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Richard G Clegg

@richardclegg.bsky.social
769 followers 174 following 1.8K posts

Academic studying complex networks at Queen Mary University of London and amateur scuba instructor. I do a lot of research using the Raphtory software for temporal networks, a fast efficient way to analyse network data: www.raphtory.com He/Him

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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Preparing some teaching material on data analysis -- some basics. I found it a really exciting moment when I first understood why there was an (n-1) in the formula for sample variance. It's a small thing but I can remember how satisfying I found that ugly weirdness turning into an "aha!"
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This week one PhD student handed in corrections, another handed in final thesis and another is finalising their first major conference paper. It's the circle of life. (I've never even seen this film.)
Circle of life as illustrated by the lion king.
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Zachary Neal @zpneal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The special issue on 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 #𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 #𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 is now available in @insna.bsky.social 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙣𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨. The editorial introduction contains short descriptions of each activity, with direct links to the open-access papers providing detailed lesson plans. doi.org/10.21307/con...
doi.org
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
My name is Ozymandias king of kings. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair. For example these vast and *trunked* legs of stone, got my full body and face too. Lots of complete statues of me exist. I am frustrated by this trunkless legs narrative.
Statue of Ramses II in Cairo museum. His legs are vast but not trunkless.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This is my favourite "bullshit" dataset. www.kaggle.com/datasets/tec... You are supposed to use it to image classify recycling. A photo tells you "is this organic or is it recycling" (ignore for now any third option).
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It's a Machine Learning module. Naturally there's Hans. Did we stop to think maybe Hans was Clever? Maybe he just got tired of the constant media coverage.
A picture of Clever hans the horse as part of a lecture slide.
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
We need to understand political polarization through a global lens: Evidence from 53 countries suggests that high levels of affective polarization are correlated with democratic backsliding, but high levels of ideological polarization are not. www.nature.com/articles/s41...,
nature.com
Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization - Nature Communications
Nearly half of all polarization research focuses on the United States, yet many American findings are global outliers. A globally equitable understanding requires bridging traditional social science w...
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with my workload so this rescue animal near Bank was super useful.
Free hugs rescue dog
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
"The message from Deep Space" is a compelling game if your mind works that way. An extraterrestrial signal source broadcasts the hydrogen line frequency and then offsets from it. You return different frequencies and if you are right the source changes. You gradually learn to communicate...
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I'll pop it into my diary, wouldn't want my knowledge to get out of date.
Renewal dates for Anti bribery and criminal finances training showing renewals in 2325.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
I do find tube noticeboard art incredibly charming. This one is from Euston, classic old TV cartoon. One of the things I miss about living in "The Cally" as they now call that bit of North London, is tube noticeboard art from Caledonian Kimmy.
Picture of top cat and benny on the tube whiteboard.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
England have got as many world cups by the "dug up by dog" route as by the "playing football" route. Feels like we could really achieve something in football with a significant investment in dogs.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Maybe it is like flying ant day? I was really furious yesterday because I knew it was in the neighborhood and managed to catch its bum end disappearing over a row of houses in Lambeth. I chased it and it got away which is a bit humiliating as it does not look speedy.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
If you're in London and you enjoy saying "Look, it's the Goodyear Blimp" here's how to track it with Flight Radar. It's been flying around all week. Here's a terrible shot from the balcony. www.flightradar24.com/DLZFN/40980aa1
Look, it's the goodyear blimp.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
End of another year of networks presentations. Enchanting/comic GenAI of myself and co-organiser @garethtyson.bsky.social as the final slide.
GenAI pic of two middle aged men on the beach.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
The traditional "networking researchers awkwardly saying cheese" photo. #Coseners26
Networking researchers in Abingdon
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
That time of year again. #Coseners26. @garethtyson.bsky.social kicking us off.
Coseners welcome slide.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
I was at a Safari Park today. They paint the vehicles in the lion enclosure in a zebra pattern. Isn't that a bit weird? What are the lions meant to think? Delicious delicious jeep full of rangers? I have been on shark dives and they don't paint the boat like a rotting whale corpse or a bait ball.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
My PhD supervisor Maurice passed away last month. I was genuinely lucky to have such a great relationship with him. He was a role model for me as to how an academic should be. www.yorkpress.co.uk/notice/30724...
yorkpress.co.uk
Professor Michael 'Maurice' Maurice Dodson - Death | York Press
It is with great sadness that the family of Professor Michael Maurice Dodson announces his passing after a short battle with lung cancer, on the…
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Turner and Turing are all very well but I'm genuinely excited by the possibilty of puffins, seals and basking sharks being on our bank notes.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
In case anyone was nostalgic for previous labour governments, Blair criticised Starmer's party for: (1) increasing the minimum wage (2) too much emphasis on workers' rights and (3) phasing out fossil fuels. Were those on your list of bad things the current government did?
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Sam Adams @samadams.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
You will live a much richer and happier life if you embrace the idea that people are not just pretending to have different tastes than you out of spite
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Andrea Baronchelli @baronca.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
AI language does not only raise the question of truth and lies. It also raises the question of what happens when belonging can be simulated. I’ve written about it in Substack. substack.com/home/post/p-...
substack.com
The problem of artificial belonging
AI language is not only a problem of truth and lies. It is also a problem of belonging.
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Prof Susie Maidment @tweetisaurus.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
This is amazing www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
theguardian.com
French professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prize
Authorities investigate Florent Montaclair over award given to himself and others including Noam Chomsky
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Alessia Galdeman @alessianetwork.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
⚡TENET satellite at @netsciconf.bsky.social never stops surprising you: we're happy to announce our 4th keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Ingo Scholtes! 🗣️Temporal Graph Isomorphism and the Expressivity of Temporal GNNs 📅 1 June 2026 t.co/GwaqJTcwzV
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
A road traffic modelling program I used to work with in the 90s used to just produce the error message "NOGGIN" if you gave it a badly inputted data file. It wasn't a cheap amateur thing either it was I think the largest selling one of its time.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
@eleanormorton.bsky.social I have been getting lots of well meant adverts from the globe theatre that make me think "Craig the tour guide doesn't give a f**k"
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Cave diving warning signs hit hard. Pretty certainly you only see this for real if you are doing fairly advanced diving anyway. (I was relatively far - yet still within daylight range - into a cave system in Yucatan peninsula.) These are (rightly) signs that tell you clearly you will die.
Cave diving warning sign - grim reaper corpses in wetsuits
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
I have seen some curious uses of spoiler tags but I just saw the one I think is the most charming. Someone on Reddit used spoiler tags on a post about the fundamental theory of calculus in case the reader did not get to the plot twist where the integral gives you the anti derivative.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Unintended irony: presentation on satellite communications shows photos of Werner Von Braun and Elon Musk. Speaker apologises: "I know a lot of people don't like Musk's politics."
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Arthur Clune @arthur.clune.org · 17/04/2026
Can confirm the headline is backed by the text
quantamagazine.org
The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived | Quanta Magazine
AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Not much of a surprise. Some kaggle datasets are genuinely awful. I reviewed a project about using a camera to classify recycling (photo it, the app answers "does it go in recycling"). ~25% of the images were of curtains hung on a wall. Images of "food waste" were farmers proudly holding veg.
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Arthur Clune @arthur.clune.org · 12/04/2026
These are wild examples of rejecting students (original article is from The Times)
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Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN) @cs4fn.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Now added to our Gendered timeline of technology cs4fn.blog/2023/05/07/a...
cs4fn.blog
A gendered timeline of technology
Women have played a gigantic role in the history of computing. Their ideas form the backbone to modern technology, though that has not always been obvious.
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Alice Schwarze @aliceschwarze.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
As side product here is that AI could allow the academic community to develop higher and enforceable reproducibility standards (at least for insilico research) because of the lower cost of reproduction studies
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
This feels absolutely crazy. If you offer money to students to do a course it is immoral to turn around and say "we made a mistake we need it back".
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
I am actually quite proud of the course on digital signal processing I co-teach. When I was an undergrad I took standard physicist courses on Fourier transforms. When I started coding using them I had some shocks. Why on earth are all the frequencies popping up mirrored?
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Mathematically when we analyse music as frequencies we are forced into a universe where it plays lopped from the start to the end of time. The nearest to a practical realisation was "(Everything I do) I do it for you" by Bryan Adams played looped for a subjective ten years in the summer of 1991.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Honestly this is what would happen if your confused elderly racist relative got control of a major funding agency.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
I see "LLMs make you stupid" articles are here en masse. Filing them with previous "X makes you stupid" claims: watching TV, computers doing maths, wordprocessing, researching on the internet, the internet, reading on screen, short videos, wikipedia, computer games, mobile phones, social media.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
I'm really invested in the extremely British "Battle of the fake Colin the Caterpillar cake" story. Our research group used to have a fake "Schmolin the caterpillar" birthday cake tradition back in the day. Kudor to headline "Larva Lamped" here: top punning. www.theguardian.com/business/202...
theguardian.com
Larva lamped: Colin the Caterpillar loses to eight lookalikes in cake taste test
Which? testers complain M&S sponge is ‘too dry’ as Waitrose’s Cecil tops the tree with ‘best buy’ gong
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
I set AI to answer political questions in "Malcolm Tucker mode" -- sweary rants in his style. Just using Gemini settings for the first time (I usually use Claude now) and I tripped its safety warnings three times trying to add that setting.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
My favourite part of this video is the last 30 seconds where we both realise how bad we (especially me) are at knowing celebrities and lord of the rings.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Temporal networks Raphtory and Lord of the Rings youtu.be/ZP6Bh3iWklQ?...
youtu.be
Temporal Networks, Where Page Rank meets Lord of the Rings - Computerphile
YouTube video by Computerphile
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Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
When I started working on UK energy in 2007, fossil fuels provided ~78% of electricity. Coal alone: 34%. Wind & solar: less than 2%. Today: wind & solar 33%, fossil fuels 28%, coal 0%. The chart below tells the story better than words can.
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
We have all had days like this right? (AI ice cream bot in my Beijing teaching building. I did not know this was going to happen I was genuinely charmed by the robot.)
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Alessia Galdeman @alessianetwork.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Don't miss the opportunity to show your work at TENET at @netsciconf.bsky.social, submit before Monday 10PM AoE, time is running out! ⌛️
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
"Inspirational" quote found in a notebook. Honestly though, while Amelia Earhart is tremendously inspirational, my takehome from her story was "sometimes probably do give up".
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Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Unexpected bit of pop culture prescience…
Far Side cartoon showing a liner with a party taking place on board sailing towards some floating mines and a small boat apparently manned by pirates with a machine gun. There is a warship in the distance. It’s dated 12/6/87 and captioned “Through a gross navigational error, the Love Boat steams into the Strait of Hormuz”
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Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
This is Don Knuth's write up of using Claude to solve a graph theory problem. cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...
cs.stanford.edu
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