Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Preparing 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!" 120
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 30/09/2026This 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.) 020
Reposted by Richard G CleggZachary Neal @zpneal.bsky.social · 30/09/2026The 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 022
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 18/09/2026My 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. 071
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 11/09/2026This 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). 120
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 11/09/2026It'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. 120
Reposted by Richard G CleggJay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026We 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.comToward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization - Nature CommunicationsNearly 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... 12616
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 01/09/2026I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with my workload so this rescue animal near Bank was super useful. 000
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... 110
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 06/08/2026I'll pop it into my diary, wouldn't want my knowledge to get out of date. 050
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 04/08/2026I 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. 020
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 19/07/2026England 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. 000
Reposted by Richard G CleggRichard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 10/07/2026Maybe 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. 111
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 10/07/2026If 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 240
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 03/07/2026End of another year of networks presentations. Enchanting/comic GenAI of myself and co-organiser @garethtyson.bsky.social as the final slide. 130
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026The traditional "networking researchers awkwardly saying cheese" photo. #Coseners26 041
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/07/2026That time of year again. #Coseners26. @garethtyson.bsky.social kicking us off. 030
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 22/06/2026I 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. 240
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 05/06/2026My 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.ukProfessor Michael 'Maurice' Maurice Dodson - Death | York PressIt is with great sadness that the family of Professor Michael Maurice Dodson announces his passing after a short battle with lung cancer, on the… 030
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 03/06/2026Turner 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. 040
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 27/05/2026In 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? 271
Reposted by Richard G CleggSam Adams @samadams.bsky.social · 16/05/2026You 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 622448
Reposted by Richard G CleggAndrea Baronchelli @baronca.bsky.social · 11/05/2026AI 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.comThe problem of artificial belongingAI language is not only a problem of truth and lies. It is also a problem of belonging. 121
Reposted by Richard G CleggProf Susie Maidment @tweetisaurus.bsky.social · 07/05/2026This is amazing www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...theguardian.comFrench professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prizeAuthorities investigate Florent Montaclair over award given to himself and others including Noam Chomsky 33610
Reposted by Richard G CleggAlessia 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 021
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 06/05/2026A 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. 010
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" 110
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 01/05/2026Cave 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. 130
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 01/05/2026I 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. 020
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 29/04/2026Unintended 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." 141
Reposted by Richard G CleggArthur Clune @arthur.clune.org · 17/04/2026Can confirm the headline is backed by the textquantamagazine.orgThe AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived | Quanta MagazineAI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning. 001
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 15/04/2026Not 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. 100
Reposted by Richard G CleggArthur Clune @arthur.clune.org · 12/04/2026These are wild examples of rejecting students (original article is from The Times) 012
Reposted by Richard G CleggComputer Science for Fun (CS4FN) @cs4fn.bsky.social · 12/04/2026Now added to our Gendered timeline of technology cs4fn.blog/2023/05/07/a...cs4fn.blogA gendered timeline of technologyWomen 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. 001
Reposted by Richard G CleggAlice Schwarze @aliceschwarze.bsky.social · 11/04/2026As 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 041
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 09/04/2026This 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". 030
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 07/04/2026I 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? 130
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 07/04/2026Mathematically 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. 3122
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 04/04/2026Honestly this is what would happen if your confused elderly racist relative got control of a major funding agency. 131
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 04/04/2026I 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. 100
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 02/04/2026I'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.comLarva lamped: Colin the Caterpillar loses to eight lookalikes in cake taste testWhich? testers complain M&S sponge is ‘too dry’ as Waitrose’s Cecil tops the tree with ‘best buy’ gong 020
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 31/03/2026I 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. 000
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026My 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. 000
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 20/03/2026Temporal networks Raphtory and Lord of the Rings youtu.be/ZP6Bh3iWklQ?...youtu.beTemporal Networks, Where Page Rank meets Lord of the Rings - ComputerphileYouTube video by Computerphile 020
Reposted by Richard G CleggJan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 18/03/2026When 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. 9392130
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 18/03/2026We 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.) 020
Reposted by Richard G CleggAlessia Galdeman @alessianetwork.bsky.social · 13/03/2026Don't miss the opportunity to show your work at TENET at @netsciconf.bsky.social, submit before Monday 10PM AoE, time is running out! ⌛️ 023
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". 030
Reposted by Richard G CleggOdd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 12/03/2026Unexpected bit of pop culture prescience… 6834202
Richard G Clegg @richardclegg.bsky.social · 05/03/2026This is Don Knuth's write up of using Claude to solve a graph theory problem. cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...cs.stanford.edu 031