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Personal essay, weekend edition. Starting with a familiar quote often attributed to English economist John Maynard Keynes:1
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
I've argued here that refusing a useful tool on principle is stubbornness. And after a few weeks of trying to go without AI at all, I still feel that way for the most part. But my relationship with AI is changing, especially around writing and scientific inquiry.
My inboxes (personal and otherwise) are filled with slop. My social feeds are filled with slop. Many of the papers I read are slop. My Hacker News links are slop. Many of the blogs I read are becoming increasingly filled with slop.2 People who I know and deeply respect are churning out AI slop at a pace I find simultaneously dizzying and disappointing (I'm not innocent here: there's some slop on some older posts here I'm embarrassed about, but I'm keeping up here unedited as a reminder). It's not just writing. I can't go a day without seeing a slide deck that looks exactly like this. IYKYK.
David Dewhurst is a program manager at DARPA. He described watching capable people he respects lose their creativity in real time as they present AI-generated content as original work. They point to length and coverage as achievements. I get some long comprehensive document and I can't find the sender's judgment anywhere in it. If I wanted Claude's analysis or opinion on this or that, I'm very well capable of asking Claude for Claude's analysis or opinion on this or that. Don't be a meat proxy.
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I feel the same way when I'm reading the scientific literature. Anshul Kundaje argues that papers have stopped working as measures of productivity, expertise, or accomplishment.
The argument is obviously correct if you think about it for a half a minute. A publication on someone's CV tells me way less than it used to about what they contributed or understand. But as a newly returned academic, I can tell you Anshul is also correct that it'll take (too much) time before we figure out new ways to assess impact and expertise, while we desperately try to hold onto our old ways, bean counting glam journal publication and H-indices and such. We still need ways to document research impact and contribution, but these days a publication doesn't really tell us much about what its authors contributed or even understand. Earlier this week the Washington Post describes a full professor at University of Chicago having published more than 200 papers and 14 books this year alone. Case in point.
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TMLR editor Nihar Shah contacted authors of 10 submissions that were already going to be desk rejected. One of them withdrew their submission. One said they were unavailable, and one didn't show up to the scheduled meeting. Of the remainder he met with, three authors couldn't answer basic questions about their papers, and three more struggled with technical details. The authors of the one remaining paper were able to answer basic questions, but Shah identified major errors in a central claim. Now this small sample can't tell you how common the problem is or how much AI caused it, but it says something. Shah also noted that this took >20 hours so it's obviously not a scalable solution.
Related, Giorgio Gilestro wrote an essay that's been making the rounds this week, calling where this ends the Weimar of Knowledge. The marginal cost of producing content is essentially zero, but the cost of attention is still high. The worry is that overwhelmed readers will rely even more on institutional prestige to decide what to read or whose work you should pay attention to. Obviously making it harder for good researchers outside well-known institutions to ever get read.
Tom Dietterich, arXiv editor in chief, shared a few thoughts on this problem. Ultimately I think the scale of the problem makes oral interviews for preprints unworkable even though I think this could really help cut down on the slop we see flooding academic publications. I've written about AI for peer review, and I do think there's a real place for it, but I'm also not bullish on an AI-written, AI-reviewed journal without human authors, for papers which will surely never be read by an actual human being. What are we even doing here.
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Then there are proposals. I can't personally speak to the degree to which NIH study sections or NSF review panels are dealing with wholly AI-generated proposals. I'm serving on a NSF panel later this year so I'll get a sense of things soon. But I'd be willing to wager the number is far higher than any of us wish.3
I've noticed a change in myself, and I don't like it. I'm losing interest in reading.
If you've spent any time using AI yourself you can smell the Claudish a mile away, no Pangram needed.4 Maybe these things will get better at writing eventually, but that's kind of beside the point. Even flawless prose wouldn't make me less reluctant to spend an hour reading something that its author spent less than 10 minutes \"writing.\"
Part of the reason I read the things I read is to understand how another person thinks. To understand their own internal thought process, whether that's about a genetics paper, how to run a research lab and mentor students in the AI age, the optimal cover crop for Virginia winters, or traffic-calming approaches for improved bike and pedestrian safety. These days I wonder how much of that person is actually present.
With some AI sparkle \u2728 thing built into everything these days the persistent temptation to use AI for literally every part of thinking and writing is hard to resist. My AI Dry July experiment which I eventually aborted, gave me reasons to write more myself. I could better recall my arguments when I wrote 100% of them, I could better understand how the sections fit together because I fussed around with the story arc for hours, and I found revision to be much easier and less frustrating. I enjoyed it more, too. People much smarter than me on the topic have written volumes about writing and thinking, so I'll just confirm here: every time I delegated the writing I missed out on much of the thinking that I would have done while trying to think through or explain an idea.
I think this should make you feel concern about your professional value. If you outsource all your proposals or lectures or manuscripts or whatever creative work you do to a competent AI, you're choosing to let atrophy the judgment and creativity your employer pays you to do. You become less capable while appearing more productive. If you think people around you won't notice, you're very wrong.
I still want AI's help. Paul Bloom describes models catching errors that human reviewers miss. I recently published a preprint on AI and biosecurity, and while I actually think AI disclosures are actually a net negative in most cases, I did write a lengthy disclosure describing in detail how I'm using a multi-agent workflow to check my work against the papers I cited, including numbers and stats and my descriptions of their findings. This was useful, until it wasn't: the biosecurity subject matter quickly led both models I used to refuse further fact-checking.
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I haven't settled on some kind of policy for every part of my work. I expect to keep using these tools and finding them useful. They're great for anything I do involving code. Lately I've been using Claude Code extensively to make little throwaway web apps to demonstrate a concept to my students far better than I could do with a janky PowerPoint animation. And I recently submitted a large proposal to develop a closed-loop AI scientist connected to a wet lab for autonomous biomedical research. But since that failed experiment in July I'm really trying to hand over less of my writing and thinking to the machines, and the majority of what I consume these days gives me more reason to take that commitment seriously as much as I can. I want to remain capable of doing the work I put my name on.
Although the attribution is questionable.
Substack, which hosts this blog you're reading now, and the vast majority of things I like to read, recently made a controversial decision to integrate Pangram's AI detection into the platform itself. If you're reading on the Substack web reader or iOS app you can click a button to check this. Screenshot below. I think Substack made a correct strategic move here. I love that blogs are making a comeback. But with more and more slop polluting the blogosphere, Substack is making a bet (one that I think will pay off) that most people, in fact, don't want to read slop. Much less pay for the privilege of doing so. It's really interesting, and telling, to see the reaction to this. My new favorite genre of essays are those vehemently and dogmatically anti-AI everything, which are, in fact, written mostly or entirely by AI. I'm hoping that writers here, now knowing that slop will be exposed, will be incentivized to not produce so much slop. And sure, you can turn off the AI detection feature, but that's a glaring admission that the whole post is, in fact, slop.
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Free research-on-research project idea. Go to NIH RePORTER ExPORTER, and download CSV files of all the abstracts for funded grants in the last 10 years. Do the same for all the JSON files you can download from NSF. Pick a subset of a few thousand, and run them through Pangram's API. Compare pre-2023 to post-2024. Now here's the part that won't make you any friends. Do the same analysis, stratified by institution, department, or dare I say, even by PI. Pangram isn't perfect but it's surprisingly accurate by way of personal experience.
I've even tried writing my own Claudish to English translator for the writing I shouldn't be doing anyway, but it only goes so far.
Knowledge refinement is the ever ongoing process in science (and beyond it) that shepherds knowledge from lab notebooks into journal articles and then on to review articles, monographs, reference handbooks, university textbooks, and finally professional domain expertise and school education for a wider public. It has been going on for a few centuries, but we hardly talk about it. In fact, I made up the term because I couldn't find an established one. Computational knowledge has not yet found its place in the knowledge refinement process. Why not? And what can we do to make it happen?
\n\nFirst of all, what is the role of knowledge refinement?
\nOne answer is that knowledge becomes more reliable in the refinement process. Any single experiment, no matter how carefully done, can turn out to be wrong for lots of reasons. In contrast, the synthesis of hundreds of independent related experiments will remain trustworthy even if one flaky input experiment has to be withdrawn.
\nAnother role of knowledge refinement is making knowledge more accessible. When we learn from others, rather than from our own experience, we start with a highly refined view of a domain, and dive into the details only later and when we see a need for it. Schools teach only refined knowledge, which thus shapes general culture.
\nFinally, with refinement, knowledge also becomes more long-lived. A useful picture here is pace layers: each refinement step pushes knowledge down into a more slowly evolving layer.
\nEach knowledge refinement step has several interrelated aspects:
\nSummarization. A large number of works from the preceding step are cooked down into a common essence that emerges from them.
Curation. Domain experts select what they see as most relevant, discarding what they consider technical details, or only of historical importance.
Integration. Each step draws on broader domain coverage than the preceding one. The relation to already established knowledge is made clearer.
Simplification and clarification. Each step is written for a wider and less specialized audience than the preceding one. Jargon is replaced by more widely understood vocabulary. New concepts are introduced and the explanation is structured around them.
All these processes require reformulation. The output of a refinement step is not simply an annotated collection of quotes from its inputs. You can't edit a journal article into a chapter for a university textbook.
\nIn the digital era, it has become widely accepted that software and electronic datasets are representations of scientific knowledge. See for example pages 9 to 11 of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which discuss \"open scientific knowledge\". For now, however, this is mostly wishful thinking. While code and data certainly are scientific information, it is difficult to consider them to be knowledge as long as they don't participate in the knowledge refinement process.
\nLet me illustrate this with analogies from pre-digital science. The predecessors of today's digital datasets are tables of observations recorded in lab notebooks. The predecessors of today's scientific software are mathematical equations. Consider the foundational research on electromagnetism that was done in the 19th century. Examples of original sources are the lab notebooks of Michael Faraday, or on the theoretical side James Clerk Maxwell's paper \"A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagneticm Field\" (already a refined version of his personal notes, which are probably lost). Today's textbooks in physics or electrical engineering mention both Faraday and Maxwell in historical overviews, but they don't ask you to consult their original work, nor do they cite passages from it in their pedagogical presentation. Instead, they show highly refined versions of Maxwell's theory in modern vector notation, which was largely created for this purpose. The textbooks also summarize the kind of experiments done by Faraday and many others, with pictures and diagrams of modern rather than historical instruments and experimental setups. Instead of real data, they show plots of idealized synthetic data for illustration.
\nWhereas nobody would seriously consider publishing a lab notebook as a journal article after just some light editing, many researchers seem to believe that computational notebooks, such as the popular Jupyter notebooks, could replace journal articles. However, the history and practice of Jupyter shows that it is by design a tool for interactive computational exploration. A Jupyter notebook is an annotated chronological record of a single computation. There is no way to summarize multiple computations. There is no way to focus on the essential aspects of a computation while relegating implementation details to an appendix. There is no way to explain, in more than words, algorithms from a library that is used in the notebook. Moreover, the order of presentation is constrained by the flow of the computation. In a typical Jupyter notebook, one of the very first lines says import matplotlib, a technical detail that in a journal article should be relegated to a reference list, because it is irrelevant to the scientific message.
If you look at today's published Jupyter notebooks, most of them are complements to journal articles. The play the role of an appendix, a repository for technical details. Notebooks that are independent publications do exist, for example in the Journal of Digital History, but the computations they contain, basic data analysis and visualization, are simple and not the main topic of the paper. Moreover, the Journal of Digital History has developed its own extensions to Jupyter that add support for hiding technical details from view while reading the article.
\nWhile I focused on Jupyter because of its popularity, other notebook technologies such as Quarto or Emacs' Babel extension to org-mode are not fundamentally different. As long as the executable content is a single computation that runs from top to bottom, the above criticisms remain valid.
\nVarious ideas for improving the publishing technology for code are being explored. One of them is removing the linear execution constraint, e.g. by using the dataflow paradigm. A few notebook systems have adopted this approach, most notably Observable. The most interesting system I have seen so far in this space is Lopecode, which adds a hypertext structure to Observable's dataflow model for computation. My own experiment on supporting the publication of refined digital knowledge is HyperDoc, which focuses on (1) integrating code and its execution into hypermedia networks and (2) building bridges to existing hypermedia systems. It has the advantage of being applicable to existing code in any programming language (though this requires significant implementation work that hasn't been done yet), and thus avoids a complete break with the past six decades of computational research.
\nMuch more remains to be done, however, before computational knowledge can become an integral part of the refinement process. Computational knowledge is most of all formalized knowledge, meaning knowledge expressed in terms of a formal system that can be processed mechanically, by a computer. Refinement techniques for formalized knowledge are constrained by the formal system they depend on. Program source code lives in a formal system defined by a programming language. It is processed mechanically by a compiler or an interpreter. The focus of a programming language is, not surprisingly, the construction of executable programs. There is a well-established refinement process for source code: scripts become library modules, which are complemented by tests and documentation and then published to become off-the-shelf ingredients for constructing more complex programs. Like knowledge refinement, code refinement makes code more reliable, more accessible, and long-lived, but only from the \"code as a tool\" perspective. It tends to reduce rather than augment its value as a knowledge repository. Software engineering priorities such as optimization and reducing redundancy tend to make the code less readable for researchers who are not professional software developers, and impenetrable to anyone who is just starting to explore a new domain of knowledge.
\nThis is why knowledge refinement in computational science remains limited to non-formal language. Textbooks remain printed books (or their digital twins, PDF files), merely referring to and writing about machine-readable artifacts such as code. The textbooks discuss concepts, including algorithms and data structures, but don't provide examples that readers could run and then build on in their own explorations. On the code side, there are often highly refined implementations for use as off-the-shelf tools, but their correspondence to what the textbooks say is unclear and not verifiable by the reader.
\nThere has been work on improving the explanation side, for example Bret Victor's explorable explanations that integrate interactive exploration tools into formerly passive textbook material. However, the strict divide between explanation and code for use in practice remains.
\nThis state of the art is tolerable for low-complexity computational knowledge, e.g. in linear algebra or signal processing. A textbook on Fourier transforms and good FFT library are good enough for learning these methods. But we need something better for complex models and methods.
\nConsider computational models of complex systems such as force fields for biomolecules, or climate models. On the machine side, they are implemented as software modules for use in simulation, using standard programming languages. On the human side, there are papers describing the principles behind their design, but lacking many details because these details would be overwhelming to a human reader. So if you really want to know how such models work, your only choice is wading through enormous amounts of source code, taking notes carefully of the findings that are relevant to your question. And if you ever want to compare two such complex models... good luck exploring two large software packages in parallel. Unfortunately, that's something you can't avoid doing during knowledge refinement. For example when you write a review paper on protein force fields, or on climate models.
\nWhen models become too complex to be represented in traditional scientific notations (equations, diagrams, etc.), they need to be represented in digital scientific notations. They need to be represented in formal systems that are made for documentation and exploration, rather than for plugging into a simulator. And they require tools that treat them as data, not code.
\nAn idea I have been pursuing for a while is the use of specification languages as digital scientific notations. See my project Leibniz for the details. Specification languages are more general than programming languages in the same way that mathematical equations are more general than mathematical functions (see here for a discussion). In particular, specification languages do not impose an executability condition on everything you write. This allows you to write incomplete function definitions or data structures. I am working on this idea and I remain optimistic that it will work out, but I won't declare victory before I have actually written that review of biomolecular force fields. Meanwhile, I'd be happy to see other work in this space, ideally pursuing very different ideas.
\nDigital scientific notations are a necessary first step for enabling the refinement of digital scientific knowledge, but the real works starts once we have them. We must then develop the tools that let researchers explore and examine publications containing formalized knowledge. We must also find refinement strategies that actually work in practice. There remains a lot to be done!
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/5vb7q-rnw59","guid":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/09/25/knowledge-refinement.html","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790294400,"rid":"kn021-31216","summary":"Knowledge refinement is the ever ongoing process in science (and beyond it) that shepherds knowledge from lab notebooks into journal articles and then on to review articles, monographs, reference handbooks, university textbooks, and finally professional domain expertise and school education for a wider public.","title":"Knowledge refinement in the digital era","updated_at":1790435361,"url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/09/25/knowledge-refinement.html","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"\"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax0.\"
\n\n\n\nEnglitch is an pretty goode langwidge. even you no grok all the pacific bits you got the jist & the splelling & grandma dont mattr to much.
\n\nHTML is much the same. You can write utterly malformed, derranged, non-standards complaint HTML and most browsers will just say \"Yeah, sure, whatever dawg!\" and render it adequately. Take a look at the source code for TodePond - a lovely website but some of the most abused HTML I've seen.
\n\nThere's a brilliant blog post by Jens Oliver Meiert which looks at whether HTML validity is seen as a priority for major sites. Basically, no.
\n\n\n\nIt's time for the annual analysis of how much of the HTML code in the field is error-free and valid. The short version: 1% of the most-frequented sites on this planet uses valid HTML\u2014and 99% don't.
\n\n
iS ThAt A pRoBlEm????
\n\nMy site is proudly HTML Valid. Run it through the HTML Validator or the Schema.org Validator and you'll see that it is fucking perfect! Same with my RSS Feed and Atom Feed. Not so much as an advisory bit of info, a couched warning, or a sternly worded suggestion1.
\n\nEvery last bit pure and holy.
\n\nOf course, syntactically valid HTML is neither necessary nor sufficient for any purpose.
\n\nPerfect HTML doesn't imply that a site is accessible (although, I'm proud to say mine meets or exceeds all WCAG guidance2).
\n\nPerfect HTML doesn't guarantee that the information it contains is accurate3.
\n\nPerfect HTML, at best, merely implies that the author gives a damn about such things. Much like Knolling, it leaves a suggestion that order is preferable to chaos4.
\n\nIt is said that one of the reasons HTML succeeded is that it is lax about validation. Most programming languages will shit the bed if you dare to leave out so much as a single semicolon. The compiler wails can be heard throughout the land.
\n\nBy contrast, HTML is designed to be sympathetic to the frailty of the human mind. \"Oh, you didn't close an element? Well, you opened a new one which I guess implies the same thing. Did you forget the correct syntax? Never mind - it'll be our little secret.\"
\n\nThat's why XHTML failed - the browser would literally refuse to render a page if it didn't meet the spec. Who can be bothered with that?! HTML just lets you get on with things.
\n\nAs I've mentioned before, humans don't write or speak in Backus\u2013Naur form. Our ideas are loosely expressed in a floating grammar which lends itself to paradoxical impossibilities and logical tautologies. And yet most of us can still parse weird sentences without too much effort.
\n\nBut most computer languages are different. It might be obvious to you that if (x = 42) means \"compare the value of x to 42\" - but what the computer sees is \"if assign x the value of 42\". Within computing our code needs to be rigorously formal and any syntax errors will lead to show-stopping bugs.
Imagine if every time a human wrote Romanes eunt domus the world simply crashed. It would be intolerable.
\n\nHTML is more like a human language than a computing language. You can understand human speech over a crackly phone line in a foreign accent - Web Browsers understand CP-1252 encoded text with bizarre syntax errors.
\n\nIf it is OK to write bad HTML, why do some of us fetishise \"pure\" HTML?
\n\nI think it comes down to an ingrained belief that it is polite to reduce ambiguity. It is nice to be precise5. It reduces the cognitive burden on anyone (or anything) which reads what we have written. We are holding up our end of the social contract by producing something unadulterated and easy to comprehend. It reduces the likelihood of different browsers rendering things differently but, almost on a cellular level, we feel that things must be done properly.
\n\nThe browser doesn't care about your inability to follow standards. But you should have some fucking self-respect and do it anyway.
\n\nWith the appropriate amount of apologies to James Nicoll \u21a9\ufe0e
\nAt the time of writing. Who knows what batshit bugs I'll accidentally include in the future \ud83d\ude43 \u21a9\ufe0e
\nAgain, it is possible to make something pass automated testing while still being an accessibility mess. \u21a9\ufe0e
\nAlthough, of course, everything you read in this site is 100% accurate. \u21a9\ufe0e
\nOr some horrifying psychological issue. Potato / Tomato. \u21a9\ufe0e
\nI will grant you, there's also a strain of 100% Completionist which compels me to get \"top score\" on all the benchmarks. But that's just pure vanity. \u21a9\ufe0e
\n![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=74960&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/aaajy-vhb90","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=74960","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HTML5_Badge_512.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790380800,"rid":"skm7j-47q74","summary":"\"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax.\" Englitch is an pretty goode langwidge.","tags":["/etc/","HTML","Webdev"],"title":"No errors, no warnings, no gods, no masters - HTML Purity is a Fetish","updated_at":1790425511,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/no-errors-no-warnings-no-gods-no-masters-html-purity-is-a-fetish/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard <video> element.
An interesting new proposal has been brought forth by Microsoft. There are a dozen ways to show a preview of an <img> element before the src= attribute has loaded. So why not standardise on previewsrc=? There's an excellent explainer on Patrick Brosset's blog.
I instinctively like the idea - if only to simplify source code and reduce JS usage. But I do have some concerns which I've shared with the team.
\n\nThis is the thing I always bang on about when I'm discussing standards. Additions to HTML should primarily benefit end users, not developers.
\n\nDo end users want this? Is there a bunch of research that shows normal people are confused that they don't see a preview image? Do they recoil in fear and distress while waiting for a full resolution picture to appear?
\n\nWhen people see a blurry or blocky image, do they understand that they need to wait for the full thing - or do they assume their computer is broken?
\n\nMicrosoft has a bazillion dollars - it can afford to spend a few thousand on interviewing some real users and mapping out what they're likely to want from this.
\n\nI begrudgingly admit that developers need love too.
\n\n\n\nWhat are the pain points of the current implementations? Is it hard to dynamically generate multiple images? Is the syntax hard to use? Do blurs slow down the page?
\n\nAgain, MS needs to pony up some cash to talk to developers. At the very least run a survey of all existing websites in the BING! database and see what they use.
\n\nWhen an image doesn't load, or loads slowly, a user will normally be shown some alt text - like this:
\n\n![\"Terence](\"http://example.test/unicorn.avif\")
\n\nIs that more or less useful than this?
\n\n![\"A](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/unicorn.webp\")
\n\nAccessibility isn't just for people with visual impairments! This is an issue I've raised with them.
\n\nI've written before about the usability of HTML elements. Some of the newer ones like <picture> have very poorly named attributes in my opinion.
One alternative for previewsrc is poster. That would match with the poster attribute on the <video> element. They both show a preview image before the main content is loaded.
Given their functionality is identical, I think it makes sense for them to have the same name. You wouldn't expect to see <video horizontal=\"1920\" vertical=\"1080\"> would you? No. That's why they use the same width and height attributes as images.
There are several interesting objections and discussions on the GitHub repo. I'm delighted that this is being talked about in the open, rather than just being presented as a fait accompli (remember the toast proposal?).
\n\nAs I said, I genuinely think that there's a useful idea in here. But after writing all of this, I think it would be better and simpler for developers to use progressive images rather than overload HTML with a new attribute.
\n\nIf website owners can't be bothered to save progressive images, I don't see why they'd bother to create a separate preview image.
\n\nKeeping preview images in sync with their full images is also likely to be a problem.
\n\nIf you think I'm wrong, read the explainer and then chat with Microsoft.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=75856&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/twr9x-eh003","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=75856","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HTML5_Badge_512.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790208000,"rid":"bke8v-4h802","summary":"One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard element. An interesting new proposal has been brought forth by Microsoft.","tags":["/etc/","HTML","Standards"],"title":"Some thoughts on HTML's proposed previewsrc attribute","updated_at":1790407829,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/some-thoughts-on-htmls-proposed-previewsrc-attribute/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"![\"Book](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/how-to-build-a-space-station.webp\")
\n\nThis book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction.
\n\n\n\nHow to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonisation of other worlds. Not just in terms of physical safety - but psychological safety as well. It is a direct and forceful rebuttal to those who say it cannot be done.
\n\nIt is, in my opinion, just a touch too credulous about some of the ludicrous claims from the hype merchants. I want to believe that Martian igloos can be conjured out of the ice and that Musk's rockets will deliver a steady stream of supplies to distant worlds. But the evidence presented is rather thin. The book works best when it focuses on what architecture can bring to the table when it comes to designing the future.
\n\n\n\nIn short, a spacecraft is not just a machine; it is also a home, an office, a refuge. If people are asked to go to the most remote environments, to live in spaces scarcely larger than a few rooms, and to perform work of immense complexity and risk, then comfort, efficiency and ergonomics are not just luxuries.
Space has to be worth living in. Putting people into a tin-can with no windows, blank walls, and an infernal background hum will drive them mad. All this is backed up with extensive descriptions of the engineering challenges of polar research bases, spaceports, and previous craft.
\n\nDespite being rightly scathing about Wernher von Braun's involvement in atrocities and his eventual political rehabilitation - he is somewhat more muted in his criticism of Messrs Musk & Bezos. There's a lot of praise for celebrity architects and designers - without any real examination of whether their designs are practical rather than just award fodder.
\n\nSimilarly, the book takes on trust that autonomous robots can ingest extraterrestrial soil, process it, and 3D print structures from it all while in a hostile environment. The fact that we don't have swarms of drones prefabbing houses in the relatively benign atmosphere of our planet should be evidence that maybe these claims aren't quite matched with reality.
\n\nFinally, the \"why?\" question. A City on Mars points out that the cost of mining gold from asteroids would be more profitably spent improving mining technology here on Earth. How to Build a Space Station takes a different approach; it'll improve things here:
\n\n\n\nSpace architecture is not just escapism, a thrilling sci-\u00adfi fantasy \u2013 it is a forge for creating the tools we need at home. These include but are not limited to circular systems, low-\u00adenergy fabrication, modular construction and buildings that take psychology seriously.
I have a lot of sympathy for that. Except\u2026 the Internation Space Station has shown us how to endlessly recycle water relatively cheaply. Yet every modern building on Earth pays only lip-service to reusing grey-water. 3D printing is amazing, but the number of structures built using autonomous robots extruding concrete is approximately zero.
\n\nWe have the technology - but we don't seem to be interested in using it.
\n\nThe book is mostly well illustrated - with some gorgeous drawings of actual craft and possible future inventions. Sadly no photos, maps, or anything to help illuminate some of the other challenges faced by living and working in space.
\n\nThis book is endlessly fascinating and bang up to date, with lots of talk of events that happened in 2025. The way it brings together the sciences of engineering and psychology is marvellous. But, as much as I'd like to believe in a Martian habitat built by robot trebuchets flinging microwave sintered tetrapods into each other, I just don't find it convincing.
\n\nI really hope I'm wrong.
\n\nMany thanks to Netgalley for the review copy - the book is available to buy now.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=75653&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/0vqd8-3qy21","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=75653","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/how-to-build-a-space-station.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789862400,"rid":"8s9qs-35530","summary":"This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction.","tags":["/etc/","Book Review","NetGalley"],"title":"Book Review: How to Build a Space Station by Jonathan Morrison","updated_at":1790407827,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/book-review-how-to-build-a-space-station-by-jonathan-morrison/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"![\"Book](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slags.webp\")
\n\nI'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia.
\n\nIt reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent. What can a teenage girl consent to? What will fuck her up for years to come? What if she doesn't mind being a little fucked up?
\n\nThe prose is amazing, the plotting perfectly paced, and the denouement satisfying - with lots of retrospectives \"Oh! I get it now\"s.
\n\nDespite the hectic and hilarious story, I still felt a little sordid reading it. There's a streak of sadness running through it, intertwined with some unbearably heartbreaking poetry.
\n\n\n\nIt's always raining and there's nothing to do except dream and they don't even give you much time to do that with all the coursework.
It is entertaining and fun - but you need a strong stomach and a casual disregard for the overall happiness of your protagonists.
\n\nOne note - there are a few odd / broken styles in the ePub. Nothing too disruptive, but some passages have a slightly smaller font size for no discernable reason.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=72687&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/fq0at-xga66","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=72687","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slags.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1786752000,"rid":"p2yaq-9mn76","summary":"I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia. It reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent.","tags":["/etc/","Book Club","Book Review"],"title":"Book Review: Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth","updated_at":1790407825,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/08/book-review-slags-by-emma-jane-unsworth/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Franziska Altemeier","given":"Nina D\u00fcvel"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"db0d8909-9e37-46d0-b16c-0551f575e86b","created":1749772800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Das Blog der TIB \u2013 Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften und Universit\u00e4tsbibliothek","doi":"https://doi.org/10.65527/tib","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/db0d8909-9e37-46d0-b16c-0551f575e86b/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.tib.eu/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blog.tib.eu/","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.65527","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tib","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"TIB-Blog","updated":1790331374,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"TIB-Blog","blog_slug":"tib","content_html":"![\"Gruppenfoto](\"https://blog.tib.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SERIOUS-3D-in-Art-and-Architectural-History_hoch-728x1024.jpg\")
Am 21. und 22. September 2026 fand an der Bibliotheca Hertziana \u2013 Max-Planck-Institut f\u00fcr Kunstgeschichte in Rom das Kick-off-Meeting des DFG/AHRC-gef\u00f6rderten Forschungsprojekts \"SERIOUS 3D in Art and Architectural History\" statt.
\nWissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus den Bereichen Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte (AAH), 3D Engineering (ENG) und Data Science in Cultural Heritage (DSC) diskutierten \u00fcber Forschungsziele, technische Anforderungen, methodische Herausforderungen und anstehende Arbeiten des gemeinsamen Projekts.
\nDas interdisziplin\u00e4re Projekt bringt Expertise aus der Bibliotheca Hertziana, der Hochschule Mainz, der TIB \u2013 Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften in Hannover sowie den Universit\u00e4ten Cambridge und Exeter zusammen.
\nIm Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, wie historische R\u00e4ume mithilfe digitaler Technologien rekonstruiert, interpretiert und vermittelt werden k\u00f6nnen.
\nEin zentrales Thema des Kick-off-Meetings war die praktische Umsetzung der Verbindung kunsthistorischer Forschungsfragen mit digitalen 3D-Modellen als Teil strukturierter Forschungsdaten.
\nHistorische Rekonstruktionen beruhen auf unterschiedlichen Quellen, wissenschaftlichen Interpretationen und mitunter unvollst\u00e4ndigen Informationen; nicht alle Informationen lassen sich ohne Weiteres in ein digitales Geb\u00e4udemodell \u00fcbertragen,
\nDas Projekt untersucht deshalb auch, wie sich solche Unsicherheiten und die zugrunde liegenden Entscheidungen nachvollziehbar dokumentieren lassen.
\nDie Gruppe Data Science in Cultural Heritage (DSC), bestehend aus dem Open Science Lab der TIB und dem DH Lab der Bibliotheca Hertziana, befasst sich unter anderem damit, wie sich diese Informationen in einer gemeinsamen technischen Infrastruktur zusammenf\u00fchren lassen.
\nEin Baustein ist das im Open Science Lab entwickelte 3D-Viewer- und Annotationswerkzeug Semantic Kompakkt f\u00fcr interoperable und nachnutzbare Forschungsdaten, das mit Wikibase4Research ein Backend f\u00fcr die semantischen Informationen beinhaltet.
\nIm Projekt Herrenh\u00e4user des Ostseeraums wird Semantic Kompakkt bereits f\u00fcr einen vergleichbaren architekturhistorischen Anwendungsfall eingesetzt und entsprechend der Bedarfe einer architekturhistorischen wissenschaftlichen Community weiterentwickelt, unter anderem die Visualisierung von Punktwolken und den historischen oder \u00f6rtlichen Zusammenh\u00e4ngen.
\nBereits eine Woche vor dem Kick-off hatte das TIB-Team seine Arbeiten zur Integration des in Serious 3D genutzten Building Information Modeling (BIM) in Semantic Kompakkt auf der Konferenz FAIR 3D Heritage in Mainz vorgestellt. Der Beitrag \"Towards (H)BIM Integration in Semantic Kompakkt: Evaluation of Web Libraries for a Modular Import Pipeline\" lieferte konkrete Ans\u00e4tze f\u00fcr die anschlie\u00dfende Arbeit in Rom. Weitere Informationen finden sich im Konferenzprogramm der FAIR 3D Heritage.
\n![\"\"](\"https://blog.tib.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SERIOUS-3D-in-Art-and-Architectural-History_3-768x1024.jpg\")
Die Diskussionen machten deutlich, dass die Anforderungen der beteiligten Disziplinen bereits bei der kunsthistorischen Recherche und der Erstellung der ersten digitalen Geb\u00e4udemodelle ber\u00fccksichtigt werden m\u00fcssen. Dazu geh\u00f6rt insbesondere die Frage, welche Informationen sp\u00e4ter f\u00fcr die semantische Modellierung, wissenschaftliche Annotation und Visualisierung ben\u00f6tigt werden.
\nAls n\u00e4chster Schritt sollen exemplarische 3D-Modelle mit unterschiedlicher Informationstiefe seitens der ENG-Partner bereitgestellt werden. An ihnen will das DSC-Team den gesamten Workflow vom Datenimport bis zur interaktiven Darstellung erproben.
\nDie Modelle sollen historische Raumsituationen nicht nur veranschaulichen, sondern auch als Arbeitsgrundlage f\u00fcr kunsthistorische Fragestellungen der AAH-Beteiligten dienen. Daf\u00fcr m\u00fcssen Quellen und unterschiedliche Rekonstruktionshypothesen mit den modellierten Objekten verkn\u00fcpft werden k\u00f6nnen.
\nThematisiert wurde au\u00dferdem, wie sich historische R\u00e4ume durch webbasiertes Storytelling interaktiv erkunden und zugleich mit Quellen, Forschungsfragen und Erl\u00e4uterungen verbinden lassen.
\n![\"\"](\"https://blog.tib.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SERIOUS-3D-in-Art-and-Architectural-History_2-768x1024.jpg\")
In der abschlie\u00dfenden Diskussion wurde nochmals betont, dass SERIOUS 3D als gemeinsamer Forschungsprozess, und nicht nur als Zusammenarbeit voneinander getrennter Arbeitsgruppen verstanden werden soll.
\nDie unterschiedlichen fachlichen Perspektiven sollen bereits bei der Entwicklung der Forschungsfragen, der Auswahl historischer Objekte und der Erarbeitung digitaler Methoden zusammengef\u00fchrt werden.
\nIm Anschluss an das Kick-off-Meeting reist das Projektteam vom 23. bis 25. September 2026 zur Feldforschung nach Florenz. Dort werden Teile des Palazzo Medici, das zentrale Forschungsobjekt von SERIOUS 3D, mithilfe von 3D-Laserscanning und Photogrammetrie digital erfasst.
\nDie gewonnenen Daten bilden die Grundlage f\u00fcr die weitere Entwicklung des historischen Geb\u00e4udemodells und die Erprobung der in Rom diskutierten technischen Workflows.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.65527/ehvpv-0zn69","guid":"https://blog.tib.eu/?p=33673","image":"https://blog.tib.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SERIOUS-3D-in-Art-and-Architectural-History_2_quer.jpg","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790294400,"rid":"4b751-nmd91","summary":"Am 21. und 22. September 2026 fand an der Bibliotheca Hertziana \u2013 Max-Planck-Institut f\u00fcr Kunstgeschichte in Rom das Kick-off-Meeting des DFG/AHRC-gef\u00f6rderten Forschungsprojekts \"SERIOUS 3D in Art and Architectural History\" statt.","tags":["OPENNESS","FORSCHUNG & PROJEKTE","3D-Architekturdaten","SERIOUS 3D","BIM"],"title":"SERIOUS 3D: Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte im digitalen Forschungsraum","updated_at":1790407815,"url":"https://blog.tib.eu/2026/09/25/serious-3d-kunst-und-architekturgeschichte-im-digitalen-forschungsraum/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Pensoft Editorial Team"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c","created":1789516800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/pensoft","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"pensoft","status":"active","subfield":"2303","title":"Pensoft Blog","updated":1790337518,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Pensoft Blog","blog_slug":"pensoft","content_html":"\n\nThe inaugural European Small Mammal Conservation Conference (SMCC 2026) took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 21 to 25 September 2026, bringing together researchers, conservationists and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to address gaps in small mammal research and monitoring.
\n\n\nOrganised jointly by the Habitat Foundation, the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Dutch Mammal Society and Mammal Conservation Europe, with support from the Faculty of Biology at Sofia University, the conference formed part of the Life for Falcons project, funded by the EU LIFE Programme.
\n\n\n\nThis year’s conference was held jointly with the 33rd Hamster Working Group and the VIII European Ground Squirrel Meeting, making hamsters and sousliks the primary focus, alongside broader topics including renewable energy development, agricultural impacts, reintroductions, predator\u2013prey interactions and innovative methodologies in small mammal research.
\n\n\n\nWe were delighted to participate in SMCC 2026 with an exhibition booth, showcasing the breadth of publishing services we offer to the biodiversity and conservation community. It was a pleasure to present our portfolio of journals dedicated to advancing research across ecology, biodiversity and conservation.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWe were particularly proud to present the following journals:
\n\n\n\nMeeting delegates from across the small mammal research community was tremendously rewarding, and we thoroughly enjoyed discussing how our journals can support and amplify their work.
\n\n\n\nBeyond our academic offerings, we were particularly excited to showcase beautiful art prints illustrated by our in-house scientific illustrator, Denitsa Peneva. The collection featured stunning depictions of otters, olinguitos and hamsters.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_6783-scaled.jpg?ssl=1\")
The scientific programme was exceptional, and we were privileged to attend many outstanding presentations that demonstrated the importance of innovative monitoring approaches and conservation action.
\n\n\n\nLessons from Citizen Science for Small Mammal Conservation Monitoring in Great Britain
\n\n\n\nWe were delighted to attend a talk by Matt Larsen-Daw, Chief Executive of the Mammal Society (UK), which presented a portfolio of citizen science programmes designed to address distribution knowledge and population monitoring across Great Britain. The programmes, united by the Mammal Mapper smartphone app, included the National Harvest Mouse Survey, the Searching for Shrews initiative, and the University Mammal Challenge.
\n\n\n\nThe presentation highlighted the value of standardised effort data, the differing trade-offs between structured and opportunistic recording, and the potential for these approaches to be applied across European contexts.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_6718-scaled.jpg?ssl=1\")
Strong Decline of Hamster Populations in Bulgaria
\n\n\n\nWe were equally impressed by Nedko Nedyalkov’s presentation documenting the significant decline in distribution and abundance of both the common hamster (Cricetus cricetus) and the Romanian hamster (Mesocricetus newtoni) across Bulgaria. The research revealed that population reductions, detected through owl pellet analysis and trapping methods, likely began in the 1950s with agricultural intensification and continue today.
\n\n\n\nGiven that both species are strictly protected under the EU Habitats Directive yet lack active conservation projects, the presentation substantiated the urgent need for targeted conservation measures. We are also pleased to note that Nedko serves as a subject editor for two of our open-access journals, ZooKeys and the Biodiversity Data Journal.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_6757-1-scaled.jpg?ssl=1\")
Reintroduced Saker Falcons and Their Dependence on European Ground Squirrels
\n\n\n\nYana Andonova's presentation on the diet of Bulgaria’s reintroduced saker falcon population provided compelling evidence of the breeding birds' overwhelming dependence on the European ground squirrel (Spermophilus citellus) as a primary food source.
\n\n\n\nThrough food-remain analysis, visual observations and camera-trap monitoring, the research documented that ground squirrels comprised over 80 per cent of identified prey items, with small rodents accounting for 89 per cent overall! It is also worth mentioning that Andonova is an author in our open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_6793-1-scaled.jpg?ssl=1\")
Attending SMCC 2026 was a genuine pleasure and particularly meaningful given that the conference took place in Sofia, the city in which our company is based. Connecting with researchers and conservationists working at the forefront of small mammal conservation, and sharing our commitment to advancing biodiversity research through open-access publishing, reinforced our dedication to supporting this important field.
\n\n\n\nWe look very much forward to engaging with this community again at future events!
\n\n\n\nFollow us on Bluesky, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn for future conference updates.
\n\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/hmn14-8zj12","guid":"https://blog.pensoft.net/?p=20924","image":"https://blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SciComm-PR-2026-Instagram-2026-09-23T165239.066.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790294400,"rid":"n5rb6-tqh12","summary":"Tweet The inaugural European Small Mammal Conservation Conference (SMCC 2026) took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 21 to 25 September 2026, bringing together researchers, conservationists and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to address gaps in small mammal research and monitoring.","tags":["Biodiversity Data Journal","Frontiers Of Biogeography","Individual-based Ecology","Nature Conservation","One Ecosystem"],"title":"Pensoft at the European Small Mammal Conservation Conference 2026","updated_at":1790407811,"url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/2026/09/25/pensoft-at-the-european-small-mammal-conservation-conference-2026/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"![\"Book](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/9781529920369-jacket-large.webp\")
\n\nOoooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.
\n\nThis isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered through the lens of a chick-lit comedy.
\n\nIt's proper laugh-aloud funny, while playing with all the clich\u00e9s of both sci-fi and romcoms.
\n\nThe thing I liked most is that Lauren is an active and intelligent protagonist unlike, say, Carol Sturka from Pluribus. Sturka never engages with the premise of her odd situation, she doesn't try to discover the rules of the world she's living in and is content to let things happen to her. Lauren spends a good deal of time at least trying to get to grips with the (un)reality of her husband-dispensing portal. I found that made for a rather gratifying story and didn't leave me shouting at the pages \"JUST TRY SOMETHING!\"
\n\nIt's also refreshing to follow the adventures of a (slight) antihero. Lauren mostly knows when she is being monstrous. She flings between feminism and self-directed misogyny - with a smattering of misandry. Her discrimination against those of us men who wear socks with individual toes is, of course, an unforgivable sin.
\n\nThe pacing is excellent - with an perfectly timed plot twist just as things are settling down. The afterword talks briefly about the multiple possible endings that were considered. I'd love to know what ideas were rejected although, in retrospect, there's only one narratively satisfying conclusion.
\n\nI read a lot of science fiction - probably more than is healthy - and The Husbands is a welcome addition to my shelf. The practicalities of the plot-device are as unimportant as how Warp Drive works; science fiction is about exploring the possibilities of a fantastical situation. If you could instantly swap your spouse because they lost the TV remote again - would you? In a world of no consequences, what would you get away with? If you discovered a break in reality, what would you try in order to exploit or understand it?
\n\nThe Husbands gets fairly dark. Never grim, exactly, but it gnaws away at the cosiness proffered by domestic bliss. Although Lauren can be a bit of a bitch, the story just about strays away from making her morally repugnant. An exemplary piece of storytelling.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=72037&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/3qy4y-apk30","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=72037","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/9781529920369-jacket-large.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1781049600,"rid":"1tjf4-42f24","summary":"Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.","tags":["/etc/","Book Review","Feminism","Sci Fi"],"title":"Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio","updated_at":1790374910,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/book-review-the-husbands-by-holly-gramazio/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"![\"Book](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/xxlarge_9781398621848.jpg\")
\n\nMy mate Lisa has written a book!
\n\nAlong with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done convincing you of the necessity of the work, it begins to explain how to actually create useful and accessible comms.
\n\nSome stuff you may have heard before. Everyone knows to add alt text, right? But this goes in for a slightly deeper dive, explaining how different publishing tools expose it, how to get the most out of it, and where it can all go wrong.
\n\nUsually books like this focus only on HTML. That's great - but there is a world outside the Web. So this goes through the steps to make PDFs accessible (a necessary evil!) and other tools which comms professionals may be regularly using.
\n\nIt also doesn't just focus on the US hegemony. Instead there are statistics and case studies from dozens of different countries and cultures. It also looks through the youth lens - are TikTok's bouncing subtitles good for accessibility? For situational stuff like not having headphones, probably but for people with cognitive impairments probably not.
\n\nEach chapter ends with \"Key Takeaways\" and a decent summary of what you've learned. You probably won't read this cover to cover, but it is worth diving in to the chapters which meet your needs. Some of the stuff was intimately familiar to me - but I had no idea about how to make Podcasts accessible.
\n\nThere's a bit of AI stuff splashed through, as is de rigueur, but it is realistic about its current limitations and how harmful it can be if misapplied.
\n\nThe book ends with a chunky checklist. I suggest printing it out and stapling it to anyone in your organisation who says accessibility is a waste of time.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=72013&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/c65y9-z0s17","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=72013","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/xxlarge_9781398621848.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1780531200,"rid":"mywpa-qh696","summary":"My mate Lisa has written a book! Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases.","tags":["/etc/","A11y","Accessibility","Book Review"],"title":"Book Review: Accessible Communications by Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis","updated_at":1790374908,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/book-review-accessible-communications-by-lisa-riemers-and-matisse-hamel-nelis/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/0153tk833","name":"University of Virginia"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Turner","given":"Stephen","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9140-9028"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Stephen Turner"}],"community_id":"382941a7-2ffa-41df-8bbb-5f772188517f","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"A practicing data scientist's take on AI, genomics, biosecurity, and the ways AI is reshaping how science gets done. Weekly updates from the field. Occasional notes on programming.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/stephenturner","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/382941a7-2ffa-41df-8bbb-5f772188517f/logo","feed_format":"application/rss+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.stephenturner.us/feed","filter":null,"generator":"Substack","home_page_url":"https://blog.stephenturner.us","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"stephenturner","status":"active","subfield":"1311","title":"Paired Ends","updated":1790414839,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Paired Ends","blog_slug":"stephenturner","content_html":"Personal essay, weekend edition. Starting with a familiar quote often attributed to English economist John Maynard Keynes:1
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
I've argued here that refusing a useful tool on principle is stubbornness. And after a few weeks of trying to go without AI at all, I still feel that way for the most part. But my relationship with AI is changing, especially around writing and scientific inquiry.
My inboxes (personal and otherwise) are filled with slop. My social feeds are filled with slop. Many of the papers I read are slop. My Hacker News links are slop. Many of the blogs I read are becoming increasingly filled with slop.2 People who I know and deeply respect are churning out AI slop at a pace I find simultaneously dizzying and disappointing (I'm not innocent here: there's some slop on some older posts here I'm embarrassed about, but I'm keeping up here unedited as a reminder). It's not just writing. I can't go a day without seeing a slide deck that looks exactly like this. IYKYK.
David Dewhurst is a program manager at DARPA. He described watching capable people he respects lose their creativity in real time as they present AI-generated content as original work. They point to length and coverage as achievements. I get some long comprehensive document and I can't find the sender's judgment anywhere in it. If I wanted Claude's analysis or opinion on this or that, I'm very well capable of asking Claude for Claude's analysis or opinion on this or that. Don't be a meat proxy.
I feel the same way when I'm reading the scientific literature. Anshul Kundaje argues that papers have stopped working as measures of productivity, expertise, or accomplishment.
The argument is obviously correct if you think about it for a half a minute. A publication on someone's CV tells me way less than it used to about what they contributed or understand. But as a newly returned academic, I can tell you Anshul is also correct that it'll take (too much) time before we figure out new ways to assess impact and expertise, while we desperately try to hold onto our old ways, bean counting glam journal publication and H-indices and such. We still need ways to document research impact and contribution, but these days a publication doesn't really tell us much about what its authors contributed or even understand. Earlier this week the Washington Post describes a full professor at University of Chicago having published more than 200 papers and 14 books this year alone. Case in point.
TMLR editor Nihar Shah contacted authors of 10 submissions that were already going to be desk rejected. One of them withdrew their submission. One said they were unavailable, and one didn't show up to the scheduled meeting. Of the remainder he met with, three authors couldn't answer basic questions about their papers, and three more struggled with technical details. The authors of the one remaining paper were able to answer basic questions, but Shah identified major errors in a central claim. Now this small sample can't tell you how common the problem is or how much AI caused it, but it says something. Shah also noted that this took >20 hours so it's obviously not a scalable solution.
Related, Giorgio Gilestro wrote an essay that's been making the rounds this week, calling where this ends the Weimar of Knowledge. The marginal cost of producing content is essentially zero, but the cost of attention is still high. The worry is that overwhelmed readers will rely even more on institutional prestige to decide what to read or whose work you should pay attention to. Obviously making it harder for good researchers outside well-known institutions to ever get read.
Tom Dietterich, arXiv editor in chief, shared a few thoughts on this problem. Ultimately I think the scale of the problem makes oral interviews for preprints unworkable even though I think this could really help cut down on the slop we see flooding academic publications. I've written about AI for peer review, and I do think there's a real place for it, but I'm also not bullish on an AI-written, AI-reviewed journal without human authors, for papers which will surely never be read by an actual human being. What are we even doing here.
Then there are proposals. I can't personally speak to the degree to which NIH study sections or NSF review panels are dealing with wholly AI-generated proposals. I'm serving on a NSF panel later this year so I'll get a sense of things soon. But I'd be willing to wager the number is far higher than any of us wish.3
I've noticed a change in myself, and I don't like it. I'm losing interest in reading.
If you've spent any time using AI yourself you can smell the Claudish a mile away, no Pangram needed.4 Maybe these things will get better at writing eventually, but that's kind of beside the point. Even flawless prose wouldn't make me less reluctant to spend an hour reading something that its author spent less than 10 minutes \"writing.\"
Part of the reason I read the things I read is to understand how another person thinks. To understand their own internal thought process, whether that's about a genetics paper, how to run a research lab and mentor students in the AI age, the optimal cover crop for Virginia winters, or traffic-calming approaches for improved bike and pedestrian safety. These days I wonder how much of that person is actually present.
With some AI sparkle \u2728 thing built into everything these days the persistent temptation to use AI for literally every part of thinking and writing is hard to resist. My AI Dry July experiment which I eventually aborted, gave me reasons to write more myself. I could better recall my arguments when I wrote 100% of them, I could better understand how the sections fit together because I fussed around with the story arc for hours, and I found revision to be much easier and less frustrating. I enjoyed it more, too. People much smarter than me on the topic have written volumes about writing and thinking, so I'll just confirm here: every time I delegated the writing I missed out on much of the thinking that I would have done while trying to think through or explain an idea.
I think this should make you feel concern about your professional value. If you outsource all your proposals or lectures or manuscripts or whatever creative work you do to a competent AI, you're choosing to let atrophy the judgment and creativity your employer pays you to do. You become less capable while appearing more productive. If you think people around you won't notice, you're very wrong.
I still want AI's help. Paul Bloom describes models catching errors that human reviewers miss. I recently published a preprint on AI and biosecurity, and while I actually think AI disclosures are actually a net negative in most cases, I did write a lengthy disclosure describing in detail how I'm using a multi-agent workflow to check my work against the papers I cited, including numbers and stats and my descriptions of their findings. This was useful, until it wasn't: the biosecurity subject matter quickly led both models I used to refuse further fact-checking.
I haven't settled on some kind of policy for every part of my work. I expect to keep using these tools and finding them useful. They're great for anything I do involving code. Lately I've been using Claude Code extensively to make little throwaway web apps to demonstrate a concept to my students far better than I could do with a janky PowerPoint animation. And I recently submitted a large proposal to develop a closed-loop AI scientist connected to a wet lab for autonomous biomedical research. But since that failed experiment in July I'm really trying to hand over less of my writing and thinking to the machines, and the majority of what I consume these days gives me more reason to take that commitment seriously as much as I can. I want to remain capable of doing the work I put my name on.
Although the attribution is questionable.
Substack, which hosts this blog you're reading now, and the vast majority of things I like to read, recently made a controversial decision to integrate Pangram's AI detection into the platform itself. If you're reading on the Substack web reader or iOS app you can click a button to check this. Screenshot below. I think Substack made a correct strategic move here. I love that blogs are making a comeback. But with more and more slop polluting the blogosphere, Substack is making a bet (one that I think will pay off) that most people, in fact, don't want to read slop. Much less pay for the privilege of doing so. It's really interesting, and telling, to see the reaction to this. My new favorite genre of essays are those vehemently and dogmatically anti-AI everything, which are, in fact, written mostly or entirely by AI. I'm hoping that writers here, now knowing that slop will be exposed, will be incentivized to not produce so much slop. And sure, you can turn off the AI detection feature, but that's a glaring admission that the whole post is, in fact, slop.
Free research-on-research project idea. Go to NIH RePORTER ExPORTER, and download CSV files of all the abstracts for funded grants in the last 10 years. Do the same for all the JSON files you can download from NSF. Pick a subset of a few thousand, and run them through Pangram's API. Compare pre-2023 to post-2024. Now here's the part that won't make you any friends. Do the same analysis, stratified by institution, department, or dare I say, even by PI. Pangram isn't perfect but it's surprisingly accurate by way of personal experience.
I've even tried writing my own Claudish to English translator for the writing I shouldn't be doing anyway, but it only goes so far.
Knowledge refinement is the ever ongoing process in science (and beyond it) that shepherds knowledge from lab notebooks into journal articles and then on to review articles, monographs, reference handbooks, university textbooks, and finally professional domain expertise and school education for a wider public. It has been going on for a few centuries, but we hardly talk about it. In fact, I made up the term because I couldn't find an established one. Computational knowledge has not yet found its place in the knowledge refinement process. Why not? And what can we do to make it happen?
\n\nFirst of all, what is the role of knowledge refinement?
\nOne answer is that knowledge becomes more reliable in the refinement process. Any single experiment, no matter how carefully done, can turn out to be wrong for lots of reasons. In contrast, the synthesis of hundreds of independent related experiments will remain trustworthy even if one flaky input experiment has to be withdrawn.
\nAnother role of knowledge refinement is making knowledge more accessible. When we learn from others, rather than from our own experience, we start with a highly refined view of a domain, and dive into the details only later and when we see a need for it. Schools teach only refined knowledge, which thus shapes general culture.
\nFinally, with refinement, knowledge also becomes more long-lived. A useful picture here is pace layers: each refinement step pushes knowledge down into a more slowly evolving layer.
\nEach knowledge refinement step has several interrelated aspects:
\nSummarization. A large number of works from the preceding step are cooked down into a common essence that emerges from them.
Curation. Domain experts select what they see as most relevant, discarding what they consider technical details, or only of historical importance.
Integration. Each step draws on broader domain coverage than the preceding one. The relation to already established knowledge is made clearer.
Simplification and clarification. Each step is written for a wider and less specialized audience than the preceding one. Jargon is replaced by more widely understood vocabulary. New concepts are introduced and the explanation is structured around them.
All these processes require reformulation. The output of a refinement step is not simply an annotated collection of quotes from its inputs. You can't edit a journal article into a chapter for a university textbook.
\nIn the digital era, it has become widely accepted that software and electronic datasets are representations of scientific knowledge. See for example pages 9 to 11 of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which discuss \"open scientific knowledge\". For now, however, this is mostly wishful thinking. While code and data certainly are scientific information, it is difficult to consider them to be knowledge as long as they don't participate in the knowledge refinement process.
\nLet me illustrate this with analogies from pre-digital science. The predecessors of today's digital datasets are tables of observations recorded in lab notebooks. The predecessors of today's scientific software are mathematical equations. Consider the foundational research on electromagnetism that was done in the 19th century. Examples of original sources are the lab notebooks of Michael Faraday, or on the theoretical side James Clerk Maxwell's paper \"A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagneticm Field\" (already a refined version of his personal notes, which are probably lost). Today's textbooks in physics or electrical engineering mention both Faraday and Maxwell in historical overviews, but they don't ask you to consult their original work, nor do they cite passages from it in their pedagogical presentation. Instead, they show highly refined versions of Maxwell's theory in modern vector notation, which was largely created for this purpose. The textbooks also summarize the kind of experiments done by Faraday and many others, with pictures and diagrams of modern rather than historical instruments and experimental setups. Instead of real data, they show plots of idealized synthetic data for illustration.
\nWhereas nobody would seriously consider publishing a lab notebook as a journal article after just some light editing, many researchers seem to believe that computational notebooks, such as the popular Jupyter notebooks, could replace journal articles. However, the history and practice of Jupyter shows that it is by design a tool for interactive computational exploration. A Jupyter notebook is an annotated chronological record of a single computation. There is no way to summarize multiple computations. There is no way to focus on the essential aspects of a computation while relegating implementation details to an appendix. There is no way to explain, in more than words, algorithms from a library that is used in the notebook. Moreover, the order of presentation is constrained by the flow of the computation. In a typical Jupyter notebook, one of the very first lines says import matplotlib, a technical detail that in a journal article should be relegated to a reference list, because it is irrelevant to the scientific message.
If you look at today's published Jupyter notebooks, most of them are complements to journal articles. The play the role of an appendix, a repository for technical details. Notebooks that are independent publications do exist, for example in the Journal of Digital History, but the computations they contain, basic data analysis and visualization, are simple and not the main topic of the paper. Moreover, the Journal of Digital History has developed its own extensions to Jupyter that add support for hiding technical details from view while reading the article.
\nWhile I focused on Jupyter because of its popularity, other notebook technologies such as Quarto or Emacs' Babel extension to org-mode are not fundamentally different. As long as the executable content is a single computation that runs from top to bottom, the above criticisms remain valid.
\nVarious ideas for improving the publishing technology for code are being explored. One of them is removing the linear execution constraint, e.g. by using the dataflow paradigm. A few notebook systems have adopted this approach, most notably Observable. The most interesting system I have seen so far in this space is Lopecode, which adds a hypertext structure to Observable's dataflow model for computation. My own experiment on supporting the publication of refined digital knowledge is HyperDoc, which focuses on (1) integrating code and its execution into hypermedia networks and (2) building bridges to existing hypermedia systems. It has the advantage of being applicable to existing code in any programming language (though this requires significant implementation work that hasn't been done yet), and thus avoids a complete break with the past six decades of computational research.
\nMuch more remains to be done, however, before computational knowledge can become an integral part of the refinement process. Computational knowledge is most of all formalized knowledge, meaning knowledge expressed in terms of a formal system that can be processed mechanically, by a computer. Refinement techniques for formalized knowledge are constrained by the formal system they depend on. Program source code lives in a formal system defined by a programming language. It is processed mechanically by a compiler or an interpreter. The focus of a programming language is, not surprisingly, the construction of executable programs. There is a well-established refinement process for source code: scripts become library modules, which are complemented by tests and documentation and then published to become off-the-shelf ingredients for constructing more complex programs. Like knowledge refinement, code refinement makes code more reliable, more accessible, and long-lived, but only from the \"code as a tool\" perspective. It tends to reduce rather than augment its value as a knowledge repository. Software engineering priorities such as optimization and reducing redundancy tend to make the code less readable for researchers who are not professional software developers, and impenetrable to anyone who is just starting to explore a new domain of knowledge.
\nThis is why knowledge refinement in computational science remains limited to non-formal language. Textbooks remain printed books (or their digital twins, PDF files), merely referring to and writing about machine-readable artifacts such as code. The textbooks discuss concepts, including algorithms and data structures, but don't provide examples that readers could run and then build on in their own explorations. On the code side, there are often highly refined implementations for use as off-the-shelf tools, but their correspondence to what the textbooks say is unclear and not verifiable by the reader.
\nThere has been work on improving the explanation side, for example Bret Victor's explorable explanations that integrate interactive exploration tools into formerly passive textbook material. However, the strict divide between explanation and code for use in practice remains.
\nThis state of the art is tolerable for low-complexity computational knowledge, e.g. in linear algebra or signal processing. A textbook on Fourier transforms and good FFT library are good enough for learning these methods. But we need something better for complex models and methods.
\nConsider computational models of complex systems such as force fields for biomolecules, or climate models. On the machine side, they are implemented as software modules for use in simulation, using standard programming languages. On the human side, there are papers describing the principles behind their design, but lacking many details because these details would be overwhelming to a human reader. So if you really want to know how such models work, your only choice is wading through enormous amounts of source code, taking notes carefully of the findings that are relevant to your question. And if you ever want to compare two such complex models... good luck exploring two large software packages in parallel. Unfortunately, that's something you can't avoid doing during knowledge refinement. For example when you write a review paper on protein force fields, or on climate models.
\nWhen models become too complex to be represented in traditional scientific notations (equations, diagrams, etc.), they need to be represented in digital scientific notations. They need to be represented in formal systems that are made for documentation and exploration, rather than for plugging into a simulator. And they require tools that treat them as data, not code.
\nAn idea I have been pursuing for a while is the use of specification languages as digital scientific notations. See my project Leibniz for the details. Specification languages are more general than programming languages in the same way that mathematical equations are more general than mathematical functions (see here for a discussion). In particular, specification languages do not impose an executability condition on everything you write. This allows you to write incomplete function definitions or data structures. I am working on this idea and I remain optimistic that it will work out, but I won't declare victory before I have actually written that review of biomolecular force fields. Meanwhile, I'd be happy to see other work in this space, ideally pursuing very different ideas.
\nDigital scientific notations are a necessary first step for enabling the refinement of digital scientific knowledge, but the real works starts once we have them. We must then develop the tools that let researchers explore and examine publications containing formalized knowledge. We must also find refinement strategies that actually work in practice. There remains a lot to be done!
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/5vb7q-rnw59","guid":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/09/25/knowledge-refinement.html","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790294400,"rid":"kn021-31216","summary":"Knowledge refinement is the ever ongoing process in science (and beyond it) that shepherds knowledge from lab notebooks into journal articles and then on to review articles, monographs, reference handbooks, university textbooks, and finally professional domain expertise and school education for a wider public.","title":"Knowledge refinement in the digital era","updated_at":1790435361,"url":"https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2026/09/25/knowledge-refinement.html","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"\"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax0.\"
\n\n\n\nEnglitch is an pretty goode langwidge. even you no grok all the pacific bits you got the jist & the splelling & grandma dont mattr to much.
\n\nHTML is much the same. You can write utterly malformed, derranged, non-standards complaint HTML and most browsers will just say \"Yeah, sure, whatever dawg!\" and render it adequately. Take a look at the source code for TodePond - a lovely website but some of the most abused HTML I've seen.
\n\nThere's a brilliant blog post by Jens Oliver Meiert which looks at whether HTML validity is seen as a priority for major sites. Basically, no.
\n\n\n\nIt's time for the annual analysis of how much of the HTML code in the field is error-free and valid. The short version: 1% of the most-frequented sites on this planet uses valid HTML\u2014and 99% don't.
\n\n
iS ThAt A pRoBlEm????
\n\nMy site is proudly HTML Valid. Run it through the HTML Validator or the Schema.org Validator and you'll see that it is fucking perfect! Same with my RSS Feed and Atom Feed. Not so much as an advisory bit of info, a couched warning, or a sternly worded suggestion1.
\n\nEvery last bit pure and holy.
\n\nOf course, syntactically valid HTML is neither necessary nor sufficient for any purpose.
\n\nPerfect HTML doesn't imply that a site is accessible (although, I'm proud to say mine meets or exceeds all WCAG guidance2).
\n\nPerfect HTML doesn't guarantee that the information it contains is accurate3.
\n\nPerfect HTML, at best, merely implies that the author gives a damn about such things. Much like Knolling, it leaves a suggestion that order is preferable to chaos4.
\n\nIt is said that one of the reasons HTML succeeded is that it is lax about validation. Most programming languages will shit the bed if you dare to leave out so much as a single semicolon. The compiler wails can be heard throughout the land.
\n\nBy contrast, HTML is designed to be sympathetic to the frailty of the human mind. \"Oh, you didn't close an element? Well, you opened a new one which I guess implies the same thing. Did you forget the correct syntax? Never mind - it'll be our little secret.\"
\n\nThat's why XHTML failed - the browser would literally refuse to render a page if it didn't meet the spec. Who can be bothered with that?! HTML just lets you get on with things.
\n\nAs I've mentioned before, humans don't write or speak in Backus\u2013Naur form. Our ideas are loosely expressed in a floating grammar which lends itself to paradoxical impossibilities and logical tautologies. And yet most of us can still parse weird sentences without too much effort.
\n\nBut most computer languages are different. It might be obvious to you that if (x = 42) means \"compare the value of x to 42\" - but what the computer sees is \"if assign x the value of 42\". Within computing our code needs to be rigorously formal and any syntax errors will lead to show-stopping bugs.
Imagine if every time a human wrote Romanes eunt domus the world simply crashed. It would be intolerable.
\n\nHTML is more like a human language than a computing language. You can understand human speech over a crackly phone line in a foreign accent - Web Browsers understand CP-1252 encoded text with bizarre syntax errors.
\n\nIf it is OK to write bad HTML, why do some of us fetishise \"pure\" HTML?
\n\nI think it comes down to an ingrained belief that it is polite to reduce ambiguity. It is nice to be precise5. It reduces the cognitive burden on anyone (or anything) which reads what we have written. We are holding up our end of the social contract by producing something unadulterated and easy to comprehend. It reduces the likelihood of different browsers rendering things differently but, almost on a cellular level, we feel that things must be done properly.
\n\nThe browser doesn't care about your inability to follow standards. But you should have some fucking self-respect and do it anyway.
\n\nWith the appropriate amount of apologies to James Nicoll \u21a9\ufe0e
\nAt the time of writing. Who knows what batshit bugs I'll accidentally include in the future \ud83d\ude43 \u21a9\ufe0e
\nAgain, it is possible to make something pass automated testing while still being an accessibility mess. \u21a9\ufe0e
\nAlthough, of course, everything you read in this site is 100% accurate. \u21a9\ufe0e
\nOr some horrifying psychological issue. Potato / Tomato. \u21a9\ufe0e
\nI will grant you, there's also a strain of 100% Completionist which compels me to get \"top score\" on all the benchmarks. But that's just pure vanity. \u21a9\ufe0e
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/aaajy-vhb90","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=74960","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HTML5_Badge_512.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790380800,"rid":"skm7j-47q74","summary":"\"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax.\" Englitch is an pretty goode langwidge.","tags":["/etc/","HTML","Webdev"],"title":"No errors, no warnings, no gods, no masters - HTML Purity is a Fetish","updated_at":1790425511,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/no-errors-no-warnings-no-gods-no-masters-html-purity-is-a-fetish/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard <video> element.
An interesting new proposal has been brought forth by Microsoft. There are a dozen ways to show a preview of an <img> element before the src= attribute has loaded. So why not standardise on previewsrc=? There's an excellent explainer on Patrick Brosset's blog.
I instinctively like the idea - if only to simplify source code and reduce JS usage. But I do have some concerns which I've shared with the team.
\n\nThis is the thing I always bang on about when I'm discussing standards. Additions to HTML should primarily benefit end users, not developers.
\n\nDo end users want this? Is there a bunch of research that shows normal people are confused that they don't see a preview image? Do they recoil in fear and distress while waiting for a full resolution picture to appear?
\n\nWhen people see a blurry or blocky image, do they understand that they need to wait for the full thing - or do they assume their computer is broken?
\n\nMicrosoft has a bazillion dollars - it can afford to spend a few thousand on interviewing some real users and mapping out what they're likely to want from this.
\n\nI begrudgingly admit that developers need love too.
\n\n\n\nWhat are the pain points of the current implementations? Is it hard to dynamically generate multiple images? Is the syntax hard to use? Do blurs slow down the page?
\n\nAgain, MS needs to pony up some cash to talk to developers. At the very least run a survey of all existing websites in the BING! database and see what they use.
\n\nWhen an image doesn't load, or loads slowly, a user will normally be shown some alt text - like this:
\n\n\n\nIs that more or less useful than this?
\n\n\n\nAccessibility isn't just for people with visual impairments! This is an issue I've raised with them.
\n\nI've written before about the usability of HTML elements. Some of the newer ones like <picture> have very poorly named attributes in my opinion.
One alternative for previewsrc is poster. That would match with the poster attribute on the <video> element. They both show a preview image before the main content is loaded.
Given their functionality is identical, I think it makes sense for them to have the same name. You wouldn't expect to see <video horizontal=\"1920\" vertical=\"1080\"> would you? No. That's why they use the same width and height attributes as images.
There are several interesting objections and discussions on the GitHub repo. I'm delighted that this is being talked about in the open, rather than just being presented as a fait accompli (remember the toast proposal?).
\n\nAs I said, I genuinely think that there's a useful idea in here. But after writing all of this, I think it would be better and simpler for developers to use progressive images rather than overload HTML with a new attribute.
\n\nIf website owners can't be bothered to save progressive images, I don't see why they'd bother to create a separate preview image.
\n\nKeeping preview images in sync with their full images is also likely to be a problem.
\n\nIf you think I'm wrong, read the explainer and then chat with Microsoft.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/twr9x-eh003","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=75856","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HTML5_Badge_512.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790208000,"rid":"bke8v-4h802","summary":"One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard element. An interesting new proposal has been brought forth by Microsoft.","tags":["/etc/","HTML","Standards"],"title":"Some thoughts on HTML's proposed previewsrc attribute","updated_at":1790407829,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/some-thoughts-on-htmls-proposed-previewsrc-attribute/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"\n\nThis book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction.
\n\n\n\nHow to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonisation of other worlds. Not just in terms of physical safety - but psychological safety as well. It is a direct and forceful rebuttal to those who say it cannot be done.
\n\nIt is, in my opinion, just a touch too credulous about some of the ludicrous claims from the hype merchants. I want to believe that Martian igloos can be conjured out of the ice and that Musk's rockets will deliver a steady stream of supplies to distant worlds. But the evidence presented is rather thin. The book works best when it focuses on what architecture can bring to the table when it comes to designing the future.
\n\n\n\nIn short, a spacecraft is not just a machine; it is also a home, an office, a refuge. If people are asked to go to the most remote environments, to live in spaces scarcely larger than a few rooms, and to perform work of immense complexity and risk, then comfort, efficiency and ergonomics are not just luxuries.
Space has to be worth living in. Putting people into a tin-can with no windows, blank walls, and an infernal background hum will drive them mad. All this is backed up with extensive descriptions of the engineering challenges of polar research bases, spaceports, and previous craft.
\n\nDespite being rightly scathing about Wernher von Braun's involvement in atrocities and his eventual political rehabilitation - he is somewhat more muted in his criticism of Messrs Musk & Bezos. There's a lot of praise for celebrity architects and designers - without any real examination of whether their designs are practical rather than just award fodder.
\n\nSimilarly, the book takes on trust that autonomous robots can ingest extraterrestrial soil, process it, and 3D print structures from it all while in a hostile environment. The fact that we don't have swarms of drones prefabbing houses in the relatively benign atmosphere of our planet should be evidence that maybe these claims aren't quite matched with reality.
\n\nFinally, the \"why?\" question. A City on Mars points out that the cost of mining gold from asteroids would be more profitably spent improving mining technology here on Earth. How to Build a Space Station takes a different approach; it'll improve things here:
\n\n\n\nSpace architecture is not just escapism, a thrilling sci-\u00adfi fantasy \u2013 it is a forge for creating the tools we need at home. These include but are not limited to circular systems, low-\u00adenergy fabrication, modular construction and buildings that take psychology seriously.
I have a lot of sympathy for that. Except\u2026 the Internation Space Station has shown us how to endlessly recycle water relatively cheaply. Yet every modern building on Earth pays only lip-service to reusing grey-water. 3D printing is amazing, but the number of structures built using autonomous robots extruding concrete is approximately zero.
\n\nWe have the technology - but we don't seem to be interested in using it.
\n\nThe book is mostly well illustrated - with some gorgeous drawings of actual craft and possible future inventions. Sadly no photos, maps, or anything to help illuminate some of the other challenges faced by living and working in space.
\n\nThis book is endlessly fascinating and bang up to date, with lots of talk of events that happened in 2025. The way it brings together the sciences of engineering and psychology is marvellous. But, as much as I'd like to believe in a Martian habitat built by robot trebuchets flinging microwave sintered tetrapods into each other, I just don't find it convincing.
\n\nI really hope I'm wrong.
\n\nMany thanks to Netgalley for the review copy - the book is available to buy now.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/0vqd8-3qy21","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=75653","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/how-to-build-a-space-station.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789862400,"rid":"8s9qs-35530","summary":"This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction.","tags":["/etc/","Book Review","NetGalley"],"title":"Book Review: How to Build a Space Station by Jonathan Morrison","updated_at":1790407827,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/book-review-how-to-build-a-space-station-by-jonathan-morrison/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1790425488,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"\n\nI'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia.
\n\nIt reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent. What can a teenage girl consent to? What will fuck her up for years to come? What if she doesn't mind being a little fucked up?
\n\nThe prose is amazing, the plotting perfectly paced, and the denouement satisfying - with lots of retrospectives \"Oh! I get it now\"s.
\n\nDespite the hectic and hilarious story, I still felt a little sordid reading it. There's a streak of sadness running through it, intertwined with some unbearably heartbreaking poetry.
\n\n\n\nIt's always raining and there's nothing to do except dream and they don't even give you much time to do that with all the coursework.
It is entertaining and fun - but you need a strong stomach and a casual disregard for the overall happiness of your protagonists.
\n\nOne note - there are a few odd / broken styles in the ePub. Nothing too disruptive, but some passages have a slightly smaller font size for no discernable reason.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/fq0at-xga66","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=72687","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/slags.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1786752000,"rid":"p2yaq-9mn76","summary":"I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia. It reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent.","tags":["/etc/","Book Club","Book Review"],"title":"Book Review: Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth","updated_at":1790407825,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/08/book-review-slags-by-emma-jane-unsworth/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Franziska Altemeier","given":"Nina D\u00fcvel"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"db0d8909-9e37-46d0-b16c-0551f575e86b","created":1749772800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Das Blog der TIB \u2013 Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften und Universit\u00e4tsbibliothek","doi":"https://doi.org/10.65527/tib","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/db0d8909-9e37-46d0-b16c-0551f575e86b/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.tib.eu/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blog.tib.eu/","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.65527","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tib","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"TIB-Blog","updated":1790331374,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"TIB-Blog","blog_slug":"tib","content_html":"Am 21. und 22. September 2026 fand an der Bibliotheca Hertziana \u2013 Max-Planck-Institut f\u00fcr Kunstgeschichte in Rom das Kick-off-Meeting des DFG/AHRC-gef\u00f6rderten Forschungsprojekts \"SERIOUS 3D in Art and Architectural History\" statt.
\nWissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus den Bereichen Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte (AAH), 3D Engineering (ENG) und Data Science in Cultural Heritage (DSC) diskutierten \u00fcber Forschungsziele, technische Anforderungen, methodische Herausforderungen und anstehende Arbeiten des gemeinsamen Projekts.
\nDas interdisziplin\u00e4re Projekt bringt Expertise aus der Bibliotheca Hertziana, der Hochschule Mainz, der TIB \u2013 Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften in Hannover sowie den Universit\u00e4ten Cambridge und Exeter zusammen.
\nIm Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, wie historische R\u00e4ume mithilfe digitaler Technologien rekonstruiert, interpretiert und vermittelt werden k\u00f6nnen.
\nEin zentrales Thema des Kick-off-Meetings war die praktische Umsetzung der Verbindung kunsthistorischer Forschungsfragen mit digitalen 3D-Modellen als Teil strukturierter Forschungsdaten.
\nHistorische Rekonstruktionen beruhen auf unterschiedlichen Quellen, wissenschaftlichen Interpretationen und mitunter unvollst\u00e4ndigen Informationen; nicht alle Informationen lassen sich ohne Weiteres in ein digitales Geb\u00e4udemodell \u00fcbertragen,
\nDas Projekt untersucht deshalb auch, wie sich solche Unsicherheiten und die zugrunde liegenden Entscheidungen nachvollziehbar dokumentieren lassen.
\nDie Gruppe Data Science in Cultural Heritage (DSC), bestehend aus dem Open Science Lab der TIB und dem DH Lab der Bibliotheca Hertziana, befasst sich unter anderem damit, wie sich diese Informationen in einer gemeinsamen technischen Infrastruktur zusammenf\u00fchren lassen.
\nEin Baustein ist das im Open Science Lab entwickelte 3D-Viewer- und Annotationswerkzeug Semantic Kompakkt f\u00fcr interoperable und nachnutzbare Forschungsdaten, das mit Wikibase4Research ein Backend f\u00fcr die semantischen Informationen beinhaltet.
\nIm Projekt Herrenh\u00e4user des Ostseeraums wird Semantic Kompakkt bereits f\u00fcr einen vergleichbaren architekturhistorischen Anwendungsfall eingesetzt und entsprechend der Bedarfe einer architekturhistorischen wissenschaftlichen Community weiterentwickelt, unter anderem die Visualisierung von Punktwolken und den historischen oder \u00f6rtlichen Zusammenh\u00e4ngen.
\nBereits eine Woche vor dem Kick-off hatte das TIB-Team seine Arbeiten zur Integration des in Serious 3D genutzten Building Information Modeling (BIM) in Semantic Kompakkt auf der Konferenz FAIR 3D Heritage in Mainz vorgestellt. Der Beitrag \"Towards (H)BIM Integration in Semantic Kompakkt: Evaluation of Web Libraries for a Modular Import Pipeline\" lieferte konkrete Ans\u00e4tze f\u00fcr die anschlie\u00dfende Arbeit in Rom. Weitere Informationen finden sich im Konferenzprogramm der FAIR 3D Heritage.
\nDie Diskussionen machten deutlich, dass die Anforderungen der beteiligten Disziplinen bereits bei der kunsthistorischen Recherche und der Erstellung der ersten digitalen Geb\u00e4udemodelle ber\u00fccksichtigt werden m\u00fcssen. Dazu geh\u00f6rt insbesondere die Frage, welche Informationen sp\u00e4ter f\u00fcr die semantische Modellierung, wissenschaftliche Annotation und Visualisierung ben\u00f6tigt werden.
\nAls n\u00e4chster Schritt sollen exemplarische 3D-Modelle mit unterschiedlicher Informationstiefe seitens der ENG-Partner bereitgestellt werden. An ihnen will das DSC-Team den gesamten Workflow vom Datenimport bis zur interaktiven Darstellung erproben.
\nDie Modelle sollen historische Raumsituationen nicht nur veranschaulichen, sondern auch als Arbeitsgrundlage f\u00fcr kunsthistorische Fragestellungen der AAH-Beteiligten dienen. Daf\u00fcr m\u00fcssen Quellen und unterschiedliche Rekonstruktionshypothesen mit den modellierten Objekten verkn\u00fcpft werden k\u00f6nnen.
\nThematisiert wurde au\u00dferdem, wie sich historische R\u00e4ume durch webbasiertes Storytelling interaktiv erkunden und zugleich mit Quellen, Forschungsfragen und Erl\u00e4uterungen verbinden lassen.
\nIn der abschlie\u00dfenden Diskussion wurde nochmals betont, dass SERIOUS 3D als gemeinsamer Forschungsprozess, und nicht nur als Zusammenarbeit voneinander getrennter Arbeitsgruppen verstanden werden soll.
\nDie unterschiedlichen fachlichen Perspektiven sollen bereits bei der Entwicklung der Forschungsfragen, der Auswahl historischer Objekte und der Erarbeitung digitaler Methoden zusammengef\u00fchrt werden.
\nIm Anschluss an das Kick-off-Meeting reist das Projektteam vom 23. bis 25. September 2026 zur Feldforschung nach Florenz. Dort werden Teile des Palazzo Medici, das zentrale Forschungsobjekt von SERIOUS 3D, mithilfe von 3D-Laserscanning und Photogrammetrie digital erfasst.
\nDie gewonnenen Daten bilden die Grundlage f\u00fcr die weitere Entwicklung des historischen Geb\u00e4udemodells und die Erprobung der in Rom diskutierten technischen Workflows.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.65527/ehvpv-0zn69","guid":"https://blog.tib.eu/?p=33673","image":"https://blog.tib.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SERIOUS-3D-in-Art-and-Architectural-History_2_quer.jpg","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790294400,"rid":"4b751-nmd91","summary":"Am 21. und 22. September 2026 fand an der Bibliotheca Hertziana \u2013 Max-Planck-Institut f\u00fcr Kunstgeschichte in Rom das Kick-off-Meeting des DFG/AHRC-gef\u00f6rderten Forschungsprojekts \"SERIOUS 3D in Art and Architectural History\" statt.","tags":["OPENNESS","FORSCHUNG & PROJEKTE","3D-Architekturdaten","SERIOUS 3D","BIM"],"title":"SERIOUS 3D: Kunst- und Architekturgeschichte im digitalen Forschungsraum","updated_at":1790407815,"url":"https://blog.tib.eu/2026/09/25/serious-3d-kunst-und-architekturgeschichte-im-digitalen-forschungsraum/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Pensoft Editorial Team"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c","created":1789516800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/pensoft","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"pensoft","status":"active","subfield":"2303","title":"Pensoft Blog","updated":1790337518,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Pensoft Blog","blog_slug":"pensoft","content_html":"\n\nThe inaugural European Small Mammal Conservation Conference (SMCC 2026) took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 21 to 25 September 2026, bringing together researchers, conservationists and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to address gaps in small mammal research and monitoring.
\n\n\nOrganised jointly by the Habitat Foundation, the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Dutch Mammal Society and Mammal Conservation Europe, with support from the Faculty of Biology at Sofia University, the conference formed part of the Life for Falcons project, funded by the EU LIFE Programme.
\n\n\n\nThis year’s conference was held jointly with the 33rd Hamster Working Group and the VIII European Ground Squirrel Meeting, making hamsters and sousliks the primary focus, alongside broader topics including renewable energy development, agricultural impacts, reintroductions, predator\u2013prey interactions and innovative methodologies in small mammal research.
\n\n\n\nWe were delighted to participate in SMCC 2026 with an exhibition booth, showcasing the breadth of publishing services we offer to the biodiversity and conservation community. It was a pleasure to present our portfolio of journals dedicated to advancing research across ecology, biodiversity and conservation.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWe were particularly proud to present the following journals:
\n\n\n\nMeeting delegates from across the small mammal research community was tremendously rewarding, and we thoroughly enjoyed discussing how our journals can support and amplify their work.
\n\n\n\nBeyond our academic offerings, we were particularly excited to showcase beautiful art prints illustrated by our in-house scientific illustrator, Denitsa Peneva. The collection featured stunning depictions of otters, olinguitos and hamsters.
\n\n\n\nThe scientific programme was exceptional, and we were privileged to attend many outstanding presentations that demonstrated the importance of innovative monitoring approaches and conservation action.
\n\n\n\nLessons from Citizen Science for Small Mammal Conservation Monitoring in Great Britain
\n\n\n\nWe were delighted to attend a talk by Matt Larsen-Daw, Chief Executive of the Mammal Society (UK), which presented a portfolio of citizen science programmes designed to address distribution knowledge and population monitoring across Great Britain. The programmes, united by the Mammal Mapper smartphone app, included the National Harvest Mouse Survey, the Searching for Shrews initiative, and the University Mammal Challenge.
\n\n\n\nThe presentation highlighted the value of standardised effort data, the differing trade-offs between structured and opportunistic recording, and the potential for these approaches to be applied across European contexts.
\n\n\n\nStrong Decline of Hamster Populations in Bulgaria
\n\n\n\nWe were equally impressed by Nedko Nedyalkov’s presentation documenting the significant decline in distribution and abundance of both the common hamster (Cricetus cricetus) and the Romanian hamster (Mesocricetus newtoni) across Bulgaria. The research revealed that population reductions, detected through owl pellet analysis and trapping methods, likely began in the 1950s with agricultural intensification and continue today.
\n\n\n\nGiven that both species are strictly protected under the EU Habitats Directive yet lack active conservation projects, the presentation substantiated the urgent need for targeted conservation measures. We are also pleased to note that Nedko serves as a subject editor for two of our open-access journals, ZooKeys and the Biodiversity Data Journal.
\n\n\n\nReintroduced Saker Falcons and Their Dependence on European Ground Squirrels
\n\n\n\nYana Andonova's presentation on the diet of Bulgaria’s reintroduced saker falcon population provided compelling evidence of the breeding birds' overwhelming dependence on the European ground squirrel (Spermophilus citellus) as a primary food source.
\n\n\n\nThrough food-remain analysis, visual observations and camera-trap monitoring, the research documented that ground squirrels comprised over 80 per cent of identified prey items, with small rodents accounting for 89 per cent overall! It is also worth mentioning that Andonova is an author in our open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.
\n\n\n\nAttending SMCC 2026 was a genuine pleasure and particularly meaningful given that the conference took place in Sofia, the city in which our company is based. Connecting with researchers and conservationists working at the forefront of small mammal conservation, and sharing our commitment to advancing biodiversity research through open-access publishing, reinforced our dedication to supporting this important field.
\n\n\n\nWe look very much forward to engaging with this community again at future events!
\n\n\n\nFollow us on Bluesky, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn for future conference updates.
\n\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/hmn14-8zj12","guid":"https://blog.pensoft.net/?p=20924","image":"https://blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SciComm-PR-2026-Instagram-2026-09-23T165239.066.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790294400,"rid":"n5rb6-tqh12","summary":"Tweet The inaugural European Small Mammal Conservation Conference (SMCC 2026) took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 21 to 25 September 2026, bringing together researchers, conservationists and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to address gaps in small mammal research and monitoring.","tags":["Biodiversity Data Journal","Frontiers Of Biogeography","Individual-based Ecology","Nature Conservation","One Ecosystem"],"title":"Pensoft at the European Small Mammal Conservation Conference 2026","updated_at":1790407811,"url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/2026/09/25/pensoft-at-the-european-small-mammal-conservation-conference-2026/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"\n\nOoooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.
\n\nThis isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered through the lens of a chick-lit comedy.
\n\nIt's proper laugh-aloud funny, while playing with all the clich\u00e9s of both sci-fi and romcoms.
\n\nThe thing I liked most is that Lauren is an active and intelligent protagonist unlike, say, Carol Sturka from Pluribus. Sturka never engages with the premise of her odd situation, she doesn't try to discover the rules of the world she's living in and is content to let things happen to her. Lauren spends a good deal of time at least trying to get to grips with the (un)reality of her husband-dispensing portal. I found that made for a rather gratifying story and didn't leave me shouting at the pages \"JUST TRY SOMETHING!\"
\n\nIt's also refreshing to follow the adventures of a (slight) antihero. Lauren mostly knows when she is being monstrous. She flings between feminism and self-directed misogyny - with a smattering of misandry. Her discrimination against those of us men who wear socks with individual toes is, of course, an unforgivable sin.
\n\nThe pacing is excellent - with an perfectly timed plot twist just as things are settling down. The afterword talks briefly about the multiple possible endings that were considered. I'd love to know what ideas were rejected although, in retrospect, there's only one narratively satisfying conclusion.
\n\nI read a lot of science fiction - probably more than is healthy - and The Husbands is a welcome addition to my shelf. The practicalities of the plot-device are as unimportant as how Warp Drive works; science fiction is about exploring the possibilities of a fantastical situation. If you could instantly swap your spouse because they lost the TV remote again - would you? In a world of no consequences, what would you get away with? If you discovered a break in reality, what would you try in order to exploit or understand it?
\n\nThe Husbands gets fairly dark. Never grim, exactly, but it gnaws away at the cosiness proffered by domestic bliss. Although Lauren can be a bit of a bitch, the story just about strays away from making her morally repugnant. An exemplary piece of storytelling.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/3qy4y-apk30","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=72037","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/9781529920369-jacket-large.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1781049600,"rid":"1tjf4-42f24","summary":"Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.","tags":["/etc/","Book Review","Feminism","Sci Fi"],"title":"Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio","updated_at":1790374910,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/book-review-the-husbands-by-holly-gramazio/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"\n\nMy mate Lisa has written a book!
\n\nAlong with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done convincing you of the necessity of the work, it begins to explain how to actually create useful and accessible comms.
\n\nSome stuff you may have heard before. Everyone knows to add alt text, right? But this goes in for a slightly deeper dive, explaining how different publishing tools expose it, how to get the most out of it, and where it can all go wrong.
\n\nUsually books like this focus only on HTML. That's great - but there is a world outside the Web. So this goes through the steps to make PDFs accessible (a necessary evil!) and other tools which comms professionals may be regularly using.
\n\nIt also doesn't just focus on the US hegemony. Instead there are statistics and case studies from dozens of different countries and cultures. It also looks through the youth lens - are TikTok's bouncing subtitles good for accessibility? For situational stuff like not having headphones, probably but for people with cognitive impairments probably not.
\n\nEach chapter ends with \"Key Takeaways\" and a decent summary of what you've learned. You probably won't read this cover to cover, but it is worth diving in to the chapters which meet your needs. Some of the stuff was intimately familiar to me - but I had no idea about how to make Podcasts accessible.
\n\nThere's a bit of AI stuff splashed through, as is de rigueur, but it is realistic about its current limitations and how harmful it can be if misapplied.
\n\nThe book ends with a chunky checklist. I suggest printing it out and stapling it to anyone in your organisation who says accessibility is a waste of time.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/c65y9-z0s17","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=72013","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/xxlarge_9781398621848.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1780531200,"rid":"mywpa-qh696","summary":"My mate Lisa has written a book! Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases.","tags":["/etc/","A11y","Accessibility","Book Review"],"title":"Book Review: Accessible Communications by Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis","updated_at":1790374908,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/book-review-accessible-communications-by-lisa-riemers-and-matisse-hamel-nelis/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":57659,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":57659}
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