![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/rar_pretty_longbaseline.004.png?resize=700%2C394&ssl=1\")
The effective force law in galaxies is MOND. At high accelerations, this is the same as Newton’s inverse square law: . At low accelerations, the deep MOND limit is . The transition between the regimes occurs at .
\n\n\nThis is well established in galaxies. The question naturally arises whether this holds on larger scales. A recent paper by Gallardo et al. says no:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn scales from 30 – 230 megaparsecs, we constrain the gravitational acceleration between pairs of halos$ at separation r to be g \u221d 1/rn with n=2.1\u00b10.3
\n
so Newton’s n = 2, not the n = 1 of the deep MOND limit. Here is their result for the kinematic SZ effect*.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/GallardoFig1.png?resize=700%2C415&ssl=1\")
Here the blue line represents Newton’s n = 2 with the boost of dark matter as appropriate for LCDM. This matches the data better than the yellow line with n = 1 representing MOND. But is that the right representation?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlthough the bulk of our analysis is model independent, we have also shown the theoretical curves appropriate for MOND. This test is the largest-scale direct test of MOND to date. Our formalism is an excellent approximation to MOND in the low-acceleration regime
\n
This much is good. It’s a nice, general approach to represent 1/r force laws like the deep MOND limit. But is that the right thing to do here?
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/the-office-michael-scott.gif?resize=208%2C168&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nthat said, we have not included the external field effect (EFE) in this analysis. This can modify the acceleration law in the case where the baryonic gravity of an object is less than the gravity of its larger environment, and has been used to explain# the velocity dispersion of satellite galaxies. However, this effect likely does not affect our analysis.
\n
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/593d9d36-1179-4b02-9c3c-218c3a680c38_text-edited-1.gif?resize=400%2C145&ssl=1\")
because the EFE absolutely affects this analysis.
\n\n\n\nThey go on to say words about how the EFE is a thing that applies on small scales (hence the allusion to dwarf galaxies) but they’re looking at large scales so it shouldn’t matter. If only that were true.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/giphy-edited.gif?resize=470%2C202&ssl=1\")
The length scale does not matter in MOND. The acceleration scale matters. Is the chunk of the universe over which they’re integrating in the low acceleration regime? Yes. Is the EFE relevant on these scales? Also yes.
\n\n\n\nSome EFE from large scale structure is unavoidable. Everything feels the tug of everything else. In the deepest depths of the intergalactic medium, the EFE is tiny (maybe 1% of a0) but also ubiquitous. In the absence of a prominent mass, it dominates. That’s exactly the regime this experiment probes.
\n\n\n\nThe force in the MOND EFE regime looks like a boosted version of Newton: . The boost factor is what we interpret as dark matter: the total mass that we need in excess of what we observe.
\n\n\n\nSo, what Gallardo et al. falsify is a straw man version of MOND in which the force law has n = 1 forever and always. That’s only true in the absence of the EFE, for which the prediction is n = 2 – as observed.
\n\n\n\nThere may be a test in the amplitude of the boost factor. We already know that is in the ballpark that’s required for the cosmic dark matter, , as this is one of the first things I checked when I was surprised to encounter MOND in the previous century. So I don’t see much hope in distinguishing between the two this way.
\n\n\n\nReality is more complicated. The amplitude of the EFE throughout intergalactic space depends on the cosmic distribution of mass. This was calculated by Chae et al. (2021), who found it to vary with both distance (from us) and position on the sky:
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Chae_EFEpaper2_F5.jpg?resize=700%2C506&ssl=1\")
It’s even worse than this, because most of the baryons are in the IGM. It makes a difference to the amplitude of the EFE how clumpy these are. They’re probably somewhat clustered into filaments and walls, but we don’t really have a great empirical map of that. So: the EFE is definitely there at a level that matters, but precisely what that level might be is rather hard to say. My best guess today is ~2% of a0, but it could be more, and probably is in places. Could be less in the midst of the deepest voids.
\n\n\n\nGallardo et al. do not cite Chae et al. (2021), nor evince awareness& that there are relevant constraints on the EFE on the scales they probe. Note that the distance range of the figure from Chae et al. (2021) goes out to 150 Mpc, which is where the relevant data of Gallardo et al. are (their last two points are largely irrelevant). So we are talking about very much the same length scales, which does matter to the integration they do. That integration per force averages over any real variations in the EFE.
\n\n\n\nThere is nowhere you can go to completely escape the EFE. A rather profound fact that appears not to be widely appreciated is that there is a minimum cosmic acceleration of order .
\n\n\n\n$Saying “halos” here is quite the linguistic bias since there are no dark matter halos in the theory they’re testing.
\n\n\n\n*There are less obscure ways to do this, but this is what they chose to do and I’m not going to attempt to unravel it here. Ask them.
\n\n\n\n#Not just explain, but predict. Repeatedly. Until the same ability to predict kinematics in advance of observation is demonstrated by LCDM, I’m going to remain underwhelmed by post-facto tests that claim to favor LCDM over MOND.
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/img_5358.jpg?resize=606%2C249&ssl=1\")
%If I recall the notation correctly, the actual EFE is and in these units so corresponds to an EFE that is 3% of . This plot was made assuming maximal clumping of the IGM baryons which gives an upper limit, so the reality is probably less; see Fig. 6 of Chae et al.
\n\n\n\n&I wonder what the refereeing process looked like. I can imagine there being no mention of the EFE initially, with a referee (or perhaps one of the many coauthors) asking if they ought to maybe worry about it and the majority choosing to wave their hands through it. That’s what it looks like.
\n\n\n\nThis is not the first time I’ve encountered the misconception that the EFE can be ignored on cosmic scales. It happened in the submitted version of Aguirre et al. (2001). In that case, I was the referee, and pointed out that the EFE had a profound effect on what they were saying about Lyman-alpha absorbers. To their credit, they listened and corrected it. I think they still kinda low-balled the amplitude of the EFE, but it went from a factor of tens problem to a small problem or maybe not a problem at all.
\n\n\n\nWhile on the topic of refereeing, I note that papers that find MOND wanting generally get less scrutiny than those which find that it works. Hardly surprising, once framed that way. I only mention this because there are certain toxic science communicators who rush to social media to denounce the incompetence of the referee any time a MOND-positive paper appears. Funny how they can be sure of the competence of the referee in a process they are not in any way privy to. If you take the time to think about it, you can more likely presume that the MOND paper has been held to a higher, not lower, standard, and weigh its credence appropriately.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/57294-avw93","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=12977","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Chae_EFEpaper2_F5.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"5c8gq-94563","summary":"The effective force law in galaxies is MOND. At high accelerations, this is the same as Newton's inverse square law: g=GM/r2g = GM/r^2. At low accelerations, the deep MOND limit is g=a0GM/rg = \\sqrt{a_0GM}/r. The transition between the regimes occurs at g=a0=1.2\u00d710\u221210ms\u22122g = a_0 = 1.2 \\times 10^{-10}\\;\\mathrm{m}\\,\\mathrm{s}^{-2}. This is well established in galaxies.","tags":["Data Interpretation","External Field Effect","LCDM","MOND"],"title":"The External Field Effect and Tests of MOND on Cosmological Scales","updated_at":1787876645,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/08/27/the-external-field-effect-and-tests-of-mond-on-cosmological-scales/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"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":1787872303,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Paired Ends","blog_slug":"stephenturner","content_html":"Here are some of my open browser tabs from the last two weeks. See also part 1.
Some Scientists Have 'Magic Hands' in the Lab. This A.I. Is Learning Why, by Carl Zimmer
With Transfyr, Dr. Wegrzyn and Ms. Wagner are building a system that can slurp up enormous amounts of data about what happens in a lab, in the form of video, audio and sensor logs from lab equipment. Transfyr even tracks the source of supplies, down to the lot numbers of glove boxes.
![\"\"](\"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OA3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ecd264-fcd8-4761-bc45-4bc401257174_800x533.gif\")
I had to unplug from AI to rediscover my love of writing by Bastien Le Guellec
I realized writing is a process that not only transforms ideas into text, but also allows the writer to continuously question and refine those ideas. The AI never did this.
What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing? by Dana Goldstein
Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition \u2014 the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.
Building a three-day early-warning system for novel pathogens, by and
The OpenAI Foundation has granted SecureBio Detection $17.2M to reduce our end-to-end time from fourteen to three days, expand our collection footprint, and further validate our detection system.
Come build the OpenAI Foundation, by OpenAI Foundation
In March 2026, we announced the Foundation's initial hires and shared our goal to invest at least $1 billion over the next year across areas including AI Resilience\u2060, Life Sciences and Curing Diseases\u2060, and AI for Civil Society and Philanthropy\u2060 and we are well on our way.
Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects, by Neil Hall, Katja R\u00f6per, Valerie Wood & Paul Nurse
We urge funders to treat biological databases as a shared infrastructure, as they do biobanks and particle accelerators. Without sustained investment, the life sciences risk building an ambitious future on a collapsing foundation.
Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They're Defending Themselves, by Alexandra Crosnoe
\"I would be completely fine with the idea to write that AI is a co-editor, but it did not contribute to any ideas,\" Stankova said. \"And you know why? Because this op-ed, for me, is not an opportunity to gain fame, to gain recognition. This is not a literary piece for me. This is a way to disseminate information, to disseminate the core arguments there.\"
AI and the New Age of Bioweapons by Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
Policymakers need a new strategy in response\u2014one that accepts that biological attacks are likely and prepares to contain the harm, helps the country recover more quickly, and uses new tools to identify and hold perpetrators accountable. Ultimately, this resilience to biological attacks could dissuade malicious actors from attempting to use them in the first place, knowing that the effects will be minimized\u2014a strategy of deterrence by resilience.
Forecasting the Impacts of Anthropic's ASL-3 Safeguards on Biosecurity Risks by
This comparison has an important limitation: the \"no GPAI\" scenario is an imperfect proxy for perfect safeguards. Perfect safeguards would eliminate the risk of misuse while preserving the defensive benefits of GPAI, such as contributions to pandemic surveillance and vaccine development. The \"no GPAI\" scenario removes all of these. This means the \"no GPAI\" world is likely more vulnerable to outbreaks (including human-caused ones) than a world with perfectly safeguarded GPAI, making it a lenient benchmark.
Defining Sequences of Concern by
So we've been doing this project with a lot of other screening tool providers to try and cordon off these zones. We're going to expand the set of sequences that we all agree are low risk. We're going to expand the set of sequences where we have a consensus that they are high risk. And we're going to label this stuff in the middle, where nobody should get in trouble for whatever they do in terms of screening, because we don't understand it scientifically.
How Claude is accelerating protein design and analytical chemistry by Anthropic
We have now received wet lab data back for the first of these experiments, a multi-arm protein design campaign against 15 targets using Claude Opus 4.8 and Mythos Preview. Our external evaluators, Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience, independently produced and tested Claude's designs in the lab, finding that of the 15 targets we designed against, Claude successfully designed binders against 14 of them.
Protein language models are overly constrained by covariation by
we've still only scratched the surface with respect to understanding what pLMs are actually good for. I have no doubt that they are an amazing tool that will have profound implications for the future of protein science. However, this does not mean that these models are currently used appropriately. Clearly, zero-shot predictions from pLMs are not that useful, in particular not if the goal is to find variants that provide novel function.
Where have organoids actually been useful? by
It's really quite extraordinary. I understand the tendency to get a little grumpy about how the cleverness of strange preclinical research seems to never quite connect with reality, but we really need to hand it to the organoid folks here. Unlike the chemotherapy case, the 3D-ness of organoids seemed necessary for the assay to work. And thanks to it, at least a few people have gotten the chance to access a drug that could dramatically improve their quality of life.
The problem(s) with tech in bioteh by
Biopharma innovation happens at the boundaries of knowledge but ML models are mostly good at generalizing within the bounds of their training data. Are we expecting them to extrapolate beyond their limits?
How to write safe software for science by Erin McAuley
These outputs are not about what the software \"should do\" but what it currently does, and you treat those outputs as the expected results. As you make changes to your software, you periodically cross-check your newly generated results with those expected results. This is your safety net!
Peer review is overwhelmed\u2014can it survive in the AI era? by Saima Sidik
The number of papers indexed in the databases Scopus and Web of Science, for example, has recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year. By one estimate, researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year\u2014work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 billion for the share done in the US alone.
AI Helps Researchers Win NIH Grants. Will Science Suffer? by Kathryn Palmer
\"A portfolio that is closer to recent funding patterns may reflect improved clarity, tighter alignment with reviewer expectations, or lower transaction costs in articulating a fundable project,\" they continued. \"But it also implies reduced exploration in the idea landscape, which matters for public funders explicitly tasked with sustaining high-variance discovery, with implications for long-run impact and sustainability of science.\"
AI-detection tools have made huge leaps forward \u2014 how good are they? by Miryam Naddaf & Richard Van Noorden
The inescapable limitation of AI detection, however good it gets, researchers say, is that although software can spot whether AI was involved in a piece, it can't prove how it was used or judge what's ethically acceptable.
Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well. by
So the point of assignments is the mental processes required to complete them, and the point of the mental processes is learning. That seems to suggest a simple litmus test for the use of AI. Artificial Intelligence tools should not substitute for tasks wherein students would benefit from doing the mental work themselves.
Eight Rules for Teaching in AI World by Kevin A. Bryan
Students \"studying with AI\" by just getting homework answers clearly doesn't work. But AI also makes possible class-specific, individualized, cost-effective mastery learning at scale.
How to keep thinking by Sean Goedecke
The main thing that's worked for me is to write more. Specifically, I mean writing in my own words. Writing with an LLM does not work for this at all, even if you're going to some effort to iterate on the content and outline the things you want to say. Why? Having to put the words together yourself forces you to articulate your thoughts. In a very real sense, it forces you to think.
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering by Florian Herrengt
If you lack the judgment required to evaluate the LLM's recommendation, asking for more judgment doesn't solve the problem. At some point, someone still has to know what is going on. And that's the most valuable person on the team.
Anthropic's 'Watermark' Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing by John Gruber
The best writing I see come out of these models is worse than anything I would choose to read for pleasure. And now Anthropic is saying they're going to make it worse, on purpose, for purposes that do not benefit me in any way? Even if only slightly worse?
Get fucked.
Why creativity matters in data visualisation by Nicola Rennie
Creativity isn't just about making things look pretty or adding more stuff into visualisations. It's about designing charts well to draw people's attention, make them think, and reduce the cognitive strain of doing so.
The summer of open weights by Martin Alderson
Winter 2025 was about agents needing frontier intelligence at any price. This summer is about good enough intelligence at a tenth of the price - and whether the frontier labs can keep charging a premium for being slightly better.
Ryan Greenblatt \u2013 What happens once AI can automate AI research? by
I think once you have AIs which are roughly matching the top human experts in AI R&D, that could kick off a feedback loop where the AIs are doing AI research. That produces smarter AIs. That feeds back in. That feedback loop could be strong enough that you end up with a lot of progress in a short period of time. Maybe my median expectation is something like four or five years of AI progress in a single year.
AGI Will Set Off an Industrial Explosion by Damon Binder at
But the question is worth taking seriously, because automating cognitive labor releases what has always been the critical brake on physical production: no matter how cheap machines and tools become, you cannot manufacture new workers. In this piece, I will assume no additional new technologies and no recursive self-improvement to superintelligence. Yet, even with these conservative assumptions, I will show that the economy stands to be profoundly transformed.
The Virginia AI Security Initiative (VAISI) is a student club at the University of Virginia. Our one line mission is: \"Mitigate catastrophic risks from advanced AI.\" I'm writing this post to explain what this means, why we think it's important, and what we plan to do about it.
[\u2026]
The problem is not purely a technical one. Philosophy is important in determining whether AI models are moral patients, and if not, then determining when they will (if ever) be. Politicians and policymakers need to set up institutions capable of regulating transformative AI, and will have to make critical, high-stakes, and rapid decisions as AI capabilities continue to progress.
What is the University's role in the Commonwealth AI Institute? by Melody Yuan
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/3asb3-8pn21","guid":"212543476","image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OA3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ecd264-fcd8-4761-bc45-4bc401257174_800x533.gif","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"bbqcf-7rp92","summary":"Notes on AI, AI in the lab, AI and biology, AI and biosecurity, AI and writing.","tags":["Biosecurity","AI"],"title":"August 2026 links #2","updated_at":1787876620,"url":"https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/august-2026-links-2","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/04xfq0f34","name":"RWTH Aachen University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Hoyt","given":"Charles Tapley","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4423-4370"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"da4ef2af-5fad-46b2-8195-d77db0141ad6","created":1716422400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Unraveling complex biology with biological knowledge graphs. Content licensed under CC BY 4.0.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/cthoyt","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/da4ef2af-5fad-46b2-8195-d77db0141ad6/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://cthoyt.com/feed.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Jekyll","home_page_url":"https://cthoyt.com/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"cthoyt","status":"active","subfield":"1312","title":"Biopragmatics","updated":1787821200,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Biopragmatics","blog_slug":"cthoyt","content_html":"\"AI is too big and too pervasive for any one university, company or agency to tackle it alone. We wanted to find a way to bring higher education, industry and government together to cooperate around responsible AI,\" Barnett wrote.
This post describes several complementary workflows for reviewing semantic\nmappings in the\nSimple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)\ngenerated either by manual curation or (semi-)automated methods. It then\ndemonstrates how the SSSOM Curator\nsoftware package implements some of these workflows for the\nBiomappings project.
\nThis post continues the series on my current work in\nNFDI4Chem and\nNFDI Section Metadata Working Group on Ontology Harmonization and Mapping\nto support Philip Str\u00f6mert and\nNoura Rayya in revitalizing the\nChemical Methods Ontology (CHMO). It is the next\nlogical step following my recent post on comparing manually curated\nSSSOM, which effectively\nprioritized discrepancies in a curator consensus workflow that needed to be\nreviewed and/or edited. This post helps organize thinking about how to approach\nthis.
\nThe main goal of this post is to present several different workflows and\nstrategies for reviewing both manually curated semantic mappings and\nautomatically generated semantic mappings in the\nSimple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)\nformat.
\nflowchart TD\n Start[[Mapping Creation]]\n Manual[Manual Curation]\n Automated[Automated Production]\n Final[Confidence Assessment]\n Start -->|via manual curation| Manual\n Start -->|via automated methods| Automated\n Manual --> M1[M1: Add reviewer] --> Final\n Manual --> M2[M2: Replace with manual curation] --> Final\n Manual --> M3[M3: Curator Consensus] --> Final\n M2 -.-> M1\n M3 -.-> M1\n Automated --> A1[A1: Add reviewer] --> Final\n Automated --> A2[A2: Replace with manual curation] --> Final\n Automated --> A3[A3: Replace with manual curation + provenance] --> Final\n A2 -.-> M1\n A3 -.-> M1\nThe table below contains four semantic mappings in the SSSOM TSV format that\nI'll use as examples through this post. They are drawn from the\ncommunity-curated Biomappings\nproject and current work on\nthe Chemical Methods Ontology (CHMO) driven by\nNFDI4Chem. Rather than showing valid SSSOM TSV file each time, I'm going to omit\nthe mapping set metadata. You should assume that I'm always using stadard\nprefixes from the Semantic Farm (previously called\nBioregistry), except in the case of the record_id column where I added dummy\nidentifiers using the ex: prefix for ease of reference throughout this post.
The first two example mappings ex:1 and ex:2 are manually curated. This is\nreflected in the mapping_justification field which contains\nSemantic Mapping Vocabulary (SEMAPV) term\nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration. The\nsecond two example mappings were produced through\nSSSOM Curator's lexical matching\nworkflow for the Biomappings project therefore have\nsemapv:LexicalMatching as their\njustifications.
The mapping justification also strongly suggests what metadata gets added to the\nmapping. The manually curated mappings contains an author_id for the\nindividual who did the curation. The lexical mappings have information about the\nmapping tool (and could additionally include fields like\nsubject_match_field,\nobject_match_field, and\nmatch_string). Both kinds of mappings\ninclude a confidence, which allows either\nthe mapping tool or the curator to self-report the confidence in the mapping's\ncorrectness.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:1 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n0.99 | \n
| ex:2 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:exactMatch | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0009-0009-1663-1003 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n0.8 | \n
| ex:3 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \n\u00a0 | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.778 | \n
| ex:4 | \nMONDO:0015053 | \nhereditary angioedema type 1 | \nskos:exactMatch | \nmesh:D056829 | \nHereditary Angioedema Types I and II | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \n\u00a0 | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.54 | \n
The most obvious review workflow for manually curated semantic mappings is for a\nsecond curator (the reviewer) to decide if they agree, disagree, or are unsure\nabout the correctness of the manually curated semantic mapping. The reviewer\nthen adds their ORCiD into the reviewer_id column and their level of agreement\nin the reviewer_agreement column,\nin which $+1.0$ means full agreement, $0.0$ means ambivalence, and $-1.0$ means\nfull disagreement. The reviewer can optionally add the date of review in the\n review_date column to support\nhistorical analyses, e.g., that help understand the lifecycles of mappings.
The following example illustrates what it would look like if Nicole Vasilevsky\n(one of the primary maintainers of MONDO) positively reviewed the manually\ncurated mapping between the MONDO and DOID terms for aleutian mink disease\nfrom ex:1. Scroll to the right to see the reviewer_id and\nreviewer_agreement columns, which appear in the order prescribed by the\nTSV serialization\nsection of the SSSOM Specification.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:5 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n0.99 | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n1.0 | \n
The following example illustrates what it looked like when Philip Str\u00f6mert (one\nof the new maintainers of CHMO) negatively reviewed the manually curated mapping\nbetween the FIX and CHMO terms in ex:2, which actually should have the\nrelation that the\nFIX:0000629 (pulsed field gel electrophoresis)\nis narrower than\nCHMO:0002315 (pulsed-field electrophoresis).\nTherefore, the reviewer_agreement is set to -1.0, meaning full disagree.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:6 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:exactMatch | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0009-0009-1663-1003 | \n0.8 | \norcid:0000-0002-1595-3213 | \n-1.0 | \n
It's not so common to have a situation where the reviewer will be fully\nambivalent and annotate the reviewer_agreement as $0.0$, so no example is\ngiven for this scenario.
Warning
Note that this review workflow is destructive - it alters the identity of\nthe semantic mapping record (i.e., a row in the SSSOM file). Importantly, this\nmeans that the semantic mapping record's\nhash\nchanges. This is an important implementation detail depending on how you or\nyour semantic mapping review software persists its semantic mappings.
\nThis workflow is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic in\nsssom_pydantic.process.review ().\nSSSOM Pydantic models semantic mappings as frozen objects, meaning that no\noperations happen in-place (i.e., all are destructive).
\nThe primary disadvantage with workflow M1 for reviewing a manually curated\nmapping is that when the reviewer disagrees, the workflow does not give the\nopportunity for the reviewer to either explicitly mark the mapping as incorrect\nor to fix it. The first version of the M2 workflow is to replace the original\nwith a new mapping explicitly marking it as incorrect by making the following\nchanges:
\npredicate_modifier (which almost always just means adding one)author_id column with the reviewer's ORCiDBelow, the first version of workflow M2 is applied to ex:2:
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \npredicate_modifier | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:7 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:exactMatch | \nNot | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0002-1595-3213 | \n0.95 | \n
The second version of the workflow M2 is applicable when the reviewer knows how\nto fix the mapping. In the pulsed-field electrophoresis example, the mapping can\nbe fixed by changing the predicate from exact match to narrow match. Similarly,\nthe old mapping gets replaced with the reviewer's ORCiD as the new author, a new\npredicate, a new confidence, and any other relevant changes.
\n| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:8 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:narrowMatch | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0002-1595-3213 | \n0.95 | \n
After, this mapping can once again undergo mapping workflow M1!
\nIn the workflow M3, two or more curators are tasked to independently manually\ncurate mappings (e.g., between the same two resources). The appearance of the\nsame mapping in two or more of the curators results can be used as a stand-in\nfor review. Conversely, workflow M3 can also amplify systematically incorrect\ncorrect, e.g., where every curator makes the same mistake because of some\nqualities of the resources being curated.
\nWhile I was locked down with my parents and sister (a microbiologist) during the\nCOVID-19 pandemic, I trained her in semantic mapping curation, then she made\nsignificant contributions to the original Biomappings paper and then to disease\nmappings in MONDO and DOID. I could imagine recuriting her for a curator\nconsensus scenario, where she would independently add ex:9 with her own\nconfidence (and any other columns).
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:1 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n0.99 | \n
| ex:9 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-1307-2508 | \n0.98 | \n
After applying workflow M3, the comparison workflow I proposed in a previous\npost can be used to highlight discrepancies that\ncan be reviewed with workflow M1 and/or M2.
\nNote
Unlike workflows M1 and M2, this review workflow is idempotent - it does not\nalter the identity of the semantic mapping record (i.e., a row in the SSSOM\nfile).
\nThis workflow operates similarly to workflow M1 where a reviewer adds their\ninformation into the reviewer_id, reviewer_agreement, and review_date\nslots. However, the disadvantage of this workflow is that justifications for\nautomatically generated mappings such as\nsemapv:LexicalMatching and\nsemapv:SemanticSimilarityThresholdMatching\nare weaker, and review does not upgrade their justification to\nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration,\nwhich is implicitly more trustworthy.
In the following example, mapping ex:3 is reviewed with high agreement.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:10 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.778 | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n1.0 | \n
Conversely, in the following example, mapping ex:4 is reviewed, with high\ndisagreement.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:11 | \nMONDO:0015053 | \nhereditary angioedema type 1 | \nskos:exactMatch | \nmesh:D056829 | \nHereditary Angioedema Types I and II | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.54 | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n-1.0 | \n
This workflow is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic in\nsssom_pydantic.process.review ().\nThe implementation is shared for workflow W1 and A1.
\nIn this workflow that mirrors workflow M2, a reviewer of an automatically\ngenerated mapping overwrites the automatically generated mapping with a manual\ncuration. Unlike M2, this workflow importantly includes the following changes:
\nauthor_id field and confidence (not the reviewer_id and\nreviewer_agreement)The following example shows this workflow applied to mapping ex:3:
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:12 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n1.0 | \n
I'm going to omit showing what happens when you want to reject a mapping (Not\ngets added) or update the predicate. These both work as expected in light of\nworkflow M2. Similarly, the results of any application of workflow A2 can then\nbe reviewed with workflow M1 after.
This workflow is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic in\nsssom_pydantic.process.curate ().\nSSSOM Pydantic models semantic mappings as frozen objects, meaning that no\noperations happen in-place (i.e., all are destructive).
\nOne of the drawbacks of workflow A2 is that it throws away provenance\ninformation from the lexical mapping. Depending on your use case, it might be\ndesired to keep that. Workflow A3 extends workflow A2 to keep the original\nmapping intact and simply append the new mapping. Importantly, the new mapping\nuses the derived_from field to point back\nto original automatically generated mapping record via the\nSSSOM record hash.\nThis is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic (note, the example hash in ex:13 is made\nup, I might add a real one later).
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \nderived_from | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:3 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \n\u00a0 | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.778 | \n\u00a0 | \n
| ex:13 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n0.99 | \nmapping:CED101AFD | \n
This workflow is implemented by a combination of SSSOM Pydantic's curate()\nfunction and the harness implemented by SSSOM Curator, but the way that mappings\nget persisted are ultimately an implementation detail.
In the following demo, I show how the\nSSSOM Curator, which runs the\nBiomappings project, implements\nworkflow A2 while curating some CHMO and IUPAC Goldbook mappings.
\n\nNico Matentzoglu, et al. (2023) published\nMapperGPT: large language models for linking and mapping entities,\nwhich suggests that agentic workflows such as those based on large language\nmodels (LLMs) could be used to review semantic mappings. Since 2023, several\nothers have investigated the idea as well.
\nI'm skeptical of the use of the word review here - I think that the\nreviewer_id slot should be reserved only review by a human (or group humans;\nthe slot is multivalued). In my opinion, the point of review is to add a\ntrustworthy judgment to a semantic mapping. I'm not against the use of (semi-)\nautomated methods for producing mappings, but it seems silly to have one\nstochastic automated method to assess another one.
At the top of the post, I mentioned the main goal was to help think through the\ncurator consensus scenario for CHMO, in which we had two curators produce\nhundreds of mostly overlapping mappings. The workflow from the previous\npost identified mappings that\nwere manually curated, but had conflicts, so this meant that we need to apply a\ncombination of workflow M1 to accept the correct mappings and workflow M2 to\nmark the incorrect ones or fix them. Then, either the consensus workflow M3\ncould be used for the rest, or Philip could do lots of painstaking work and do\nworkflow M1.
\nSince we want this to be a gold standard, he's going to go down the M1 route and\ndo a careful review of everything from the perspective of the student's\ncurations. Then, we could always apply the whole comparison workflow again and\ntake a quick final pass!
\nEach of the workflows presented here has drawbacks and might be appropriate\ndepending on your goals and the software you're using. In the end, you might\nhave a combination of manually curated and automatically generated mappings,\nsome of which are reviewed and some of which are not.
\nThe next step is to collapse many evidences into a single mapping that can be\nused for downstream applications of semantic mappings, such as in the\nconstruction of knowledge graphs. Part of that is to estimate the confidence of\nthe consensus mapping. I originally started thinking about these ideas while\ndeveloping the\nSemantic Mapping Reasoner and Assembler (SeMRA),\nbut refined and generalized the ideas to be applicable to arbitrary semantic\nmappings in SSSOM\nhere. In a\nfollow-up post, I'll write more about the SSSOM confidence model and the\nalgorithm I proposed for estimating combine confidences.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/gka4k-wtt21","guid":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/08/27/reviewing-sssom","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"5cz4g-v2m83","summary":"This post describes several complementary workflows for reviewing semantic mappings in the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) generated either by manual curation or (semi-)automated methods. It then demonstrates how the SSSOM Curator software package implements some of these workflows for the Biomappings project.","tags":["SSSOM","Semantic Mappings","Review","Biocuration"],"title":"Semantic Mapping Review Workflows","updated_at":1787853360,"url":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/08/27/reviewing-sssom.html","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Mykolas Romeris University, Faculty of Human and Social Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Dagiene","given":"Eleonora","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0043-3837"},{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/01f5wp925","name":"Universitat Oberta de Catalunya"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aibar","given":"Eduard","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1727-1523"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Leiden Madtrics"}],"community_id":"d8304840-75c2-4164-bc37-ec879c4f065b","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Leiden Madtrics","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/leidenmadtrics","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/d8304840-75c2-4164-bc37-ec879c4f065b/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":null,"slug":"leidenmadtrics","status":"active","subfield":"1804","title":"Leiden Madtrics","updated":1787830260,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Leiden Madtrics","blog_slug":"leidenmadtrics","content_html":"Companion post to Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner's \"Research culture as a politics of uncertainty\"
If research culture is a politics of uncertainty, then someone has to organise that politics. In a recent post, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner proposed understanding research culture as a way of distributing uncertainty across research systems: who can afford to take risks, whose research problems are easier to pursue, who bears the costs. This is a powerful framing. But it raises an obvious next question, which we set out to answer empirically: how,\nand by whom, is that uncertainty distributed in practice, and through what systems?
Our answer, based on a comparison of Spain and Lithuania, is that a large part of the work is done by something rarely discussed in research culture debates: publishing infrastructures. These two countries show, almost as a natural experiment, that similar national policy pressure produces very different outcomes depending on whether a domestic publishing infrastructure survives to absorb this pressure.
Spain and Lithuania are both semi-peripheral\u00a0European systems under the familiar pressure to internationalise: to publish in prestigious, core-based journals as the measure of success. Both saw the rapid arrival of high-volume open-access publishers such as MDPI. On paper, the incentive was identical. The outcome was not.
In Spain, a resilient ecosystem of university- and society-run journals (many in Spanish, and thus reaching readers across Latin America) remained standing. Spanish researchers could treat new open-access outlets as one more option: a portfolio addition layered onto domestic journals and traditional international ones. When MDPI's share climbed to roughly a third of national output, the system had the resources to push back; after the national agency ANECA delisted several titles, that share fell to around 13%. Uncertainty remained spread across multiple credibility circuits.
In Lithuania, national evaluation policy had spent two decades gradually marginalising domestic journals, whose share of the country's Web of Science output fell from a peak near 52% to about 7% by 2024. With the domestic circuit devalued, researchers had nowhere to distribute their bets. New publishers became not an addition but a systemic substitute, replacing an infrastructure that policy had hollowed out. What looks like individual strategic choice is, seen at the system level, a constrained response: uncertainty concentrated onto a narrow set of external, commercial pathways.
We call the first outcome autonomous coexistence and the second dependent displacement. The difference between them is not researcher virtue or national temperament, but whether a community-managed publishing infrastructure was allowed to keep functioning. These configurations point to a more general distinction in how systems adapt to shared pressures: whether new publishing models extend an existing repertoire of options or come to replace previously available pathways altogether.
This is the point we seek to add to the politics-of-uncertainty framing. Uncertainty is never encountered in a pure form; it is mediated. Publishing infrastructures are one of the most concrete ways in which this mediation is organised. They define the available pathways through which work can be made visible and credible, and in doing so they decide whether uncertainty can be spread\nacross options or gets funnelled into dependence.
That means research culture is not only about norms, working conditions, or good intentions. It is also an infrastructural condition. Evaluation systems do not merely respond to uncertainty; they systematically redistribute it, and they do so through the mundane machinery of journal lists, indexing databases, and incentives. This also reframes directionality: by privileging particular formats and databases, evaluation systems stabilise some research trajectories and quietly render others less viable. This also reframes directionality as a matter of infrastructural configuration: by privileging particular formats and databases, evaluation systems stabilise some research trajectories while quietly rendering others less viable.
If the above is true, then protecting and governing publishing infrastructures is not a technical footnote to the research culture agenda; it is part of the agenda. A country that dismantles its domestic scholarly publishing, as has been argued before, does not simply lose a few journals; it loses the buffer that lets its researchers distribute uncertainty on their own terms. Reforming metrics alone may not be enough if the infrastructures that give reform something to land on have already been eroded.
This connects directly to a broader conversation about metascience and democracy: about illuminating the uncertainties we tend to neglect. Bringing infrastructure into that discussion grounds debates about uncertainty, directionality, and democratic engagement in the material organisation of research systems. The distribution of uncertainty is not neutral. It is designed, and crucially, it can be designed differently.
The full study is available to read: Dagien\u0117, E. & Aibar, E. (2026). \"Publishing infrastructures in the semi-periphery: how research assessment shapes the research output of Spain and Lithuania.\" Research Evaluation, 35(1), rvag042. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag042
Header picture by chi_margo on Unsplash
DOI:\u00a0pending
September brings the start of a new academic year, and with it many of us will be looking at our professional goals and development opportunities. If you're looking for professional development resources but don't know where to start, The Bibliomagician now hosts a page listing over 20 resources for bibliometricians, librarians, and information professionals looking to upskill!\u00a0
\nThe page can be found here or under the Resources drop down menu in the navigation bar.
\nThis casually maintained page is not exhaustive and while some resources are specifically targeted towards bibliometric skills, there are others which are applicable to scholarly communications work and academic librarianship in general!\u00a0
\nThe Bibliomagician and LIS-Bibliometrics committee do not endorse any of the listed resources and merely provide this collection for your perusal and consideration. We welcome suggestions to the list but reserve the right to curate it as we see fit.\u00a0
\nWe hope that this provides inspiration and encouragement to our community to continue learning and growing!
\n\nUnless it states otherwise, the content of the Bibliomagician is licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/0mmrj-n9817","guid":"http://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/?p=5614","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"0ebh8-jvs14","summary":"September brings the start of a new academic year, and with it many of us will be looking at our professional goals and development opportunities.","tags":["Metrics","Bibliometrician","Bibliometrics","Resources","Scientometrics"],"title":"New Professional Development Resources on The Bibliomagician","updated_at":1787839688,"url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2026/08/27/new-professional-development-resources-on-the-bibliomagician/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1787821147,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"In November 2025 I reported my intentions of turning Rogue Scholar into a German non-profit organization, and the steps needed for that. The first step (needed by German law) is at least seven founding members and I am asking for your support.
In the November 2025 post I listed the following main steps to formally register a German non-profit:
This boils down to the following: meet in person with at least seven people, discuss and approve the bylaws, elect a founding board, and sign the bylaws in front of a notary. This will happen in Berlin with the tentative date of December 9. Three months are needed to draft the statutes, coordinate with a notary and tax authorities, and organize venue, travel and other logistics.
German law no longer requires the General Assembly to be held in person, but seven people signing the bylaws is still required, so meeting in person simplifies the process. German is the official language of the bylaws, but the General Assembly will be held in English and remote participation will be possible. I don't forsee any controversial discussions, and promotion of science and research is one of the legally recognized charitable purposes for a German non-profit.
Every natural person or organization can become a member. The membership fees will be set in fee regulations, but importantly membership is about governance of the non-profit organization, and will not be required for a science blog to be archived by Rogue Scholar.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has reached two important milestones this week, so the timing is right to do the next step and launch a non-profit organization:
The feature image of this post is the famous photograph of the 29 attendees of the fifth Solvay Conference of Physics in October 2027. The conference contributed extraordinarily to the clarification of the physical foundations of the quantum theory (Heisenberg). Diversity was still a huge problem, and Marie Curie was the only woman attending.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you want to become a founding Rogue Scholar member, or have any questions or comments.
\n\"The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself\" \u2013bell hooks, quoted by d. Sabela Grimes at Show and Prove, 9.18.10
![\"52537656624_f5cccc6dc1_c\"](\"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/52537656624_f5cccc6dc1_c.jpg\")
This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP. In fact, I scratched out the rough draft of these lines in my notebook on the bus ride home, all Eminem 8 Mile-style. So embedded somewhere in my words will inevitably be the thick chug of the engine, the squeaky bounce-bounce of the shocks, the ocean-like roar of (the)17, and the steady tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk of hip hop pumping from my fellow commuter's earbuds. Across the bus aisle, this secondhand beat called to me and challenged me to think about ways that sound studies can reach across the (inter)disciplinary aisle to hip hop (and vice versa). So that's where my head's at right now: what does sound studies bring to hip hop's platform? And what does hip hop offer in return?
\nI should say first off that I don't necessarily see an intellectual conflict between these two fields\u2014although Norma Coates' 2008 Cinema Journal piece, \"Sound Studies: Missing the (Popular) Music for the Screens?\" makes a compelling case for institutional turf wars on the horizon between sound studies, media studies, and popular music study writ large\u2014I actually came to sound studies through hip hop, and obviously haven't left hip hop behind (and neither has Sounding Out!: peep Liana Silva and Scott Poulson-Bryant's recent posts). Among the many things that hip hop has done for me and to me\u2014personally, socially, and politically\u2014was to open my ears to all sorts of amazing and important sounds, which eventually translated academically into frustration with the limits of popular music study back in the early 2000s. I found many texts that deconstructed hip hop lyrics and visual imagery, parsed MC's personas, dropped some socio-historical science, and traced capitalist networks like you wouldn't believe, but when it came down to the constitutive element of the medium itself, the sonic art through which it devoted itself to moving heads, hearts, and butts simultaneously, there was silence (and not because Doug E. Fresh said so).
\nOutside of Tricia Rose's landmark chapter on \"flow, layering, and rupture\" in 1994's Black Noise, I found precious few texts that were willing or able to engage with the primary way in which hip hop put in work \"if not in the word, in the sound\" as Frederick Douglass once put it a long time ago. Hip hop was, true to its word, bringing the noise, and traditional music studies wasn't making meaning of it in even part of the way that hip hop audiences were. To signify on Shante Smalls's comment at Show and Prove in reference to trying to teach Murs's \"Dark Skinned White Girl\" to an NYU class, hip hop sounded to popular music scholars just like a guy talking over some beats\u2014all flattened out. So I strapped on my headphones night after night, trying to fill this void by listening and writing, writing and listening. You can read my early attempts in a discography of Los Angeles hip hop called \"Audible Angels\" I published online in 2004, in which I tried to capture the sonic signature of each artist I wrote about, integrating it with their vocal style, lyrical themes and historical and regional context. The fact that one of the artists in the discography sent me a remastered version of their record based on some of my commentary not only suggested that I did a halfway decent job, but also that the artists themselves are clamoring for scholars to take their sound as seriously as they do.
\nBecause of the bus, my experience at the conference was shorter than I would have liked, so I can't remotely claim full coverage (I am especially sorry to have missed Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr.'s talk on Filipino DJs and contemporary U.S. racial formations, which I know would have (re)mixed sound, race, and hip hop, hamster style), so I will have to sample the bits and bytes that I did hear.
\nIn a panel on \"Methodology, Pedagogy, and Educational Practice,\" M.C. K-Swift talked about the sonic differences between standard English, Black English, and Hip Hop English and what it means to code switch between all three. Johan S\u00f6derman discussed similar issues about hip hop in Sweden, especially the way in which hip hop enables marginalized Swedish youth to sound and signify differently in the same language.
\nIn the panel I moderated, \"Aesthetic Dimensions of Hip Hop\"\u2014in which there were amazing papers by Naomi Bragin on popping in Northern California's East Bay and Jessica Pab\u00f3n on the \"feminist masculinity\" of female graffiti in Brasil, Mexico, and the US\u2014sound was largely a shadow presence, animating limbs, accompanying film, and being punctuated by muscle pops and krylon hisses. Jens Althoff discussed 1970s samples briefly in his talk on the influence of blaxploitation cinema on hip hop but there was really only one paper that explicitly addressed sound, Joshua Bennett 's \"I Love it When You Call Me Big (Poppa).\" Bennett used Barthes' \"The Grain of the Voice\" to give an evocative and nuanced reading of the \"palpable sense of surplus\" in Notorious B.I.G's voice, the way in which his heavy timbre comes together with his \"wheezing undertone\" to re-present his corporeal body as superabundant rather than substandard.
\nFinally, in the afternoon, I was fascinated by Nicole Hodges Persley's exploration of the sound of cross-racial appropriation both in her paper, \"People in Me\" and in her performance, in which she used both voice and gesture to represent a white suburban teen, a young Asian graffiti writer from Silverlake, and a Senegalese student drawn to the U.S. by hip hop. Persley raised important questions about who has \"the right to talk black\" while addressing the pleasures and the politics of using the body as a remixing agent and translator of hip hop, accent, culture and immigrant experience.
\nSo of course I came to Show and Prove eager to take in some talk about sound\u2014and I wouldn't say I was disappointed. Surprised (slightly) and challenged (totally), but not disappointed. Sound wasn't as center stage as I expected, but it certainly wasn't marginalized either. Instead, it was ubiquitous; sound in hip hop studies seems to be taken for granted in the same way that vision is just about everywhere else. Although hip hop is understood to be an audio-visual art, its organizing metaphors are sonic: remixing, sampling, scratching, and Dj-ing all describe sonic phenomena as well as aural frameworks for understanding the world. The way in which hip hop studies take sound for granted presents both a lesson and an opportunity for sound studies.
\nWhile I had been hoping to hear more papers that brought the conversation back around to the beat, I felt that all the papers spoke through it, even if the topic reached beyond it to bodily movement, visual culture, theatre, and pedagogy. And that is where I think hip hop studies asks sound studies to step up its game\u2014to take seriously sound's intersection with the other senses, using sound as a jumping off point and not always a final destination. In Jeff Chang 's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop, dancer Rennie Harris described bodily movement as \"just the last manifestation of sound,\" which blew my mind, because even though sound and motion are so fluidly entangled, we usually talk about them as if they are separate entities.
\nOn the flip side, one of the things that distinguishes sound studies from popular music study is its methodology\u2014the way in which sound is treated as an active process, a way of thinking and being, rather than solely an object of study. And this methodology is what I think sound studies can offer hip hop studies\u2014a sustained conversation on listening in a multiplicity of forms. Listening practices are what knits the different elements of hip hop together, what links artist to producer to audience, sometimes in the very same body at the very same time. What happens when we think of hip hop artists as listeners? What if we viewed them not only as producers of tracks but also of listening practices? Is there such a thing as hip hop listening? If so, what are its ethics and aesthetics? How might hip hop listening practices impact and feed into the various modes of hip-hop performance in music and beyond: dance, cinema, theatre, literature, graphic design?
\nSo, while hip hop studies and sound studies have quite a bit to show and prove to each other, I can't be the only one eager for the collabo.
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\u2014
\nFeatured Image by Michael Coughlin, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/apjdn-mx606","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=639","image":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/52537656624_f5cccc6dc1_c.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1285027200,"rid":"pjxkc-ycq37","summary":"This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP.","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Black Studies","Conferences","Diasporic Sound"],"title":"Ill Communication: Hip Hop Studies & Sound Studies @ Show And Prove","updated_at":1787782789,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/09/20/ill-communication/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Ford","given":"Robert"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"Ever since the Chicago Cubs installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, music has been a part of the baseball ballpark experience. Unlike basketball, hockey or football, baseball doesn't have non-stop action, and its frequent periods of inaction give an organist or stadium DJ a broad canvas on which to improvise. Initially, ballpark music was strictly organ music, as organs were present at every ballpark by the middle of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the organist was complemented by the stadium DJ, who played recorded music over the stadium sound system. Gradually, the DJ overtook the organist and many stadiums no longer play live organ music; a little less than half of the 30 ballparks that host Major League Baseball games today don't employ an organist.
\nAs technology improved, allowing stadium DJs to play music on the computer rather than on the record or 8-track player, teams began allowing baseball players to choose the music they wanted to hear. And, in the 1990s, the phrase \"walk-up music\" entered the sports fan's vernacular. Position players chose songs for the stadium DJ to play when they walked from the on-deck circle to the batter's box. Pitchers picked music to be played while they warmed up at the start of their outing.
\nPlayers select their music in a variety of ways. Some pick a song from their favorite artists, artists that often originate from their corner of the world (e.g. a lefthanded pitcher from Texas warming up to country music or Southern hip-hop; a utility infielder from the Dominican Republic opting for a merengue or bachata tune). Others will choose music they feel helps motivate them to perform better on the field, choosing a new song whenever they enter a slump. Some players will even allow the stadium DJ to pick their music. In 2007, New York Mets third baseman David Wright gave the fans the opportunity to vote for his walk-up song online, giving them list of 50 of his favorites to choose from (the fans choice: \"Me & U,\" the only hit by Cassie, a hip-hop artist).
\nWhile almost every baseball player has walk-up music, only a handful of players have had their music become an iconic part of their image and legacy. The best example of a player who's become closely identified with his entrance music is New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/rivera.jpg\")
Photo by Flickr user Dennis
Rivera has been the Yankees' closer for more than a decade and a half, called upon to get the last three outs in the ninth inning when the Yankees are ahead by a handful of runs. The closer's role is one of the most pressure-packed in all of team sports. Do it well, and your opponents often feel defeated as soon as you come into the game. Do it poorly, and you'll frustrate your teammates, your manager and your team's fan base. After all, nothing's more demoralizing than losing a game you've all but won, and a closer's job is to turn almost-certain wins into definite victories. Rivera is arguably the best closer in baseball history, an integral part of a Yankees team that's won five championships and advanced to the playoffs in all but one of his 16 seasons.
\nDuring Rivera's rise to prominence in the late 1990s, the DJ at Yankee Stadium, his home ballpark, began playing \"Enter Sandman\" by Metallica when Rivera came into the game. To a certain extent, \"Enter Sandman\" seems like a strange choice for Rivera's entrance. While it does start off softly before building to a eardrum-thumping crescendo of guitars, \"Enter Sandman\" is a loud, heavy-metal song. Rivera, the most reserved of the Yankees superstars developed over the last two decades, is serene and soft-spoken. To the untrained ear, \"Enter Sandman\" sounds arrogant and boastful, two words that have never been used to describe Rivera.
\nHowever, in many ways, \"Enter Sandman\" does compliment Rivera. Its lyrics, about a child battling nightmares as he tries to sleep, are a perfect metaphor for Rivera, whose job is to gives opposing hitters nightmares while trying to put the game to bed in the Yankees' favor. Rivera, a deeply religious man by all accounts, probably approves of the song's encouragement to \"Say your prayers little one\" and its recitation of a classic children's bedtime prayer (\"Now I lay me down to sleep/Pray the Lord my soul to keep\u2026\"). In addition, Rivera may also get a kick out of the idea of opposing hitters saying their prayers before facing the dancing and darting fastballs that he throws with ruthless efficiency and pinpoint accuracy.
\nIt also helps that Yankee Stadium is one of the loudest outdoor venues anywhere. Its combination of rabid fans and their New York-style obnoxiousness and hubris combined with an ear-splitting sound system that could wake the dead already makes the Bronx, NY stadium one of the toughest venues for visiting teams to compete. Combine those elements with a song that's loud, even before you raise the volume, being played while an indomitable closer jogs to the pitcher's mound from the bullpen behind the outfield fence and makes his warm-up throws and it isn't hard to understand why many enemy teams are mentally vanquished before they even take their cuts against Rivera, whose entrance routine serves to both whip the Yankee Stadium crowd into a frenzy and intimidate opponents.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/demel.dk/wp-content/yankee_stadium_new_ny.jpg\")
Photo by de Mel
Would Rivera be as dominant without such scene-setter is a legitimate question. While baseball is a very technical sport, requiring precision whether you're fielding a ground ball or laying down a bunt, emotion and superstition has a prominent place in the sport. Yankee Stadium is already one of the most hostile stadiums for opponents; throw in a great closer coming out to a ominous, foreboding song and it's understandable how an opponent's anxiety would be heightened. You could also argue that, Rivera is so good, what's playing over the sound system is immaterial. After all, Rivera does play half his games on the road, away from Yankee Stadium and \"Enter Sandman,\" and he has managed to excel in those contests as well.
\nRivera is now 40 years old and still among the best at an age when most baseball players are retired or on the downward slope. Upon retirement (and the requisite five-year waiting period), Rivera will almost certainly be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame with the other greats. And, while \"Enter Sandman\" hasn't been the sole reason for his success, it will always be an indelible part of Rivera's legacy.
\n\u2013Robert Ford
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It's no secret that over the course of the twentieth century, aesthetic productions have drawn increasingly on recycled and re-appropriated materials. Perhaps, for this reason, the above video \u2013 a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller on the newly minted Mario Paint Composer \u2013 sounds absolutely mundane. Nothing new, just another curiosity born out of the collective consciousness we cannily refer to as the Internets, which we understand jokingly as a series of tubes, notably Youtubes. Laffs aside, this phenomena complicates many traditional modes of interpretation.How do we hear the music of a convergence era when within it lies a devious set of connotations, each serving to reorient the listener to its own particular theme? What tactics do listeners take when interpreting this semiotic collision of sound, icon and song? These questions complicate the topic of genre, where a social consensus traditionally guides the collective organization of a medium. What social and sonic forms shape our understanding of Thriller as it was reproduced by Mario Paint Composer on Youtube in 2008?
\n![\"\"](\"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/series_of_tubes.jpg?w=300\" "\\"series_of_tubes\\"")
Before delving too deeply into a discussion of genre, it is important to situate the phenomena of convergence in a pre-digital context. Although the user-centric nature of web 2.0 has certainly helped to accelerate this process, one needs to look no further than Dick Hebdige's \"The Meaning of Mod,\" in the anthology Resistance Through Rituals, to sense an earlier precedent to the mash-up culture we observe today. Drawn to the adventure of a dangerous soHo night-life culture, \"The mod dealt his blows by inverting and distorting the images (of neatness, of short hair) so cherished by his employers and parents, to create a style, which while being overtly close to the straight world was nonetheless incomprehensible to it.\" Although Hebdige is writing in 1974, long before computers would become mainstream, he makes a worthy point here about the appropriation of fashion. Constructing it as an act of distortion,Hebdige argues that early 1960s mods (understood here as a working class youth movement), through their stylistic appropriations were able to undermine the fabric of British society. By acting as criminals, but lauding the style of white collar workers \u2013 suits, short hair \u2013 mods help to show that semiotic convergence is not something new, instead it can be read as a stance of resistance.
\nIn the case of Thriller, resistance is too strong a word. I prefer distortion, it is value neutral, although it can easily be understood in the context of resistance. Thriller on Mario Paint Composer distorts Thriller by Michael Jackson. By simplifying the song to a series of 16-bit samples, the song's transcriber geoffnet1, translates it all to the symbolic language of Mario Paint \u2013 where mushrooms sound like drums, hearts are bass notes, ships are cymbals, flowers are horns, cars are synth pads and game-boys sound like blips. geoffnet1's Thriller is a distortion of the Mario Paint Composer sound as well; originally a part of the 1992 Super Nintendo cartridge, Mario Paint, Mario Paint Composer is now a fan-modded update of its original form. Unlike the original Mario Paint Composer has been designed with functionality taking a precedent over accessibility. Originally marketed as an intuitive music scripting software, the following limitations were part and parcel of the platform (These restrictions have been copied from Tombobbuilder's page, a musician who works with the limits of Mario Paint Composer as it was originally distributed.):
\n1. Only 24 measures are available.
\n2. No more than three notes at a time.
\n3. You can not double notes on the same line or space.
\n4. Tempo is restricted.
\n5. There is no fluctuation in dynamics (volume).
\n6. No sharps or flats are available.
\n7. Can only compose using the \"white keys\" from the piano.
\n8. Only two of each letter name are available (except A, where there is only one).
\n9. C major and A natural minor are the only keys to compose in.
Of these restrictions, Thriller only conforms to the third: \"You can not double notes on the same line or space,\" in this regard it distorts what most people understand as the Mario Paint sound as well. By no means am I calling this work inauthentic, instead I am calling attention to the stability of sonic tropes in our cultural memory. The sound of Mario Paint is not remembered for the limitations described above, instead, there is a stable and distinct sonic fingerprint which is derived from the alchemy of icon, sound and song though which genre can be constructed and maintained.
\nThriller is 8-bit music, even though there is nothing 8-bit about it. Similar to the way in which mods subverted the British status-quo, Thriller puts the idea of genre into crisis. This is not a crisis that works to undermine the existence of genre as a phenomenon, it is instead a crisis of interpretation, where the traditional means through which a genre can be identified are called into question. No longer can the easy answers be found at Allmusic or Wikipedia, some sounds have become more epistemically ellusive. Ultimately, this is a good thing, as it encourages listeners to take a critical ear to what they are listening to \u2013 and how they come to understand it.
\nAT
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Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, \"Hey, I'm not done! You can't go yet!\" And they laugh. And they stay.
\n![\"\"](\"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/apape_cdcover-9.jpg\" "\\"apape_cdcover-9\\"")
Album Cover: Andreas Pape's The Big Hit
I am an economist and a musician. In both of my chosen fields, performance is a necessary component. As an economist, I teach and I present papers; as a musician, I put on shows. Performance is the willful construction of a series of events using the body\u2014hands, voice, gesture\u2014and the instruments the body can manipulate to create a particular mental state for the witnesses. In the days leading up to my next show on October 16th at The Beef in Binghamton, NY, I have pondered the intimate ways in which listening structures the corporeal nature of performance. As an economist, I understand that performance is strategic, in that I imagine a listener for my music and choose my actions to influence that listener. As a musician, I recall moments that I listened.
\nThe audience is one of the instruments available to the performer. I plan to use this to my advantage at my upcoming show. When I envision my fingers first passing across my guitar, the audience will not be engaged with me: they will be talking to each other, getting a drink, finding a seat. I will play a song at a normal volume; given the other noise, it will be background, not a centerpiece. Most people will hear it, but not many will notice it. The climax of the song will involve me holding a loud, high vocal note until all other noise dies. Each person there will have a moment in which they hear that note and wonder what it is and they will grow silent. By the end of the note, every person in the room will realize that the performance has started and that this sustained note is part of a song they have been hearing but not listening to for several minutes. As the note draws to a close, they will feel compelled to shout, to clap, to exclaim. Their part in this performance\u2014the noise, the silence, then the noise\u2014will be one they will play without knowing, beforehand, that they were included.
\nI imagine this moment like the opening to Belle And Sebastian's \"I Don't Love Anyone:\" 'I don't love anyone/ You're not listening/ \u2026 I don't love anyone/You're not listening even now.' As a listener, you realize as he says 'even now,' that he's right: you weren't listening. It was a transcendent moment that shocks me as a listener: the author of the song had climbed inside my head without me knowing, and then was able to name exactly the listening experience I was having.
\nIn Chronicles, Bob Dylan describes a listening experience built around a singer who constructs her own way to view the rhythm of a song. \"I'd seen [Martha Reeves] in New York \u2026 where she'd been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn't keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine was her entire band\" (160). This phrasing that is out-of-phase with the band (or the audience) reminds me of Odetta.
\n![\"\"](\"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/odetta.jpg?w=300\" "\\"A")
Odetta might be best known for her performance of \"I've been driving on Bald Mountain/Water Boy.\" She rebuilt those two traditional 4/4 folk songs swung onto a three-beat triplet, so what emerges is a swinging triplet where beats two and three are rushed in after a lethargic one: ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three. After several times though the verses, she stops the guitar entirely and carries a long vocal note, setting up a moment of unnaturally long silence. The guitar and grunt that end the silence seem arrhythmic to my ear, but Odetta can sing by her own time that swings in and out of phase with the rest of us. We're not meant to know when resolution comes, and it's that uncertainty that Odetta wants us to experience.
\nI once saw Jeff Tweedy use a controlled complete silence with Wilco's performance of \"Misunderstood\" from Being There in 2001. Tweedy doesn't use uncertainty as Odetta does; his use of silence is more akin to methodically turning on and off a bedroom light in the middle of the night. In particular, the band performs an extended outro which involves two beats of sound and two beats of silence: \"NOTHING \u2013 -.\" On \"NAH\" and \"THING\" the whole band is together on two identical, stinging staccato notes.
\n\nSeeking to recreate a combination of those listening experiences in my audience, I wrote \"Something This Easy,\" a song about confusing interactions with an ex. The song is forty percent silence: nineteen beats of melody followed by thirteen beats of silence. I don't tap my foot or keep time during the silence, save for holding my breath, and I bring back the sound when I (have to) exhale. I try to keep the audience slightly and repeatedly startled by resisting any precise expectation of sound that they may hold. After a beat, the audience will break the silence when I make them laugh with the line: \"I know your body like a Swedish furniture map.\" With the eruption of laughter in an otherwise silent room, my audience becomes the instrument creating the music that they are listening to at that moment. That is, they are the only instrument I'm playing.
\nAs a musician, this is the listening experience I designed: the laughter rings after I've triggered it like a overtone ring on a string long after having been plucked and left. As an economist, I see how I used the imagined listener successfully: I forecasted how these real listeners would react, and was able to use that forecast to design not only this moment, but potentially many others as well.
\nDownloadable Pape Mix of Wilco, Odetta, and his own \"Something this Easy\":
\nRhythm to Organize Silence (Misunderstood_Tweedy_ Bald Mtn_Odetta_ SmthThisEasy_Pape)
\nView Andreas Duus Pape's latest album The Big Hit here
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The effective force law in galaxies is MOND. At high accelerations, this is the same as Newton’s inverse square law: . At low accelerations, the deep MOND limit is . The transition between the regimes occurs at .
\n\n\nThis is well established in galaxies. The question naturally arises whether this holds on larger scales. A recent paper by Gallardo et al. says no:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn scales from 30 – 230 megaparsecs, we constrain the gravitational acceleration between pairs of halos$ at separation r to be g \u221d 1/rn with n=2.1\u00b10.3
\n
so Newton’s n = 2, not the n = 1 of the deep MOND limit. Here is their result for the kinematic SZ effect*.
\n\n\n\nHere the blue line represents Newton’s n = 2 with the boost of dark matter as appropriate for LCDM. This matches the data better than the yellow line with n = 1 representing MOND. But is that the right representation?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlthough the bulk of our analysis is model independent, we have also shown the theoretical curves appropriate for MOND. This test is the largest-scale direct test of MOND to date. Our formalism is an excellent approximation to MOND in the low-acceleration regime
\n
This much is good. It’s a nice, general approach to represent 1/r force laws like the deep MOND limit. But is that the right thing to do here?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nthat said, we have not included the external field effect (EFE) in this analysis. This can modify the acceleration law in the case where the baryonic gravity of an object is less than the gravity of its larger environment, and has been used to explain# the velocity dispersion of satellite galaxies. However, this effect likely does not affect our analysis.
\n
because the EFE absolutely affects this analysis.
\n\n\n\nThey go on to say words about how the EFE is a thing that applies on small scales (hence the allusion to dwarf galaxies) but they’re looking at large scales so it shouldn’t matter. If only that were true.
\n\n\nThe length scale does not matter in MOND. The acceleration scale matters. Is the chunk of the universe over which they’re integrating in the low acceleration regime? Yes. Is the EFE relevant on these scales? Also yes.
\n\n\n\nSome EFE from large scale structure is unavoidable. Everything feels the tug of everything else. In the deepest depths of the intergalactic medium, the EFE is tiny (maybe 1% of a0) but also ubiquitous. In the absence of a prominent mass, it dominates. That’s exactly the regime this experiment probes.
\n\n\n\nThe force in the MOND EFE regime looks like a boosted version of Newton: . The boost factor is what we interpret as dark matter: the total mass that we need in excess of what we observe.
\n\n\n\nSo, what Gallardo et al. falsify is a straw man version of MOND in which the force law has n = 1 forever and always. That’s only true in the absence of the EFE, for which the prediction is n = 2 – as observed.
\n\n\n\nThere may be a test in the amplitude of the boost factor. We already know that is in the ballpark that’s required for the cosmic dark matter, , as this is one of the first things I checked when I was surprised to encounter MOND in the previous century. So I don’t see much hope in distinguishing between the two this way.
\n\n\n\nReality is more complicated. The amplitude of the EFE throughout intergalactic space depends on the cosmic distribution of mass. This was calculated by Chae et al. (2021), who found it to vary with both distance (from us) and position on the sky:
\n\n\n\nIt’s even worse than this, because most of the baryons are in the IGM. It makes a difference to the amplitude of the EFE how clumpy these are. They’re probably somewhat clustered into filaments and walls, but we don’t really have a great empirical map of that. So: the EFE is definitely there at a level that matters, but precisely what that level might be is rather hard to say. My best guess today is ~2% of a0, but it could be more, and probably is in places. Could be less in the midst of the deepest voids.
\n\n\n\nGallardo et al. do not cite Chae et al. (2021), nor evince awareness& that there are relevant constraints on the EFE on the scales they probe. Note that the distance range of the figure from Chae et al. (2021) goes out to 150 Mpc, which is where the relevant data of Gallardo et al. are (their last two points are largely irrelevant). So we are talking about very much the same length scales, which does matter to the integration they do. That integration per force averages over any real variations in the EFE.
\n\n\n\nThere is nowhere you can go to completely escape the EFE. A rather profound fact that appears not to be widely appreciated is that there is a minimum cosmic acceleration of order .
\n\n\n\n$Saying “halos” here is quite the linguistic bias since there are no dark matter halos in the theory they’re testing.
\n\n\n\n*There are less obscure ways to do this, but this is what they chose to do and I’m not going to attempt to unravel it here. Ask them.
\n\n\n\n#Not just explain, but predict. Repeatedly. Until the same ability to predict kinematics in advance of observation is demonstrated by LCDM, I’m going to remain underwhelmed by post-facto tests that claim to favor LCDM over MOND.
\n\n\n%If I recall the notation correctly, the actual EFE is and in these units so corresponds to an EFE that is 3% of . This plot was made assuming maximal clumping of the IGM baryons which gives an upper limit, so the reality is probably less; see Fig. 6 of Chae et al.
\n\n\n\n&I wonder what the refereeing process looked like. I can imagine there being no mention of the EFE initially, with a referee (or perhaps one of the many coauthors) asking if they ought to maybe worry about it and the majority choosing to wave their hands through it. That’s what it looks like.
\n\n\n\nThis is not the first time I’ve encountered the misconception that the EFE can be ignored on cosmic scales. It happened in the submitted version of Aguirre et al. (2001). In that case, I was the referee, and pointed out that the EFE had a profound effect on what they were saying about Lyman-alpha absorbers. To their credit, they listened and corrected it. I think they still kinda low-balled the amplitude of the EFE, but it went from a factor of tens problem to a small problem or maybe not a problem at all.
\n\n\n\nWhile on the topic of refereeing, I note that papers that find MOND wanting generally get less scrutiny than those which find that it works. Hardly surprising, once framed that way. I only mention this because there are certain toxic science communicators who rush to social media to denounce the incompetence of the referee any time a MOND-positive paper appears. Funny how they can be sure of the competence of the referee in a process they are not in any way privy to. If you take the time to think about it, you can more likely presume that the MOND paper has been held to a higher, not lower, standard, and weigh its credence appropriately.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/57294-avw93","guid":"https://tritonstation.com/?p=12977","image":"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Chae_EFEpaper2_F5.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"5c8gq-94563","summary":"The effective force law in galaxies is MOND. At high accelerations, this is the same as Newton's inverse square law: g=GM/r2g = GM/r^2. At low accelerations, the deep MOND limit is g=a0GM/rg = \\sqrt{a_0GM}/r. The transition between the regimes occurs at g=a0=1.2\u00d710\u221210ms\u22122g = a_0 = 1.2 \\times 10^{-10}\\;\\mathrm{m}\\,\\mathrm{s}^{-2}. This is well established in galaxies.","tags":["Data Interpretation","External Field Effect","LCDM","MOND"],"title":"The External Field Effect and Tests of MOND on Cosmological Scales","updated_at":1787876645,"url":"https://tritonstation.com/2026/08/27/the-external-field-effect-and-tests-of-mond-on-cosmological-scales/","version":"v1"},{"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":1787872303,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Paired Ends","blog_slug":"stephenturner","content_html":"Here are some of my open browser tabs from the last two weeks. See also part 1.
Some Scientists Have 'Magic Hands' in the Lab. This A.I. Is Learning Why, by Carl Zimmer
With Transfyr, Dr. Wegrzyn and Ms. Wagner are building a system that can slurp up enormous amounts of data about what happens in a lab, in the form of video, audio and sensor logs from lab equipment. Transfyr even tracks the source of supplies, down to the lot numbers of glove boxes.
I had to unplug from AI to rediscover my love of writing by Bastien Le Guellec
I realized writing is a process that not only transforms ideas into text, but also allows the writer to continuously question and refine those ideas. The AI never did this.
What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing? by Dana Goldstein
Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition \u2014 the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.
Building a three-day early-warning system for novel pathogens, by and
The OpenAI Foundation has granted SecureBio Detection $17.2M to reduce our end-to-end time from fourteen to three days, expand our collection footprint, and further validate our detection system.
Come build the OpenAI Foundation, by OpenAI Foundation
In March 2026, we announced the Foundation's initial hires and shared our goal to invest at least $1 billion over the next year across areas including AI Resilience\u2060, Life Sciences and Curing Diseases\u2060, and AI for Civil Society and Philanthropy\u2060 and we are well on our way.
Treat biological databases as infrastructure, not projects, by Neil Hall, Katja R\u00f6per, Valerie Wood & Paul Nurse
We urge funders to treat biological databases as a shared infrastructure, as they do biobanks and particle accelerators. Without sustained investment, the life sciences risk building an ambitious future on a collapsing foundation.
Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They're Defending Themselves, by Alexandra Crosnoe
\"I would be completely fine with the idea to write that AI is a co-editor, but it did not contribute to any ideas,\" Stankova said. \"And you know why? Because this op-ed, for me, is not an opportunity to gain fame, to gain recognition. This is not a literary piece for me. This is a way to disseminate information, to disseminate the core arguments there.\"
AI and the New Age of Bioweapons by Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
Policymakers need a new strategy in response\u2014one that accepts that biological attacks are likely and prepares to contain the harm, helps the country recover more quickly, and uses new tools to identify and hold perpetrators accountable. Ultimately, this resilience to biological attacks could dissuade malicious actors from attempting to use them in the first place, knowing that the effects will be minimized\u2014a strategy of deterrence by resilience.
Forecasting the Impacts of Anthropic's ASL-3 Safeguards on Biosecurity Risks by
This comparison has an important limitation: the \"no GPAI\" scenario is an imperfect proxy for perfect safeguards. Perfect safeguards would eliminate the risk of misuse while preserving the defensive benefits of GPAI, such as contributions to pandemic surveillance and vaccine development. The \"no GPAI\" scenario removes all of these. This means the \"no GPAI\" world is likely more vulnerable to outbreaks (including human-caused ones) than a world with perfectly safeguarded GPAI, making it a lenient benchmark.
Defining Sequences of Concern by
So we've been doing this project with a lot of other screening tool providers to try and cordon off these zones. We're going to expand the set of sequences that we all agree are low risk. We're going to expand the set of sequences where we have a consensus that they are high risk. And we're going to label this stuff in the middle, where nobody should get in trouble for whatever they do in terms of screening, because we don't understand it scientifically.
How Claude is accelerating protein design and analytical chemistry by Anthropic
We have now received wet lab data back for the first of these experiments, a multi-arm protein design campaign against 15 targets using Claude Opus 4.8 and Mythos Preview. Our external evaluators, Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience, independently produced and tested Claude's designs in the lab, finding that of the 15 targets we designed against, Claude successfully designed binders against 14 of them.
Protein language models are overly constrained by covariation by
we've still only scratched the surface with respect to understanding what pLMs are actually good for. I have no doubt that they are an amazing tool that will have profound implications for the future of protein science. However, this does not mean that these models are currently used appropriately. Clearly, zero-shot predictions from pLMs are not that useful, in particular not if the goal is to find variants that provide novel function.
Where have organoids actually been useful? by
It's really quite extraordinary. I understand the tendency to get a little grumpy about how the cleverness of strange preclinical research seems to never quite connect with reality, but we really need to hand it to the organoid folks here. Unlike the chemotherapy case, the 3D-ness of organoids seemed necessary for the assay to work. And thanks to it, at least a few people have gotten the chance to access a drug that could dramatically improve their quality of life.
The problem(s) with tech in bioteh by
Biopharma innovation happens at the boundaries of knowledge but ML models are mostly good at generalizing within the bounds of their training data. Are we expecting them to extrapolate beyond their limits?
How to write safe software for science by Erin McAuley
These outputs are not about what the software \"should do\" but what it currently does, and you treat those outputs as the expected results. As you make changes to your software, you periodically cross-check your newly generated results with those expected results. This is your safety net!
Peer review is overwhelmed\u2014can it survive in the AI era? by Saima Sidik
The number of papers indexed in the databases Scopus and Web of Science, for example, has recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year. By one estimate, researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year\u2014work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 billion for the share done in the US alone.
AI Helps Researchers Win NIH Grants. Will Science Suffer? by Kathryn Palmer
\"A portfolio that is closer to recent funding patterns may reflect improved clarity, tighter alignment with reviewer expectations, or lower transaction costs in articulating a fundable project,\" they continued. \"But it also implies reduced exploration in the idea landscape, which matters for public funders explicitly tasked with sustaining high-variance discovery, with implications for long-run impact and sustainability of science.\"
AI-detection tools have made huge leaps forward \u2014 how good are they? by Miryam Naddaf & Richard Van Noorden
The inescapable limitation of AI detection, however good it gets, researchers say, is that although software can spot whether AI was involved in a piece, it can't prove how it was used or judge what's ethically acceptable.
Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well. by
So the point of assignments is the mental processes required to complete them, and the point of the mental processes is learning. That seems to suggest a simple litmus test for the use of AI. Artificial Intelligence tools should not substitute for tasks wherein students would benefit from doing the mental work themselves.
Eight Rules for Teaching in AI World by Kevin A. Bryan
Students \"studying with AI\" by just getting homework answers clearly doesn't work. But AI also makes possible class-specific, individualized, cost-effective mastery learning at scale.
How to keep thinking by Sean Goedecke
The main thing that's worked for me is to write more. Specifically, I mean writing in my own words. Writing with an LLM does not work for this at all, even if you're going to some effort to iterate on the content and outline the things you want to say. Why? Having to put the words together yourself forces you to articulate your thoughts. In a very real sense, it forces you to think.
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering by Florian Herrengt
If you lack the judgment required to evaluate the LLM's recommendation, asking for more judgment doesn't solve the problem. At some point, someone still has to know what is going on. And that's the most valuable person on the team.
Anthropic's 'Watermark' Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing by John Gruber
The best writing I see come out of these models is worse than anything I would choose to read for pleasure. And now Anthropic is saying they're going to make it worse, on purpose, for purposes that do not benefit me in any way? Even if only slightly worse?
Get fucked.
Why creativity matters in data visualisation by Nicola Rennie
Creativity isn't just about making things look pretty or adding more stuff into visualisations. It's about designing charts well to draw people's attention, make them think, and reduce the cognitive strain of doing so.
The summer of open weights by Martin Alderson
Winter 2025 was about agents needing frontier intelligence at any price. This summer is about good enough intelligence at a tenth of the price - and whether the frontier labs can keep charging a premium for being slightly better.
Ryan Greenblatt \u2013 What happens once AI can automate AI research? by
I think once you have AIs which are roughly matching the top human experts in AI R&D, that could kick off a feedback loop where the AIs are doing AI research. That produces smarter AIs. That feeds back in. That feedback loop could be strong enough that you end up with a lot of progress in a short period of time. Maybe my median expectation is something like four or five years of AI progress in a single year.
AGI Will Set Off an Industrial Explosion by Damon Binder at
But the question is worth taking seriously, because automating cognitive labor releases what has always been the critical brake on physical production: no matter how cheap machines and tools become, you cannot manufacture new workers. In this piece, I will assume no additional new technologies and no recursive self-improvement to superintelligence. Yet, even with these conservative assumptions, I will show that the economy stands to be profoundly transformed.
The Virginia AI Security Initiative (VAISI) is a student club at the University of Virginia. Our one line mission is: \"Mitigate catastrophic risks from advanced AI.\" I'm writing this post to explain what this means, why we think it's important, and what we plan to do about it.
[\u2026]
The problem is not purely a technical one. Philosophy is important in determining whether AI models are moral patients, and if not, then determining when they will (if ever) be. Politicians and policymakers need to set up institutions capable of regulating transformative AI, and will have to make critical, high-stakes, and rapid decisions as AI capabilities continue to progress.
What is the University's role in the Commonwealth AI Institute? by Melody Yuan
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/3asb3-8pn21","guid":"212543476","image":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OA3w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7ecd264-fcd8-4761-bc45-4bc401257174_800x533.gif","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"bbqcf-7rp92","summary":"Notes on AI, AI in the lab, AI and biology, AI and biosecurity, AI and writing.","tags":["Biosecurity","AI"],"title":"August 2026 links #2","updated_at":1787876620,"url":"https://blog.stephenturner.us/p/august-2026-links-2","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/04xfq0f34","name":"RWTH Aachen University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Hoyt","given":"Charles Tapley","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4423-4370"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"da4ef2af-5fad-46b2-8195-d77db0141ad6","created":1716422400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Unraveling complex biology with biological knowledge graphs. Content licensed under CC BY 4.0.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/cthoyt","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/da4ef2af-5fad-46b2-8195-d77db0141ad6/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://cthoyt.com/feed.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Jekyll","home_page_url":"https://cthoyt.com/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"cthoyt","status":"active","subfield":"1312","title":"Biopragmatics","updated":1787821200,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Biopragmatics","blog_slug":"cthoyt","content_html":"\"AI is too big and too pervasive for any one university, company or agency to tackle it alone. We wanted to find a way to bring higher education, industry and government together to cooperate around responsible AI,\" Barnett wrote.
This post describes several complementary workflows for reviewing semantic\nmappings in the\nSimple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)\ngenerated either by manual curation or (semi-)automated methods. It then\ndemonstrates how the SSSOM Curator\nsoftware package implements some of these workflows for the\nBiomappings project.
\nThis post continues the series on my current work in\nNFDI4Chem and\nNFDI Section Metadata Working Group on Ontology Harmonization and Mapping\nto support Philip Str\u00f6mert and\nNoura Rayya in revitalizing the\nChemical Methods Ontology (CHMO). It is the next\nlogical step following my recent post on comparing manually curated\nSSSOM, which effectively\nprioritized discrepancies in a curator consensus workflow that needed to be\nreviewed and/or edited. This post helps organize thinking about how to approach\nthis.
\nThe main goal of this post is to present several different workflows and\nstrategies for reviewing both manually curated semantic mappings and\nautomatically generated semantic mappings in the\nSimple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)\nformat.
\nflowchart TD\n Start[[Mapping Creation]]\n Manual[Manual Curation]\n Automated[Automated Production]\n Final[Confidence Assessment]\n Start -->|via manual curation| Manual\n Start -->|via automated methods| Automated\n Manual --> M1[M1: Add reviewer] --> Final\n Manual --> M2[M2: Replace with manual curation] --> Final\n Manual --> M3[M3: Curator Consensus] --> Final\n M2 -.-> M1\n M3 -.-> M1\n Automated --> A1[A1: Add reviewer] --> Final\n Automated --> A2[A2: Replace with manual curation] --> Final\n Automated --> A3[A3: Replace with manual curation + provenance] --> Final\n A2 -.-> M1\n A3 -.-> M1\nThe table below contains four semantic mappings in the SSSOM TSV format that\nI'll use as examples through this post. They are drawn from the\ncommunity-curated Biomappings\nproject and current work on\nthe Chemical Methods Ontology (CHMO) driven by\nNFDI4Chem. Rather than showing valid SSSOM TSV file each time, I'm going to omit\nthe mapping set metadata. You should assume that I'm always using stadard\nprefixes from the Semantic Farm (previously called\nBioregistry), except in the case of the record_id column where I added dummy\nidentifiers using the ex: prefix for ease of reference throughout this post.
The first two example mappings ex:1 and ex:2 are manually curated. This is\nreflected in the mapping_justification field which contains\nSemantic Mapping Vocabulary (SEMAPV) term\nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration. The\nsecond two example mappings were produced through\nSSSOM Curator's lexical matching\nworkflow for the Biomappings project therefore have\nsemapv:LexicalMatching as their\njustifications.
The mapping justification also strongly suggests what metadata gets added to the\nmapping. The manually curated mappings contains an author_id for the\nindividual who did the curation. The lexical mappings have information about the\nmapping tool (and could additionally include fields like\nsubject_match_field,\nobject_match_field, and\nmatch_string). Both kinds of mappings\ninclude a confidence, which allows either\nthe mapping tool or the curator to self-report the confidence in the mapping's\ncorrectness.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:1 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n0.99 | \n
| ex:2 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:exactMatch | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0009-0009-1663-1003 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n0.8 | \n
| ex:3 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \n\u00a0 | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.778 | \n
| ex:4 | \nMONDO:0015053 | \nhereditary angioedema type 1 | \nskos:exactMatch | \nmesh:D056829 | \nHereditary Angioedema Types I and II | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \n\u00a0 | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.54 | \n
The most obvious review workflow for manually curated semantic mappings is for a\nsecond curator (the reviewer) to decide if they agree, disagree, or are unsure\nabout the correctness of the manually curated semantic mapping. The reviewer\nthen adds their ORCiD into the reviewer_id column and their level of agreement\nin the reviewer_agreement column,\nin which $+1.0$ means full agreement, $0.0$ means ambivalence, and $-1.0$ means\nfull disagreement. The reviewer can optionally add the date of review in the\n review_date column to support\nhistorical analyses, e.g., that help understand the lifecycles of mappings.
The following example illustrates what it would look like if Nicole Vasilevsky\n(one of the primary maintainers of MONDO) positively reviewed the manually\ncurated mapping between the MONDO and DOID terms for aleutian mink disease\nfrom ex:1. Scroll to the right to see the reviewer_id and\nreviewer_agreement columns, which appear in the order prescribed by the\nTSV serialization\nsection of the SSSOM Specification.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:5 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n0.99 | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n1.0 | \n
The following example illustrates what it looked like when Philip Str\u00f6mert (one\nof the new maintainers of CHMO) negatively reviewed the manually curated mapping\nbetween the FIX and CHMO terms in ex:2, which actually should have the\nrelation that the\nFIX:0000629 (pulsed field gel electrophoresis)\nis narrower than\nCHMO:0002315 (pulsed-field electrophoresis).\nTherefore, the reviewer_agreement is set to -1.0, meaning full disagree.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:6 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:exactMatch | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0009-0009-1663-1003 | \n0.8 | \norcid:0000-0002-1595-3213 | \n-1.0 | \n
It's not so common to have a situation where the reviewer will be fully\nambivalent and annotate the reviewer_agreement as $0.0$, so no example is\ngiven for this scenario.
Warning
Note that this review workflow is destructive - it alters the identity of\nthe semantic mapping record (i.e., a row in the SSSOM file). Importantly, this\nmeans that the semantic mapping record's\nhash\nchanges. This is an important implementation detail depending on how you or\nyour semantic mapping review software persists its semantic mappings.
\nThis workflow is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic in\nsssom_pydantic.process.review ().\nSSSOM Pydantic models semantic mappings as frozen objects, meaning that no\noperations happen in-place (i.e., all are destructive).
\nThe primary disadvantage with workflow M1 for reviewing a manually curated\nmapping is that when the reviewer disagrees, the workflow does not give the\nopportunity for the reviewer to either explicitly mark the mapping as incorrect\nor to fix it. The first version of the M2 workflow is to replace the original\nwith a new mapping explicitly marking it as incorrect by making the following\nchanges:
\npredicate_modifier (which almost always just means adding one)author_id column with the reviewer's ORCiDBelow, the first version of workflow M2 is applied to ex:2:
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \npredicate_modifier | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:7 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:exactMatch | \nNot | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0002-1595-3213 | \n0.95 | \n
The second version of the workflow M2 is applicable when the reviewer knows how\nto fix the mapping. In the pulsed-field electrophoresis example, the mapping can\nbe fixed by changing the predicate from exact match to narrow match. Similarly,\nthe old mapping gets replaced with the reviewer's ORCiD as the new author, a new\npredicate, a new confidence, and any other relevant changes.
\n| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:8 | \nFIX:0000629 | \npulsed field gel electrophoresis | \nskos:narrowMatch | \nCHMO:0002315 | \npulsed-field electrophoresis | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0002-1595-3213 | \n0.95 | \n
After, this mapping can once again undergo mapping workflow M1!
\nIn the workflow M3, two or more curators are tasked to independently manually\ncurate mappings (e.g., between the same two resources). The appearance of the\nsame mapping in two or more of the curators results can be used as a stand-in\nfor review. Conversely, workflow M3 can also amplify systematically incorrect\ncorrect, e.g., where every curator makes the same mistake because of some\nqualities of the resources being curated.
\nWhile I was locked down with my parents and sister (a microbiologist) during the\nCOVID-19 pandemic, I trained her in semantic mapping curation, then she made\nsignificant contributions to the original Biomappings paper and then to disease\nmappings in MONDO and DOID. I could imagine recuriting her for a curator\nconsensus scenario, where she would independently add ex:9 with her own\nconfidence (and any other columns).
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:1 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n0.99 | \n
| ex:9 | \nMONDO:0005641 | \naleutian mink disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:2934 | \naleutian mink disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-1307-2508 | \n0.98 | \n
After applying workflow M3, the comparison workflow I proposed in a previous\npost can be used to highlight discrepancies that\ncan be reviewed with workflow M1 and/or M2.
\nNote
Unlike workflows M1 and M2, this review workflow is idempotent - it does not\nalter the identity of the semantic mapping record (i.e., a row in the SSSOM\nfile).
\nThis workflow operates similarly to workflow M1 where a reviewer adds their\ninformation into the reviewer_id, reviewer_agreement, and review_date\nslots. However, the disadvantage of this workflow is that justifications for\nautomatically generated mappings such as\nsemapv:LexicalMatching and\nsemapv:SemanticSimilarityThresholdMatching\nare weaker, and review does not upgrade their justification to\nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration,\nwhich is implicitly more trustworthy.
In the following example, mapping ex:3 is reviewed with high agreement.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:10 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.778 | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n1.0 | \n
Conversely, in the following example, mapping ex:4 is reviewed, with high\ndisagreement.
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \nreviewer_id | \nreviewer_agreement | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:11 | \nMONDO:0015053 | \nhereditary angioedema type 1 | \nskos:exactMatch | \nmesh:D056829 | \nHereditary Angioedema Types I and II | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.54 | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n-1.0 | \n
This workflow is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic in\nsssom_pydantic.process.review ().\nThe implementation is shared for workflow W1 and A1.
\nIn this workflow that mirrors workflow M2, a reviewer of an automatically\ngenerated mapping overwrites the automatically generated mapping with a manual\ncuration. Unlike M2, this workflow importantly includes the following changes:
\nauthor_id field and confidence (not the reviewer_id and\nreviewer_agreement)The following example shows this workflow applied to mapping ex:3:
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nconfidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:12 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \norcid:0000-0001-5208-3432 | \n1.0 | \n
I'm going to omit showing what happens when you want to reject a mapping (Not\ngets added) or update the predicate. These both work as expected in light of\nworkflow M2. Similarly, the results of any application of workflow A2 can then\nbe reviewed with workflow M1 after.
This workflow is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic in\nsssom_pydantic.process.curate ().\nSSSOM Pydantic models semantic mappings as frozen objects, meaning that no\noperations happen in-place (i.e., all are destructive).
\nOne of the drawbacks of workflow A2 is that it throws away provenance\ninformation from the lexical mapping. Depending on your use case, it might be\ndesired to keep that. Workflow A3 extends workflow A2 to keep the original\nmapping intact and simply append the new mapping. Importantly, the new mapping\nuses the derived_from field to point back\nto original automatically generated mapping record via the\nSSSOM record hash.\nThis is implemented in SSSOM Pydantic (note, the example hash in ex:13 is made\nup, I might add a real one later).
| record_id | \nsubject_id | \nsubject_label | \npredicate_id | \nobject_id | \nobject_label | \nmapping_justification | \nauthor_id | \nmapping_tool | \nmapping_tool_id | \nmapping_tool_version | \nconfidence | \nderived_from | \n
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ex:3 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:LexicalMatching | \n\u00a0 | \nSSSOM Curator | \nwikidata:Q138902949 | \n0.6.3 | \n0.778 | \n\u00a0 | \n
| ex:13 | \nMONDO:0005676 | \nborna disease | \nskos:exactMatch | \nDOID:5154 | \nborna disease | \nsemapv:ManualMappingCuration | \norcid:0000-0003-4423-4370 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n\u00a0 | \n0.99 | \nmapping:CED101AFD | \n
This workflow is implemented by a combination of SSSOM Pydantic's curate()\nfunction and the harness implemented by SSSOM Curator, but the way that mappings\nget persisted are ultimately an implementation detail.
In the following demo, I show how the\nSSSOM Curator, which runs the\nBiomappings project, implements\nworkflow A2 while curating some CHMO and IUPAC Goldbook mappings.
\n\nNico Matentzoglu, et al. (2023) published\nMapperGPT: large language models for linking and mapping entities,\nwhich suggests that agentic workflows such as those based on large language\nmodels (LLMs) could be used to review semantic mappings. Since 2023, several\nothers have investigated the idea as well.
\nI'm skeptical of the use of the word review here - I think that the\nreviewer_id slot should be reserved only review by a human (or group humans;\nthe slot is multivalued). In my opinion, the point of review is to add a\ntrustworthy judgment to a semantic mapping. I'm not against the use of (semi-)\nautomated methods for producing mappings, but it seems silly to have one\nstochastic automated method to assess another one.
At the top of the post, I mentioned the main goal was to help think through the\ncurator consensus scenario for CHMO, in which we had two curators produce\nhundreds of mostly overlapping mappings. The workflow from the previous\npost identified mappings that\nwere manually curated, but had conflicts, so this meant that we need to apply a\ncombination of workflow M1 to accept the correct mappings and workflow M2 to\nmark the incorrect ones or fix them. Then, either the consensus workflow M3\ncould be used for the rest, or Philip could do lots of painstaking work and do\nworkflow M1.
\nSince we want this to be a gold standard, he's going to go down the M1 route and\ndo a careful review of everything from the perspective of the student's\ncurations. Then, we could always apply the whole comparison workflow again and\ntake a quick final pass!
\nEach of the workflows presented here has drawbacks and might be appropriate\ndepending on your goals and the software you're using. In the end, you might\nhave a combination of manually curated and automatically generated mappings,\nsome of which are reviewed and some of which are not.
\nThe next step is to collapse many evidences into a single mapping that can be\nused for downstream applications of semantic mappings, such as in the\nconstruction of knowledge graphs. Part of that is to estimate the confidence of\nthe consensus mapping. I originally started thinking about these ideas while\ndeveloping the\nSemantic Mapping Reasoner and Assembler (SeMRA),\nbut refined and generalized the ideas to be applicable to arbitrary semantic\nmappings in SSSOM\nhere. In a\nfollow-up post, I'll write more about the SSSOM confidence model and the\nalgorithm I proposed for estimating combine confidences.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/gka4k-wtt21","guid":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/08/27/reviewing-sssom","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"5cz4g-v2m83","summary":"This post describes several complementary workflows for reviewing semantic mappings in the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) generated either by manual curation or (semi-)automated methods. It then demonstrates how the SSSOM Curator software package implements some of these workflows for the Biomappings project.","tags":["SSSOM","Semantic Mappings","Review","Biocuration"],"title":"Semantic Mapping Review Workflows","updated_at":1787853360,"url":"https://cthoyt.com/2026/08/27/reviewing-sssom.html","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Mykolas Romeris University, Faculty of Human and Social Studies"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Dagiene","given":"Eleonora","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0043-3837"},{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/01f5wp925","name":"Universitat Oberta de Catalunya"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Aibar","given":"Eduard","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1727-1523"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Leiden Madtrics"}],"community_id":"d8304840-75c2-4164-bc37-ec879c4f065b","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Leiden Madtrics","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/leidenmadtrics","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/d8304840-75c2-4164-bc37-ec879c4f065b/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":null,"slug":"leidenmadtrics","status":"active","subfield":"1804","title":"Leiden Madtrics","updated":1787830260,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Leiden Madtrics","blog_slug":"leidenmadtrics","content_html":"Companion post to Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner's \"Research culture as a politics of uncertainty\"
If research culture is a politics of uncertainty, then someone has to organise that politics. In a recent post, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner proposed understanding research culture as a way of distributing uncertainty across research systems: who can afford to take risks, whose research problems are easier to pursue, who bears the costs. This is a powerful framing. But it raises an obvious next question, which we set out to answer empirically: how,\nand by whom, is that uncertainty distributed in practice, and through what systems?
Our answer, based on a comparison of Spain and Lithuania, is that a large part of the work is done by something rarely discussed in research culture debates: publishing infrastructures. These two countries show, almost as a natural experiment, that similar national policy pressure produces very different outcomes depending on whether a domestic publishing infrastructure survives to absorb this pressure.
Spain and Lithuania are both semi-peripheral\u00a0European systems under the familiar pressure to internationalise: to publish in prestigious, core-based journals as the measure of success. Both saw the rapid arrival of high-volume open-access publishers such as MDPI. On paper, the incentive was identical. The outcome was not.
In Spain, a resilient ecosystem of university- and society-run journals (many in Spanish, and thus reaching readers across Latin America) remained standing. Spanish researchers could treat new open-access outlets as one more option: a portfolio addition layered onto domestic journals and traditional international ones. When MDPI's share climbed to roughly a third of national output, the system had the resources to push back; after the national agency ANECA delisted several titles, that share fell to around 13%. Uncertainty remained spread across multiple credibility circuits.
In Lithuania, national evaluation policy had spent two decades gradually marginalising domestic journals, whose share of the country's Web of Science output fell from a peak near 52% to about 7% by 2024. With the domestic circuit devalued, researchers had nowhere to distribute their bets. New publishers became not an addition but a systemic substitute, replacing an infrastructure that policy had hollowed out. What looks like individual strategic choice is, seen at the system level, a constrained response: uncertainty concentrated onto a narrow set of external, commercial pathways.
We call the first outcome autonomous coexistence and the second dependent displacement. The difference between them is not researcher virtue or national temperament, but whether a community-managed publishing infrastructure was allowed to keep functioning. These configurations point to a more general distinction in how systems adapt to shared pressures: whether new publishing models extend an existing repertoire of options or come to replace previously available pathways altogether.
This is the point we seek to add to the politics-of-uncertainty framing. Uncertainty is never encountered in a pure form; it is mediated. Publishing infrastructures are one of the most concrete ways in which this mediation is organised. They define the available pathways through which work can be made visible and credible, and in doing so they decide whether uncertainty can be spread\nacross options or gets funnelled into dependence.
That means research culture is not only about norms, working conditions, or good intentions. It is also an infrastructural condition. Evaluation systems do not merely respond to uncertainty; they systematically redistribute it, and they do so through the mundane machinery of journal lists, indexing databases, and incentives. This also reframes directionality: by privileging particular formats and databases, evaluation systems stabilise some research trajectories and quietly render others less viable. This also reframes directionality as a matter of infrastructural configuration: by privileging particular formats and databases, evaluation systems stabilise some research trajectories while quietly rendering others less viable.
If the above is true, then protecting and governing publishing infrastructures is not a technical footnote to the research culture agenda; it is part of the agenda. A country that dismantles its domestic scholarly publishing, as has been argued before, does not simply lose a few journals; it loses the buffer that lets its researchers distribute uncertainty on their own terms. Reforming metrics alone may not be enough if the infrastructures that give reform something to land on have already been eroded.
This connects directly to a broader conversation about metascience and democracy: about illuminating the uncertainties we tend to neglect. Bringing infrastructure into that discussion grounds debates about uncertainty, directionality, and democratic engagement in the material organisation of research systems. The distribution of uncertainty is not neutral. It is designed, and crucially, it can be designed differently.
The full study is available to read: Dagien\u0117, E. & Aibar, E. (2026). \"Publishing infrastructures in the semi-periphery: how research assessment shapes the research output of Spain and Lithuania.\" Research Evaluation, 35(1), rvag042. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvag042
Header picture by chi_margo on Unsplash
DOI:\u00a0pending
September brings the start of a new academic year, and with it many of us will be looking at our professional goals and development opportunities. If you're looking for professional development resources but don't know where to start, The Bibliomagician now hosts a page listing over 20 resources for bibliometricians, librarians, and information professionals looking to upskill!\u00a0
\nThe page can be found here or under the Resources drop down menu in the navigation bar.
\nThis casually maintained page is not exhaustive and while some resources are specifically targeted towards bibliometric skills, there are others which are applicable to scholarly communications work and academic librarianship in general!\u00a0
\nThe Bibliomagician and LIS-Bibliometrics committee do not endorse any of the listed resources and merely provide this collection for your perusal and consideration. We welcome suggestions to the list but reserve the right to curate it as we see fit.\u00a0
\nWe hope that this provides inspiration and encouragement to our community to continue learning and growing!
\n\nUnless it states otherwise, the content of the Bibliomagician is licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/0mmrj-n9817","guid":"http://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/?p=5614","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1787788800,"rid":"0ebh8-jvs14","summary":"September brings the start of a new academic year, and with it many of us will be looking at our professional goals and development opportunities.","tags":["Metrics","Bibliometrician","Bibliometrics","Resources","Scientometrics"],"title":"New Professional Development Resources on The Bibliomagician","updated_at":1787839688,"url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2026/08/27/new-professional-development-resources-on-the-bibliomagician/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Front Matter"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fenner","given":"Martin","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Martin Fenner","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1419-2405"}],"community_id":"15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8","created":1672531200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"The Front Matter Blog covers the intersection of science and technology since 2007.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.53731/front_matter","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/15a362ea-8138-42b8-917f-1840a92addf8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/atom","filter":null,"generator":"Ghost","home_page_url":"https://blog.front-matter.de/","issn":"2749-9952","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.53731","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"front_matter","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"Front Matter","updated":1787821147,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Front Matter","blog_slug":"front_matter","content_html":"In November 2025 I reported my intentions of turning Rogue Scholar into a German non-profit organization, and the steps needed for that. The first step (needed by German law) is at least seven founding members and I am asking for your support.
In the November 2025 post I listed the following main steps to formally register a German non-profit:
This boils down to the following: meet in person with at least seven people, discuss and approve the bylaws, elect a founding board, and sign the bylaws in front of a notary. This will happen in Berlin with the tentative date of December 9. Three months are needed to draft the statutes, coordinate with a notary and tax authorities, and organize venue, travel and other logistics.
German law no longer requires the General Assembly to be held in person, but seven people signing the bylaws is still required, so meeting in person simplifies the process. German is the official language of the bylaws, but the General Assembly will be held in English and remote participation will be possible. I don't forsee any controversial discussions, and promotion of science and research is one of the legally recognized charitable purposes for a German non-profit.
Every natural person or organization can become a member. The membership fees will be set in fee regulations, but importantly membership is about governance of the non-profit organization, and will not be required for a science blog to be archived by Rogue Scholar.
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive has reached two important milestones this week, so the timing is right to do the next step and launch a non-profit organization:
The feature image of this post is the famous photograph of the 29 attendees of the fifth Solvay Conference of Physics in October 2027. The conference contributed extraordinarily to the clarification of the physical foundations of the quantum theory (Heisenberg). Diversity was still a huge problem, and Marie Curie was the only woman attending.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you want to become a founding Rogue Scholar member, or have any questions or comments.
\n\"The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself\" \u2013bell hooks, quoted by d. Sabela Grimes at Show and Prove, 9.18.10
This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP. In fact, I scratched out the rough draft of these lines in my notebook on the bus ride home, all Eminem 8 Mile-style. So embedded somewhere in my words will inevitably be the thick chug of the engine, the squeaky bounce-bounce of the shocks, the ocean-like roar of (the)17, and the steady tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk of hip hop pumping from my fellow commuter's earbuds. Across the bus aisle, this secondhand beat called to me and challenged me to think about ways that sound studies can reach across the (inter)disciplinary aisle to hip hop (and vice versa). So that's where my head's at right now: what does sound studies bring to hip hop's platform? And what does hip hop offer in return?
\nI should say first off that I don't necessarily see an intellectual conflict between these two fields\u2014although Norma Coates' 2008 Cinema Journal piece, \"Sound Studies: Missing the (Popular) Music for the Screens?\" makes a compelling case for institutional turf wars on the horizon between sound studies, media studies, and popular music study writ large\u2014I actually came to sound studies through hip hop, and obviously haven't left hip hop behind (and neither has Sounding Out!: peep Liana Silva and Scott Poulson-Bryant's recent posts). Among the many things that hip hop has done for me and to me\u2014personally, socially, and politically\u2014was to open my ears to all sorts of amazing and important sounds, which eventually translated academically into frustration with the limits of popular music study back in the early 2000s. I found many texts that deconstructed hip hop lyrics and visual imagery, parsed MC's personas, dropped some socio-historical science, and traced capitalist networks like you wouldn't believe, but when it came down to the constitutive element of the medium itself, the sonic art through which it devoted itself to moving heads, hearts, and butts simultaneously, there was silence (and not because Doug E. Fresh said so).
\nOutside of Tricia Rose's landmark chapter on \"flow, layering, and rupture\" in 1994's Black Noise, I found precious few texts that were willing or able to engage with the primary way in which hip hop put in work \"if not in the word, in the sound\" as Frederick Douglass once put it a long time ago. Hip hop was, true to its word, bringing the noise, and traditional music studies wasn't making meaning of it in even part of the way that hip hop audiences were. To signify on Shante Smalls's comment at Show and Prove in reference to trying to teach Murs's \"Dark Skinned White Girl\" to an NYU class, hip hop sounded to popular music scholars just like a guy talking over some beats\u2014all flattened out. So I strapped on my headphones night after night, trying to fill this void by listening and writing, writing and listening. You can read my early attempts in a discography of Los Angeles hip hop called \"Audible Angels\" I published online in 2004, in which I tried to capture the sonic signature of each artist I wrote about, integrating it with their vocal style, lyrical themes and historical and regional context. The fact that one of the artists in the discography sent me a remastered version of their record based on some of my commentary not only suggested that I did a halfway decent job, but also that the artists themselves are clamoring for scholars to take their sound as seriously as they do.
\nBecause of the bus, my experience at the conference was shorter than I would have liked, so I can't remotely claim full coverage (I am especially sorry to have missed Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr.'s talk on Filipino DJs and contemporary U.S. racial formations, which I know would have (re)mixed sound, race, and hip hop, hamster style), so I will have to sample the bits and bytes that I did hear.
\nIn a panel on \"Methodology, Pedagogy, and Educational Practice,\" M.C. K-Swift talked about the sonic differences between standard English, Black English, and Hip Hop English and what it means to code switch between all three. Johan S\u00f6derman discussed similar issues about hip hop in Sweden, especially the way in which hip hop enables marginalized Swedish youth to sound and signify differently in the same language.
\nIn the panel I moderated, \"Aesthetic Dimensions of Hip Hop\"\u2014in which there were amazing papers by Naomi Bragin on popping in Northern California's East Bay and Jessica Pab\u00f3n on the \"feminist masculinity\" of female graffiti in Brasil, Mexico, and the US\u2014sound was largely a shadow presence, animating limbs, accompanying film, and being punctuated by muscle pops and krylon hisses. Jens Althoff discussed 1970s samples briefly in his talk on the influence of blaxploitation cinema on hip hop but there was really only one paper that explicitly addressed sound, Joshua Bennett 's \"I Love it When You Call Me Big (Poppa).\" Bennett used Barthes' \"The Grain of the Voice\" to give an evocative and nuanced reading of the \"palpable sense of surplus\" in Notorious B.I.G's voice, the way in which his heavy timbre comes together with his \"wheezing undertone\" to re-present his corporeal body as superabundant rather than substandard.
\nFinally, in the afternoon, I was fascinated by Nicole Hodges Persley's exploration of the sound of cross-racial appropriation both in her paper, \"People in Me\" and in her performance, in which she used both voice and gesture to represent a white suburban teen, a young Asian graffiti writer from Silverlake, and a Senegalese student drawn to the U.S. by hip hop. Persley raised important questions about who has \"the right to talk black\" while addressing the pleasures and the politics of using the body as a remixing agent and translator of hip hop, accent, culture and immigrant experience.
\nSo of course I came to Show and Prove eager to take in some talk about sound\u2014and I wouldn't say I was disappointed. Surprised (slightly) and challenged (totally), but not disappointed. Sound wasn't as center stage as I expected, but it certainly wasn't marginalized either. Instead, it was ubiquitous; sound in hip hop studies seems to be taken for granted in the same way that vision is just about everywhere else. Although hip hop is understood to be an audio-visual art, its organizing metaphors are sonic: remixing, sampling, scratching, and Dj-ing all describe sonic phenomena as well as aural frameworks for understanding the world. The way in which hip hop studies take sound for granted presents both a lesson and an opportunity for sound studies.
\nWhile I had been hoping to hear more papers that brought the conversation back around to the beat, I felt that all the papers spoke through it, even if the topic reached beyond it to bodily movement, visual culture, theatre, and pedagogy. And that is where I think hip hop studies asks sound studies to step up its game\u2014to take seriously sound's intersection with the other senses, using sound as a jumping off point and not always a final destination. In Jeff Chang 's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop, dancer Rennie Harris described bodily movement as \"just the last manifestation of sound,\" which blew my mind, because even though sound and motion are so fluidly entangled, we usually talk about them as if they are separate entities.
\nOn the flip side, one of the things that distinguishes sound studies from popular music study is its methodology\u2014the way in which sound is treated as an active process, a way of thinking and being, rather than solely an object of study. And this methodology is what I think sound studies can offer hip hop studies\u2014a sustained conversation on listening in a multiplicity of forms. Listening practices are what knits the different elements of hip hop together, what links artist to producer to audience, sometimes in the very same body at the very same time. What happens when we think of hip hop artists as listeners? What if we viewed them not only as producers of tracks but also of listening practices? Is there such a thing as hip hop listening? If so, what are its ethics and aesthetics? How might hip hop listening practices impact and feed into the various modes of hip-hop performance in music and beyond: dance, cinema, theatre, literature, graphic design?
\nSo, while hip hop studies and sound studies have quite a bit to show and prove to each other, I can't be the only one eager for the collabo.
\n
\u2014
\nFeatured Image by Michael Coughlin, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/apjdn-mx606","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=639","image":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/52537656624_f5cccc6dc1_c.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1285027200,"rid":"pjxkc-ycq37","summary":"This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP.","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Black Studies","Conferences","Diasporic Sound"],"title":"Ill Communication: Hip Hop Studies & Sound Studies @ Show And Prove","updated_at":1787782789,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/09/20/ill-communication/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Ford","given":"Robert"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"Ever since the Chicago Cubs installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, music has been a part of the baseball ballpark experience. Unlike basketball, hockey or football, baseball doesn't have non-stop action, and its frequent periods of inaction give an organist or stadium DJ a broad canvas on which to improvise. Initially, ballpark music was strictly organ music, as organs were present at every ballpark by the middle of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the organist was complemented by the stadium DJ, who played recorded music over the stadium sound system. Gradually, the DJ overtook the organist and many stadiums no longer play live organ music; a little less than half of the 30 ballparks that host Major League Baseball games today don't employ an organist.
\nAs technology improved, allowing stadium DJs to play music on the computer rather than on the record or 8-track player, teams began allowing baseball players to choose the music they wanted to hear. And, in the 1990s, the phrase \"walk-up music\" entered the sports fan's vernacular. Position players chose songs for the stadium DJ to play when they walked from the on-deck circle to the batter's box. Pitchers picked music to be played while they warmed up at the start of their outing.
\nPlayers select their music in a variety of ways. Some pick a song from their favorite artists, artists that often originate from their corner of the world (e.g. a lefthanded pitcher from Texas warming up to country music or Southern hip-hop; a utility infielder from the Dominican Republic opting for a merengue or bachata tune). Others will choose music they feel helps motivate them to perform better on the field, choosing a new song whenever they enter a slump. Some players will even allow the stadium DJ to pick their music. In 2007, New York Mets third baseman David Wright gave the fans the opportunity to vote for his walk-up song online, giving them list of 50 of his favorites to choose from (the fans choice: \"Me & U,\" the only hit by Cassie, a hip-hop artist).
\nWhile almost every baseball player has walk-up music, only a handful of players have had their music become an iconic part of their image and legacy. The best example of a player who's become closely identified with his entrance music is New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera.
\nPhoto by Flickr user Dennis
Rivera has been the Yankees' closer for more than a decade and a half, called upon to get the last three outs in the ninth inning when the Yankees are ahead by a handful of runs. The closer's role is one of the most pressure-packed in all of team sports. Do it well, and your opponents often feel defeated as soon as you come into the game. Do it poorly, and you'll frustrate your teammates, your manager and your team's fan base. After all, nothing's more demoralizing than losing a game you've all but won, and a closer's job is to turn almost-certain wins into definite victories. Rivera is arguably the best closer in baseball history, an integral part of a Yankees team that's won five championships and advanced to the playoffs in all but one of his 16 seasons.
\nDuring Rivera's rise to prominence in the late 1990s, the DJ at Yankee Stadium, his home ballpark, began playing \"Enter Sandman\" by Metallica when Rivera came into the game. To a certain extent, \"Enter Sandman\" seems like a strange choice for Rivera's entrance. While it does start off softly before building to a eardrum-thumping crescendo of guitars, \"Enter Sandman\" is a loud, heavy-metal song. Rivera, the most reserved of the Yankees superstars developed over the last two decades, is serene and soft-spoken. To the untrained ear, \"Enter Sandman\" sounds arrogant and boastful, two words that have never been used to describe Rivera.
\nHowever, in many ways, \"Enter Sandman\" does compliment Rivera. Its lyrics, about a child battling nightmares as he tries to sleep, are a perfect metaphor for Rivera, whose job is to gives opposing hitters nightmares while trying to put the game to bed in the Yankees' favor. Rivera, a deeply religious man by all accounts, probably approves of the song's encouragement to \"Say your prayers little one\" and its recitation of a classic children's bedtime prayer (\"Now I lay me down to sleep/Pray the Lord my soul to keep\u2026\"). In addition, Rivera may also get a kick out of the idea of opposing hitters saying their prayers before facing the dancing and darting fastballs that he throws with ruthless efficiency and pinpoint accuracy.
\nIt also helps that Yankee Stadium is one of the loudest outdoor venues anywhere. Its combination of rabid fans and their New York-style obnoxiousness and hubris combined with an ear-splitting sound system that could wake the dead already makes the Bronx, NY stadium one of the toughest venues for visiting teams to compete. Combine those elements with a song that's loud, even before you raise the volume, being played while an indomitable closer jogs to the pitcher's mound from the bullpen behind the outfield fence and makes his warm-up throws and it isn't hard to understand why many enemy teams are mentally vanquished before they even take their cuts against Rivera, whose entrance routine serves to both whip the Yankee Stadium crowd into a frenzy and intimidate opponents.
\nPhoto by de Mel
Would Rivera be as dominant without such scene-setter is a legitimate question. While baseball is a very technical sport, requiring precision whether you're fielding a ground ball or laying down a bunt, emotion and superstition has a prominent place in the sport. Yankee Stadium is already one of the most hostile stadiums for opponents; throw in a great closer coming out to a ominous, foreboding song and it's understandable how an opponent's anxiety would be heightened. You could also argue that, Rivera is so good, what's playing over the sound system is immaterial. After all, Rivera does play half his games on the road, away from Yankee Stadium and \"Enter Sandman,\" and he has managed to excel in those contests as well.
\nRivera is now 40 years old and still among the best at an age when most baseball players are retired or on the downward slope. Upon retirement (and the requisite five-year waiting period), Rivera will almost certainly be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame with the other greats. And, while \"Enter Sandman\" hasn't been the sole reason for his success, it will always be an indelible part of Rivera's legacy.
\n\u2013Robert Ford
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It's no secret that over the course of the twentieth century, aesthetic productions have drawn increasingly on recycled and re-appropriated materials. Perhaps, for this reason, the above video \u2013 a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller on the newly minted Mario Paint Composer \u2013 sounds absolutely mundane. Nothing new, just another curiosity born out of the collective consciousness we cannily refer to as the Internets, which we understand jokingly as a series of tubes, notably Youtubes. Laffs aside, this phenomena complicates many traditional modes of interpretation.How do we hear the music of a convergence era when within it lies a devious set of connotations, each serving to reorient the listener to its own particular theme? What tactics do listeners take when interpreting this semiotic collision of sound, icon and song? These questions complicate the topic of genre, where a social consensus traditionally guides the collective organization of a medium. What social and sonic forms shape our understanding of Thriller as it was reproduced by Mario Paint Composer on Youtube in 2008?
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Before delving too deeply into a discussion of genre, it is important to situate the phenomena of convergence in a pre-digital context. Although the user-centric nature of web 2.0 has certainly helped to accelerate this process, one needs to look no further than Dick Hebdige's \"The Meaning of Mod,\" in the anthology Resistance Through Rituals, to sense an earlier precedent to the mash-up culture we observe today. Drawn to the adventure of a dangerous soHo night-life culture, \"The mod dealt his blows by inverting and distorting the images (of neatness, of short hair) so cherished by his employers and parents, to create a style, which while being overtly close to the straight world was nonetheless incomprehensible to it.\" Although Hebdige is writing in 1974, long before computers would become mainstream, he makes a worthy point here about the appropriation of fashion. Constructing it as an act of distortion,Hebdige argues that early 1960s mods (understood here as a working class youth movement), through their stylistic appropriations were able to undermine the fabric of British society. By acting as criminals, but lauding the style of white collar workers \u2013 suits, short hair \u2013 mods help to show that semiotic convergence is not something new, instead it can be read as a stance of resistance.
\nIn the case of Thriller, resistance is too strong a word. I prefer distortion, it is value neutral, although it can easily be understood in the context of resistance. Thriller on Mario Paint Composer distorts Thriller by Michael Jackson. By simplifying the song to a series of 16-bit samples, the song's transcriber geoffnet1, translates it all to the symbolic language of Mario Paint \u2013 where mushrooms sound like drums, hearts are bass notes, ships are cymbals, flowers are horns, cars are synth pads and game-boys sound like blips. geoffnet1's Thriller is a distortion of the Mario Paint Composer sound as well; originally a part of the 1992 Super Nintendo cartridge, Mario Paint, Mario Paint Composer is now a fan-modded update of its original form. Unlike the original Mario Paint Composer has been designed with functionality taking a precedent over accessibility. Originally marketed as an intuitive music scripting software, the following limitations were part and parcel of the platform (These restrictions have been copied from Tombobbuilder's page, a musician who works with the limits of Mario Paint Composer as it was originally distributed.):
\n1. Only 24 measures are available.
\n2. No more than three notes at a time.
\n3. You can not double notes on the same line or space.
\n4. Tempo is restricted.
\n5. There is no fluctuation in dynamics (volume).
\n6. No sharps or flats are available.
\n7. Can only compose using the \"white keys\" from the piano.
\n8. Only two of each letter name are available (except A, where there is only one).
\n9. C major and A natural minor are the only keys to compose in.
Of these restrictions, Thriller only conforms to the third: \"You can not double notes on the same line or space,\" in this regard it distorts what most people understand as the Mario Paint sound as well. By no means am I calling this work inauthentic, instead I am calling attention to the stability of sonic tropes in our cultural memory. The sound of Mario Paint is not remembered for the limitations described above, instead, there is a stable and distinct sonic fingerprint which is derived from the alchemy of icon, sound and song though which genre can be constructed and maintained.
\nThriller is 8-bit music, even though there is nothing 8-bit about it. Similar to the way in which mods subverted the British status-quo, Thriller puts the idea of genre into crisis. This is not a crisis that works to undermine the existence of genre as a phenomenon, it is instead a crisis of interpretation, where the traditional means through which a genre can be identified are called into question. No longer can the easy answers be found at Allmusic or Wikipedia, some sounds have become more epistemically ellusive. Ultimately, this is a good thing, as it encourages listeners to take a critical ear to what they are listening to \u2013 and how they come to understand it.
\nAT
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Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, \"Hey, I'm not done! You can't go yet!\" And they laugh. And they stay.
\nAlbum Cover: Andreas Pape's The Big Hit
I am an economist and a musician. In both of my chosen fields, performance is a necessary component. As an economist, I teach and I present papers; as a musician, I put on shows. Performance is the willful construction of a series of events using the body\u2014hands, voice, gesture\u2014and the instruments the body can manipulate to create a particular mental state for the witnesses. In the days leading up to my next show on October 16th at The Beef in Binghamton, NY, I have pondered the intimate ways in which listening structures the corporeal nature of performance. As an economist, I understand that performance is strategic, in that I imagine a listener for my music and choose my actions to influence that listener. As a musician, I recall moments that I listened.
\nThe audience is one of the instruments available to the performer. I plan to use this to my advantage at my upcoming show. When I envision my fingers first passing across my guitar, the audience will not be engaged with me: they will be talking to each other, getting a drink, finding a seat. I will play a song at a normal volume; given the other noise, it will be background, not a centerpiece. Most people will hear it, but not many will notice it. The climax of the song will involve me holding a loud, high vocal note until all other noise dies. Each person there will have a moment in which they hear that note and wonder what it is and they will grow silent. By the end of the note, every person in the room will realize that the performance has started and that this sustained note is part of a song they have been hearing but not listening to for several minutes. As the note draws to a close, they will feel compelled to shout, to clap, to exclaim. Their part in this performance\u2014the noise, the silence, then the noise\u2014will be one they will play without knowing, beforehand, that they were included.
\nI imagine this moment like the opening to Belle And Sebastian's \"I Don't Love Anyone:\" 'I don't love anyone/ You're not listening/ \u2026 I don't love anyone/You're not listening even now.' As a listener, you realize as he says 'even now,' that he's right: you weren't listening. It was a transcendent moment that shocks me as a listener: the author of the song had climbed inside my head without me knowing, and then was able to name exactly the listening experience I was having.
\nIn Chronicles, Bob Dylan describes a listening experience built around a singer who constructs her own way to view the rhythm of a song. \"I'd seen [Martha Reeves] in New York \u2026 where she'd been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn't keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine was her entire band\" (160). This phrasing that is out-of-phase with the band (or the audience) reminds me of Odetta.
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Odetta might be best known for her performance of \"I've been driving on Bald Mountain/Water Boy.\" She rebuilt those two traditional 4/4 folk songs swung onto a three-beat triplet, so what emerges is a swinging triplet where beats two and three are rushed in after a lethargic one: ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three. After several times though the verses, she stops the guitar entirely and carries a long vocal note, setting up a moment of unnaturally long silence. The guitar and grunt that end the silence seem arrhythmic to my ear, but Odetta can sing by her own time that swings in and out of phase with the rest of us. We're not meant to know when resolution comes, and it's that uncertainty that Odetta wants us to experience.
\nI once saw Jeff Tweedy use a controlled complete silence with Wilco's performance of \"Misunderstood\" from Being There in 2001. Tweedy doesn't use uncertainty as Odetta does; his use of silence is more akin to methodically turning on and off a bedroom light in the middle of the night. In particular, the band performs an extended outro which involves two beats of sound and two beats of silence: \"NOTHING \u2013 -.\" On \"NAH\" and \"THING\" the whole band is together on two identical, stinging staccato notes.
\n\nSeeking to recreate a combination of those listening experiences in my audience, I wrote \"Something This Easy,\" a song about confusing interactions with an ex. The song is forty percent silence: nineteen beats of melody followed by thirteen beats of silence. I don't tap my foot or keep time during the silence, save for holding my breath, and I bring back the sound when I (have to) exhale. I try to keep the audience slightly and repeatedly startled by resisting any precise expectation of sound that they may hold. After a beat, the audience will break the silence when I make them laugh with the line: \"I know your body like a Swedish furniture map.\" With the eruption of laughter in an otherwise silent room, my audience becomes the instrument creating the music that they are listening to at that moment. That is, they are the only instrument I'm playing.
\nAs a musician, this is the listening experience I designed: the laughter rings after I've triggered it like a overtone ring on a string long after having been plucked and left. As an economist, I see how I used the imagined listener successfully: I forecasted how these real listeners would react, and was able to use that forecast to design not only this moment, but potentially many others as well.
\nDownloadable Pape Mix of Wilco, Odetta, and his own \"Something this Easy\":
\nRhythm to Organize Silence (Misunderstood_Tweedy_ Bald Mtn_Odetta_ SmthThisEasy_Pape)
\nView Andreas Duus Pape's latest album The Big Hit here
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