?

Students have always cheated. Bending and breaking the rules is human nature. And by the same token, educators are not police. We are not here to obsessively surveil our students — education is based on mutual trust. Therefore, our duty is to build mutually shared values with our students and colleagues.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

It is vital that we don't overestimate our understanding of human cognition. Yes, there is reason to believe we have a better grasp of some things than when AI hype first appeared in the 1950s, but that better understanding is not clear, and almost certainly isn't on the basis of simple computation

Although we do not fully understand human thinking, this does not licence attributing thinking to whichever machine or technology, uncritically and through anthropomorphisation. Such arguments from ignorance lack all scientific rigour. The only argument from ignorance that science permits is caution, more research, and care as appropriate actions when something is truly unknown.

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 07/09/2025

The more I learn about history, the more I understand how important learning about history is. This is doubly important in my own professional field. @olivia.science and colleagues driving home the point against the inevitability of AI reminding us of this.

When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia (Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates “the AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute fictionforscience.”(Heffernan, 2025,n.p. Duarte etal.2024).

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Marek @marekmcg.eurosky.social · 25/08/2025

Thank goodness I finally have a technology that can automate my being suckered by phishing scams. And all is costs is our environment, our autonomy, and our dignity.

Meme of Fry from Futurama brandishing a handful and cash with the text: "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY"

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