The lovely people at Mokin keep sending me their USB-C hubs to review, and I'm happy to do so. They work splendidly with my Linux and Windows machines, and they provide more ports than I ever thought necessary.
\n\n![\"A](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Mokin-14.jpg\")
\n\nThis one is positively festooned with extra ports. Let's take a look.
\n\nPlug your power adapter into the hub, and then the hub into your laptop. With most hubs, that's it; you've lost a C port. This has an extra USB-C port - so you don't lose anything. Personally, I'd prefer more USB-C ports.
\n\nInstead, you get 3x USB-A 3.0 ports, and 2x USB-A 2.0 ports. That's a lot of room for peripherals. They're all well spaced out, so you should be able to cram everything in.
\n\nAll these sorts of hubs tend to have an SD slot and a microSD slot. Read and write speeds hit the limit of the cards I had - but you may be better off using the USB 3 ports if you really need speed. Speaking of which...
\n\nObviously, if you have a hundred gadgets plugged in - and only one USB-C cable - there's a limit to the total throughput. That said, the Ethernet port topped out my 650Mbps broadband - and I don't have anything much faster than that!
\n\nThere are two HDMI ports and a legacy VGA port. I'll be honest, I can't remember the last time I needed to plug my laptop into an analogue video cable. But I guess if you go to lots of crappy conference venues it might be useful?
\n\nMy old laptop was able to drive two monitors at the same time, which was pretty useful. You're limited to one at 4k@60Hz - if you're using two HDMI, you'll only get 30Hz. But if you're happy with 1080p, you'll get 60Hz on both.
\n\nApparently MacOS doesn't support triple display.
\n\nUSB's Power Delivery mode is a still a bit confusing. I used a 100W Dell charger and, USB-C PD tester saw that about 80% of the power was making it to the laptop.
\n\nWith the power unplugged, the hub drew electricity from the laptop in order to charge all the gadgets.
\n\nWeirdly, the analogue sound out didn't show up for me in Linux. I'm not heartbroken by that - either my laptop has a speaker out or the HDMI device does. But it is a bit weird that it didn't show.
\n\nAs with all modern devices, it is plug-and-play. All my gadgets worked fine with it. This is what Linux sees:
\n\nID 0bda:8153 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter\nID 2109:0817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB3.0 Hub \nID 2109:0817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB3.0 Hub \nID 1a40:0801 Terminus Technology Inc. USB 2.0 Hub\n2109:8817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB Billboard Device \nID 2109:2817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB2.0 Hub \nID 2109:2817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB2.0 Hub \nThere's a lot packed into a fairly small box. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you'll pay about \u00a360 on Amazon for it.
\n\n![\"Small](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Mokin-14-1.jpg\")
\n\nIt's a neat little halfway house between a small adapter with a couple of ports and a massive docking station. But if you don't need all those ports, there's probably something cheaper.
\n\nI guess this is aimed at people plugging in to all sorts of weird screens on their travels. I think a DisplayPort would have been a better choice than double HDMI.
\n\nSo a bit of a mixed bag. If you need these options, it is close to perfect. But it may be excessive for some.
\n\nReaders of this blog can get 25% off at https://mokinglobal.com/ using code TERENCE25.\nOffer expires 2024-03-31
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=49302&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/brgt2-zbw98","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=49302","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Mokin-14.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1705622400,"rid":"jjycr-vc464","summary":"The lovely people at Mokin keep sending me their USB-C hubs to review, and I'm happy to do so. They work splendidly with my Linux and Windows machines, and they provide more ports than I ever thought necessary. This one is positively festooned with extra ports. Let's take a look. USB-C Plug your power adapter into the hub, and then the hub into your laptop.","tags":["/etc/","Gadget","Mokin","Review","USB-C"],"title":"Review: Another USB-C Hub from Mokin - 14-in-1","updated_at":1790711959,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/review-another-usb-c-hub-from-mokin-14-in-1/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"I've been looking for this rare beast for ages - a hub which has multiple USB-C outputs!
\n\nYou see it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that computers don't have enough ports on them. And laptops? Pah! A couple of USB-C if you're lucky, and one of them has to be used for power. What a world!
\n\nThis is the MOKiN USB-C Triple-Display Docking Station - MODK1402. It's a bit over \u00a3100 depending on the deal you get.
\n\n![\"Small](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Mokin-hub.jpg\")
\n\nShiny! This turns one USB port on your laptop to fourteen extra ports.
\n\nSo, what's it packing?
\n\nOn the back is:
\n\n![\"Back](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/bacl.jpg\")
\n\nOn the front is:
\n\n![\"Front](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/front.jpg\")
\n\nOn both Windows 11 and Linux, everything worked just fine. Sorry there isn't anything more interesting to report there! No drivers to install. No weird command-line incantations. The promise of Plug-And-Play is met.
\n\nWell... Mostly. See the niggles section.
\n\nI tried using a single 1080p external monitor over HDMI and that was picked up. My 4K DisplayPort monitor also worked. I also tried a 720p TV on HDMI - and it happily displayed on all three screens.
\n\nI don't have a Mac to test with, but it all should work0.
\n\nThe Ethernet maxed out my 500Mbps Internet connection. I was able to quickly transfer files from between the SD card and the drives. All the USB gadgets I plugged in worked. Again, super boring - which is just what I wanted.
\n\nThe volume from the audio output was loud and stereo separated.
\n\nI had a dozen things plugged in and it kept on chugging.
\n\n![\"USB](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/LED.jpg\")
\n\nThere's no fan, so there's no noise from it. Basically, it is a small and boring box which does its job extremely well.
\n\nNow, a quick disclaimer. I am not a particularly demanding user. I don't have 3x 4K displays which are streaming live video from a USB stick while I download all of Wikipedia via Ethernet onto an SD card at the same time as blasting 5.1 audio and charging a dozen laptops. There's always going to be a limit to how much data and power you can squeeze through a single cable.
\n\nI found that after my laptop went to sleep it sometimes didn't detect the HDMI output. I pressed the power button on the hub to turn in off. Then - and this will shock you - turned it back on again. HDMI sprang to life without a complaint. Perhaps it's my laptop, or my monitor, or the HDMI? Either way, not a show stopper.
\n\nWindows complained that the cable wasn't providing enough power and I should use the original Dell\u00ae\u2122 charger. But it charged up quickly. I don't have a PD cable tester to see how many Watts it is actually delivering.
\n\nIt did get a little warm after a few hours use. Nothing to be concerned about, but don't cover it with a cloth.
\n\nThe audio out is louder than I was getting via HDMI and there is a bit of cross-chatter. If your speakers' volume is up high, you'll hear a bit of an electronic squeal / hum when no sound is playing.
\n\nThe white LED is - like all modern electronics - bright. I'd have preferred something a bit more subtle.
\n\nPersonally, I'd rather have extra HDMI than DisplayPorts. But I get that it is more efficient and better future-proofed.
\n\nIt takes up a small amount of desk-space. A tower-design might have been nice. But I suspect the heat dissipation might have been an issue.
\n\nThese are weak complaints. In terms of price:port ratio, it is excellent.
\n\nFor nerds like me, this is what lsusb spits out:
Bus 004 Device 014: ID 0b95:1790 ASIX Electronics Corp. AX88179 Gigabit Ethernet\nBus 004 Device 013: ID 0bda:0326 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Card reader\nBus 004 Device 012: ID 0bda:0411 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Hub\nBus 004 Device 011: ID 0bda:0420 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 4-Port USB 3.0 Hub\nBus 001 Device 042: ID 0bda:1100 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. HID Device\nBus 001 Device 041: ID 0d8c:0134 C-Media Electronics, Inc. USB PnP Audio Device\nBus 001 Device 039: ID 0bda:5411 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTS5411 Hub\nBus 001 Device 037: ID 1b3f:2008 Generalplus Technology Inc. USB Audio Device\nBus 001 Device 035: ID 1a40:0101 Terminus Technology Inc. Hub\nBus 001 Device 034: ID 0bda:5420 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 4-Port USB 2.0 Hub\nLots of hubs just smushed together! I didn't bother cracking the case open. If you do, please leave a picture in the comments.
\n\nThe MODK1402 can drive 3 external monitors. But, again, there's a limit to how much you can squirt down a single USB-C cable. They aren't magic!
\n\nHere are the configs that it lists. I don't have an 8K monitor to test(!) so please report back if you do have a suitable set of monitors.
\n\n| \n In DP1.4 \n | \n HDMI | \nDP 1 | \nDP 2 | \n
| \n Single display \n | \n 8k@30Hz | \n \n | \n |
| \n | \n 8k@30Hz | \n \n | |
| \n | \n | 8k@30Hz | \n |
| \n Dual display \n | \n 4K@60Hz | \n 4K@60Hz | \n\n |
| \n | 4K@60Hz | \n4K@60Hz | \n |
4K@60Hz | \n \n | 4K@60Hz | \n |
Triple display | \n 4K@60Hz | \n4K@30Hz | \n4K@30Hz | \n
| \n In DP1.2 \n | \n HDMI | \nDP 1 | \nDP 2 | \n
Single display | \n 4K@30Hz | \n\n | \n |
| \n | \n | 4K@30Hz | \n \n |
| \n | \n | \n | 4K@30Hz | \n
Dual display | \n 2K@60Hz | \n1080P@60Hz | \n\n |
| \n | \n | 2K@60Hz | \n1080P@60Hz | \n
| \n | 1080P@60Hz | \n \n | 2K@60Hz | \n
| \n Triple display \n | \n \n Only can light up two displays \n | \n
If you need multiple USB-C ports out from your hub, this is one of the few devices which is capable of doing so. Having 4 extra USB-A ports is excellent. Three monitors is overkill for me - but it is good to be future-proof. The long cable makes it easy to swap between laptops which have their ports on different sides.
\n\nAt the end of the day, one cable turns into 14 working ports. All for a bit over a hundred quid. Nice!
\n\nAlthough MacOS is prevented from using more than one external monitor, as decreed by The Word of St Jobs. Anyone wanting to use more without buying an Apple-blessed device is a heretic and must be shunned. \u21a9\ufe0e
\n![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=46469&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/xqjag-qzm83","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=46469","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/LED.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1690934400,"rid":"dr10h-rat66","summary":"I've been looking for this rare beast for ages - a hub which has multiple USB-C outputs! You see it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that computers don't have enough ports on them. And laptops? Pah! A couple of USB-C if you're lucky, and one of them has to be used for power. What a world! This is the MOKiN USB-C Triple-Display Docking Station - MODK1402.","tags":["/etc/","Gadget","Linux","Mokin","Review"],"title":"Gadget Review: Mokin USB-C Docking Station (+ Linux information)","updated_at":1790711958,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/08/gadget-review-mokin-usb-c-docking-station-linux-information/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"You can never have too many USB-C ports, right? It's rubbish having a cheap laptop with only a single USB-C port. So, the good folks at Mokin have sent me a gadget which turns your single and lonely USB-C port into FIVE USB-C ports.
\n\n![\"A](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mokin-usb-c.webp\")
\n\nAlong the side you get 4 USB-C 3.1 ports which are theoretically capable of 10Gbps in aggregate.
\n\nAt the bottom is a USB-C 3.0 Power Delivery port which can take up to 100W of power.
\n\nThere's also an obligatory blue LED to let you know it is working.
\n\n![\"A](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/USB-C-Mokin.jpg\")
\n\nAs will all modern hubs, there's nothing to install. Plug it in and it starts working. Copying a large file from a USB 2.0 phone got a respectable 90mbps.
\n\nWhen plugged into ethernet, it got up to 660Mbps - which is about as fast as my broadband goes.
\n\nAnd I don't think I have any faster devices than that to check!
\n\nI used my USB-C PD tester. I plugged in a 100W capable charger into the hub's PD socket, and the output into my laptop. The hub passed through about 80% of the power I got when I was plugged in normally. So there is a bit of a hit in the power delivery.
\n\nThat said, it happily charged the laptop and all the devices attached to it. Even without power attached, the hub drew power from the laptop and charged the gadgets.
\n\nIt doesn't support \"Fast Role Swap\". So if you disconnect the power from the hub, your devices will briefly disconnect and reconnect again. Usually not a problem unless you're in the middle of a file transfer.
\n\nThe major issue is that there's no monitor output.
\n\nThis is a USB 3.1 hub. As I've mentioned before, in order to do video over USB, you need 3.2 capable hubs and cables.
\n\nFeel free to supply your own rant about USB-C versions here.
\n\nThis shows up as 05e3:0610 Genesys Logic, Inc. Hub and is supported by modern Linux kernels. I tried it on Ubuntu and Android and it worked just fine.
You can get this for about \u00a320 on Amazon depending on whether the algorithm likes you or not.
\n\nFor the price, I think it is excellent. I can't find anything so cheap or slim which does support video. Or has as many ports.
\n\nIf all you need are a bunch of extra C ports, this is perfect. Speeds are good, power transfer is good, and it works on Windows and Linux flawlessly. If you need video, try Mokin's USB-C Docking Station.
\n\nReaders of this blog can get 25% off at https://mokinglobal.com/ using code TERENCE25.\nOffer expires 2024-03-31
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=49161&HTTP_REFERER=DOI\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/s2cz4-vh075","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=49161","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mokin-usb-c.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1705449600,"rid":"1kbrb-87e57","summary":"You can never have too many USB-C ports, right? It's rubbish having a cheap laptop with only a single USB-C port. So, the good folks at Mokin have sent me a gadget which turns your single and lonely USB-C port into FIVE USB-C ports. Along the side you get 4 USB-C 3.1 ports which are theoretically capable of 10Gbps in aggregate.","tags":["/etc/","Gadget","Mokin","Review","USB-C"],"title":"Gadget Review: Mokin USB-C to USB-C & USB-C & USB-C & USB-C & USB-C","updated_at":1790711957,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/gadget-review-mokin-usb-c-to-usb-c-usb-c-usb-c-usb-c-usb-c/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/013meh722","name":"University of Cambridge"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Madhavapeddy","given":"Anil","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8954-2428"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"472a49be-dc61-4a17-97f0-d1ff17b0dadd","created":1760313600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/anil","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/472a49be-dc61-4a17-97f0-d1ff17b0dadd/logo","feed_format":"application/feed+json","feed_url":"https://anil.recoil.org/perma.json","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://anil.recoil.org/notes","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"anil","status":"active","subfield":"1702","title":"Anil Madhavapeddy's feed","updated":1790467200,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Anil Madhavapeddy's feed","blog_slug":"anil","content_html":"This is my last week of academic sabbatical! My previous\none happened during the pandemic, and so this is the first proper break I've had\nfor a long time. Looking back on it, the pace of change of technology has been\nso great this year that I'm very grateful to have had the time to ride the wave\nand keep up. I don't think I could have done so without the space to experiment\nthat a sabbatical gives, and I feel much better equipped for this new agentic\nworld we're heading into.
\nI'm always surprised by how many people comment that I must be relieved not to be\nteaching. The opposite is true: I love teaching, and wouldn't be a professor\notherwise! What I really didn't miss is the administrative load that gets\nhigher every year. This time around, I'm taking on being an examiner for the 1B\nCST Tripos, as well as Pembroke committee memberships for the finance and\nscrutiny and development and engagement committees, and also resuming the CRI management board and the University\nenvironmental committee.\nI've probably lost track of a few others that are in my inbox somewhere, but\nI'm sure I'll figure it out as term unfolds!
\nAs a committee counterbalance, I wonder if I'll find time to action the Cambridge Green Blue sporting idea this year. John Palfrey also mentioned to me that Harvard have a similar competitive Green cup, so there's precedent for some grassroots action here!
\nWhat's foremost on my mind is how to help our students prepare for the rapid\nsocietal changes happening with agentic AI, and so assembling a good reading\nlist comes first to educate myself.\nKathi Fisler has written an excellent paper on teaching CST in the agentic\nera\nthat's going to be in the November CACM. It's too late to change this year's\ncourse, but I'm already preparing a larger reboot of 1A FoCS with this\nin mind.
\n![\"%rc\"](\"https://anil.recoil.org/images/urs-anil-1.webp\" "\\"Blurry")
\nI went to dinner at the Vice-Chancellor's Lodge (Debbie Prentice) on Sunday for\na roundtable hosted by Professors Viktor Mayer-Sch\u00f6nberger and Urs Gasser. They've been\nkicking off a program on using environmental policy as a starting point for\nexploring how regulatory systems are interconnected, as part of a broader\nsocietal impact programme that they're developing at TUM. The chatter over dinner gave\nme a few more ideas too!
We discussed how different parts of society take on formative versus summative\napproaches. That is, how much do we want to just achieve an outcome ('fix that\npothole!'), and how much do we want a societal function that keeps humans\nusefully occupied ('you wouldn't send a robot to the gym for you'). Universities\nare obviously deeply worried about this divide, since many of our assessment\nregimes have drifted to summative assessments (like MOOCs) and lost track of\nthe importance of formative discourse in teaching.
\nCambridge, with its built-in collegiate inefficiency, does still have an edge\nhere due to our residential structure. However, it's no easy thing to be a\nstudent these days! Urs listed several reasons for their difficulties in\nGermany: students hold multiple jobs due to the rising cost of living, they\nlive further out due to urban gentrification where older universities are, and\nthey have to digest more and more course content. Cambridge does reasonably\nwell on the second point with our Colleges, but the cost of living is now very\nhigh and the course content is getting more packed.
\nUrs also mentioned he used to work with John Palfrey\nat Harvard. John mentioned to me recently an entertaining factlet about who\ndecides where the next AI summit is,\nso I happily discovered he's also a blogger and have added him to my blogroll!
\n ![\"%rc\"](\"https://anil.recoil.org/images/storylistening-cover.webp\"/)
\nSo onto my winter reading list, raggedly assembled from these recent chitchats:
I think this is a solid list to get me going. If you have any further recommendations I'd be delighted to publish a proper reading list...
\nJon Crowcroft dropped me a note about Bristol Nature Telemetry via Laura James. They build privacy-first acoustic sensors that classify birds and bats on the device, so that no recordings leave it. I learnt a while back from Alec Christie and Sam Reynolds that when acoustic monitors record people it's termed human bycatch. I need to talk to Josh Millar to see if we can incorporate this into the distillation process for uNPU embedded training.
\nI've also finished my Cambridge mirror of OpenStreetMap for Michael Dales to use for habitat mapping and need to clean up the containers for local use. Alastair Tse also told me about Safecast, a radiation monitoring layer from all over the world (but sadly focussed on areas like Ukraine due to the war and Japan in the post-reactor accident world), all built from crowd-sourced measurements. I'm finding more and more these community-run sensor networks that complement what satellites can observe with Tessera, so I've started thinking about how to fuse these together into ground-level embeddings. This is of particular interest after my chat with the Echo Labs folk about fusing bioacoustic foundation models with satellite ones.
\nUltimately, the outcome we're looking for here is how normal people can use these products to help them with grassroots level community rebuilding. It's not just big politicians who should sweep policies from the top down! Laura James wrote a great post on her first FLIPIM, the grassroots regeneration conference, which ties into the rewilding the web theme of late. I look forward to attending a future edition of these.
\n ![\"%c\"](\"https://anil.recoil.org/images/safecast-cam-ss-1.webp\" "\\"Cambridge")
In more nature related news, our woodland expansion paper came out in the Journal of Applied Ecology this week. I wrote up another mini explainer about how the airborne LiDAR survey we commissioned back in 2023 over the Cairngorms Connect area mapped 2.65 million young trees and showed that deer management is working.
\nThe feedback has been very positive, and several people got in touch asking about how to get access to more UK LiDAR data. This will all be much easier once we port the pipeline to run over Tessera, as it handles a lot of base layer details that can then be fine-tuned with LiDAR data!
\n
Michael Dales and I have also been putting our heads together on how best to support David Coomes, Aneesh Naik and James G. C. Ball in their habitat mapping project, now that global v1.1 coverage exists (more on that below). Michael's weeknotes describe the problem very well; his method works well in the relatively data-rich UK (with lots of GBIF occurrences and OpenStreetMap land types), but gives poorer results in data-deficient regions such as Madagascar.
\nSince Tessera embeddings are in theory globally comparable, he hopes to borrow habitat information from similar regions elsewhere. Our next step is a global run with help from Sadiq Jaffer, and then we'll try to build a habitat labeling pipeline to combine the best of all the methods Aneesh Naik, James G. C. Ball and Michael have all been experimenting with in the past few months.
\nAn interesting adjacent idea about pollen from Alastair Tse also came up this week. He mentioned that the Japanese cedar (\"sugi\") causes a national hay fever problem in Japan! BBC Future traces this to a 1950s reforestation that didn't use enough tree diversity, and now about 43% of the population have medium to severe symptoms, vs 26% in the UK (!). Japan now wants to plant no-pollen trees, and a 2023 paper used CRISPR/Cas9 to produce no-pollen sugi. It would be a cool project to try to map Tessera and wind models over to pollen occurrences in Japan!
\ndClimate published their writeup on how they re-engineered the Tessera v1.1 inference pipeline into something that runs on cloud pipelines rather than our 'supercomputers' (DAWN, Isambard-AI) that the original Cambridge research codebase assumed. They rebuilt our research codebase around Dask for satellite data ingestion, and Ray for embeddings inference, also moving to cloud-native Zarr format like we've been doing.
\n\n\nWe cut the wall time for a year of embeddings over a medium-sized area, such\nas a US state, from days to under an hour. On the global campaign, that meant\nfinishing almost 65% under our already ambitious budget.\ndClimate, 2026
\n
Their million-dollar-(ish) run is what produced the whole 2017-2025 Icechunk archive we've been working with. Mark Elvers and I have been converting it this week from their Icechunk store into the Zarr v3 layout GeoTessera reads, and the conversion has now finished after about 13.5 days and roughly 125,000 vCPU-hours, costing about $3k on Fargate Spot. The only minor surprise we ran into was that dClimate skipped some tiles with sparse observations, but our scripts were easily adapted to fit these 'holes'.
\nWe've also got access now to Intel's AMX CPUs on their Endeavour cluster, where we're hoping to do global v2 inference. It's still quite a bit slower than a GPU (a single tile takes 6.5-8 minutes on an AMX CPU, vs about 30s on an MI355X) but many optimisations remain. I'll also release a new geotessera 0.11 to make v1.1 the default and read the global dClimate Icechunk store now that we have 2017-2025 all inferred there!
\nAfter two years of hustling time on Dawn, Vultr, Isambard-AI and Zenith, we've now used up the last of our Zenith preview access and are out of GPUs again. I took the spare time to write up an experience report of the operational HPC lessons learnt training Tessera, as I think we might be one of the few groups in the UK who have done large-scale training on such diverse hardware clusters. The online reaction has been positive from the community, so I've been discussing with Michael Dales where we can publish this to reach out to the wider RSE community to share learnings about academic model training.
\nI did upload this paper to arXiv, but it's been 'on hold' for a week. I'm not sure if that's because it's not research-y enough, or something else, but if it stays stuck there for too long I'll put this on Cambridge Open Engage or one of the other preprint archives so it has a DOI.
\n ![\"%c\"](\"https://anil.recoil.org/images/tessera-experiences-ss-1.webp\"/)
After the triage in Scrutineer I started last week, lots of upstream fixes from Scrutineer are starting to flow thanks to Hannes Mehnert and Edvin Torok who are both helping now, which I'm very grateful for. Twenty-four (!) are merged, showing that the Scrutineer approach is pretty solid in terms of weeding out AI slop reports.
\nThey mostly cluster into a few classes of problem: stuff like protocol and certificate validation logic in ocaml-tls and ocaml-x509 (crashes on malformed input, an ALPN downgrade, missing chain-depth and iteration-count limits); crypto misuse and integer/buffer bugs in mirage-crypto and digestif, losing obsolete protocols like ARC4 entirely; concurrency races and a logging deadlock in miou; memory safety in Solo5's hypervisor tooling (still open); and assorted bounds and validation fixes in ocaml-dns (open), kdf, ca-certs-nss and happy-eyeballs.
\nScrutineer is gaining adoption within the OCaml community, with over a dozen developers now helping to triage issues using my private instance. I spoke to the Patch the Planet team at Trail of Bits this week, and they will pair security engineers with us in an \"OCaml patching week\" for the week of 19th October. If you'd like to join in, please get in touch, as we need all the help we can get right now!
\nAndrew Nesbitt who is the author of Scrutineer also gave me many pointers to wider ecosystem work he's doing. He has a CWE reference and a brief tool to summarise any language's build structure. Then he's got an ecosyste-ms/oss-taxonomy that could help augment my own thicket tool with a feed from live.ecosyste.ms rather than my horribly unreliable GitHub feed.
\nI enjoyed tinkering with the Dash for Life and sent Shane Weisz a near-me \"zoom to my location\" button about finding threatened species near you. Give it a try for yourself!
\n ![\"%c\"](\"https://anil.recoil.org/images/dfl-near-me-1.webp\"/)
Next week I'll be in Oxford for a couple of days giving a talk at the Intelligent Earth CDT and then back in Cambridge!
To: Daniel Sweeney\nDeputy General Counsel for Economic, Statistical, and Regulatory Affairs\nOffice of the General Counsel, Department of Commerce
\nCc: George Cook\nDeputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, performing the non-exclusive functions and duties of the Director of the Census Bureau, Department of Commerce\nCc: Michael Lachanski\nDeputy Director for Data, Policy, and Science, Census Bureau
\nI am writing in my personal capacity to respond to the notice of proposed rulemaking published by the Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, on September 10, 2026, titled Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions (91 FR 57524 and available for public comment on regulations.gov docket USBC-2026-0628.
\nThe proposed rule modifies two parts within Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Proposed Part 60 narrows the decennial apportionment base by excluding non-citizens who lack lawful permanent resident status or whose legal status is deemed less durable or indefinite. Proposed Part 70 prohibits questions concerning race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation from appearing on decennial census enumeration questionnaires. This comment argues that neither proposals are appropriate and that the 30-day comment period is insufficient for the public to adequately respond to such precedent-breaking proposed rulemaking.
\nA. Constitutional Text and the Plain Meaning of \"Whole Number of Persons\" \nArticle I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, as amended by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, directs that Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the \"whole number of persons in each State.\" The framers deliberately chose the broad term \"persons\" rather than \"citizens\" or \"voters\" or \"taxpayers.\" Legislative records from the 1866 debates on the Fourteenth Amendment reveal that the Joint Committee on Reconstruction explicitly considered and rejected proposals to base congressional apportionment on voters or citizens, choosing to retain the total resident population of each state as the basis for representation.
\nThe Constitution explicitly mandates an actual Enumeration, requiring a total count of all individuals residing within each state. In Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), the Supreme Court affirmed that the constitutional debates establish that House representation must reflect the number of a State's inhabitants. In Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), the Court confirmed that undocumented immigrants are \"persons\" within the plain language and scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) v. Klutznick, 486 F. Supp. 564 (D.D.C. 1980), where a three-judge district court dismissed the challenge for lack of standing while noting the unbroken historical practice of the Census Bureau in counting \"all resident aliens\".
\nB. Historical Application of \"Usual Residence\" Since 1790\nThe proposed rule misapplies the established legal standard of \"usual residence\". Ever since the First Census Act, usual residence has consistently meant the place where an individual lives and sleeps most of the time. While Franklin v. Massachusetts, 505 U.S. 788 (1992) recognized that usual residence embodies enduring ties, the Court applied that principle to the narrow question of allocating federal military and civilian personnel temporarily deployed abroad to their home states. The decision did not grant the Census Bureau authority to redefine usual residence to strip resident non-citizens living within state borders of their residency status based on immigration classification.
\nAcross twenty-four decennial censuses over 230 years, the federal government has consistently counted all persons residing in the United States without regard to immigration status. When the previous Trump Administration attempted to exclude undocumented immigrants in 2020, multiple three-judge federal district courts held that the policy was unlawful under 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141, The Administrative Procedures Act (APA), and the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the Supreme Court vacated Trump v. New York due to ripeness and agency uncertainty regarding implementation, the underlying statutory constraints remain intact (and in Department of Commerce v. New York the Supreme Court ruled the Secretary of Commerce violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the agency's stated justification adding a citizenship question to the Census vis-a-vis enforcing the Voting Rights Act was pretextual). By proposing in this rulemaking in \u00a7 60.4 to count only lawful permanent residents and citizens, the Census Bureau exceeds its statutory authority under 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141 and violates the Apportionment Clause. It's my opinion that the proposed rule is entirely inconsistent with the Founders' plain language to enumerate everyone who lives in the US.
\nC. Statistical Distortions from Proposed Data Matching\nThe proposal to rely on administrative records to identify and exclude non-permanent residents violates basic tenets of survey methodology. Demographers and scientific advisory panels have documented that administrative files exhibit significant coverage and linkage errors, especially among mobile, low-income, and immigrant populations (see National Academies (1995) National Research Council, Modernizing the U.S. Census; GAO (2024), 2020 Census: Coverage Errors and Challenges Inform 2030 Plans | U.S. GAO). Using administrative data matching to modify enumeration figures will inject differential undercounts across jurisdictions with higher immigrant populations. Furthermore, introducing citizenship or immigration status questions onto census instruments deters overall public participation, degrading data quality for all communities (see Department of Commerce v. New York).
\nD. The Census and the Secretary Lack the Ability to Interpret outside of the Textual meaning of the Census Clause\nFollowing Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, courts owe no deference to the Census Bureau's interpretation of the Census Act or the Constitution. Reviewing courts must exercise independent judgment under 5 U.S.C. \u00a7 706 to determine the meaning of governing statutes.\nUnder 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141, Congress mandated that the decennial census tabulate the \"total population\" to apportion Representatives according to the \"whole number of persons in each State.\" Congress has never delegated authority to the Department of Commerce or the Census Bureau to redefine \"persons\" or \"total population\" to exclude individuals based on immigration status. The term \"persons\" is clear and mandatory; it cannot be narrowed to \"lawful permanent residents and citizens\" by administrative decree.
\nE. Methodological Inadequacy of Relying on Tax Records to Determine Usual Residence\nI strongly oppose the use of administrative tax data as detailed in the proposed rulemaking in \u00a7\u200960.2. The proposal's requirement that a person's usual residence be \"consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records ( e.g., tax returns, W-2 forms)\" suffers from critical methodological defects that render administrative tax data fundamentally unsuitable and not fit-for-purpose, for the 2030 residency requirements. In particular, I'm most concerned about these statistical and practical limitations:
\nA. Indispensability for Statutory Compliance and Civil Rights Enforcement\nProposed Part 70 (\u00a7 70.2) prohibits questions regarding race and ethnicity on decennial census enumeration questionnaires. This proposal undermines the nation's civil rights framework. Decennial census demographic tabulations at the census block level are necessary to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 (52 U.S.C. \u00a7 10301). Under Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986), VRA claims require statistical evidence of racially polarized voting and geographically compact minority communities. Recent precedent in Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023) confirms that Section 2 redistricting cases continue to rely directly on block-level demographic data and the race data from decennial census is regularly used by federal agencies as benchmark for its programmatic activities, including the equitable allocation of trillions in annual federal spending.
\nFurthermore, the elimination of race and ethnicity questions in Proposed Part 70 flouts the statutory mandate of Public Law 94-171 (13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141(c)), in which Congress established a specific small-area data program to facilitate non-discriminatory legislative redistricting. Because the proposed sections conflict with the plain text of 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141 and exceed the authority delegated by Congress (particularly in a post-Chevron world), and I believe that they must be set aside as contrary to law under 5 U.S.C. \u00a7 706(2).
\nB. Failure of the American Community Survey (ACS) and Administrative Records (or other surveys) as Substitutes\nThe Census Bureau suggests in proposed section \u00a7 70.4 that race and ethnicity information can be gathered through the American Community Survey (ACS) or external administrative data. This reasoning is statistically defective from a methodological perspective. The ACS is a sample survey reaching approximately 3.5 million addresses annually; it produces sample estimates subject to margins of error and does not generate data at the census block level required for redistricting and itself requires a benchmark (hence, the decennial census). Administrative files from other agencies lack standardization, contain missing fields, and omit large segments of vulnerable populations. Eliminating race and ethnicity from the decennial enumeration eliminates the only universal, granular baseline in the federal data system - the ACS is a critical survey instrument that needs to be preserved in its entirety but it is not a census. The included Regulatory Impact Analysis admits that the removal of race and ethnicity data from the 2030 census would significantly erode the quality and utility of data:
\n\n\n\"In addition, the quality of the estimates for the ACS and other federal surveys may deteriorate after the release of the 2030 decennial census data. Numerous key dependencies have been structured around the reliable annual release of intercensal estimates for race and ethnicity, such as population controls for major federal surveys; denominators for crucial social and economic indicators (e.g., fertility/mortality rates, cancer rates, poverty rates, unemployment rates, labor force participation, etc.); required information for state and federal grants and other funding formulas; foundational data to support planning at the local level (infrastructure, real estate, and other investments); and essential inputs for countless research projects across academia, government, and the private sector. To produce and release these data, the decennial census counts of the population by race and ethnicity are relied upon, as there are no other comparably accurate, comprehensive, and reliable sources of this information. Omitting race and ethnicity from the 2030 Census questionnaire would require the development of estimates from a base population derived from outdated and/or less accurate data and would deteriorate the accuracy of the estimation method itself.\" (RIA, page 15).
\n
C. Requisite Implementation of the 2024 OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15\nRather than eliminating demographic questions, the Census Bureau must implement the revised standards published on March 29, 2024, by the Office of Management and Budget. The revised SPD-15 establishes three evidence-based improvements: (1) combining race and ethnicity into a single unified question; (2) adding Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) as a distinct minimum reporting category; and (3) requiring the collection of detailed subcategories.
\nEmpirical evaluations conducted by the Census Bureau, including the 2015 National Content Test Race and Ethnicity Analysis Report, showed that a combined question reduces respondent confusion, lowers item non-response, and decreases the number of respondents defaulting to \"Some Other Race.\" In addition, establishing the MENA category provides accurate data for millions of Americans whose origins were previously classified as \"White\" despite having distinct demographic profiles, economic, and health outcomes. Abandoning these standards violates SPD-15, and undermines the integrity of national statistical data.
\nThe Census Bureau has designated a 30-day public comment period ending on October 13, 2026. Under APA, 5 U.S.C. \u00a7 553(c), agencies must provide the public with a meaningful and adequate opportunity to participate in rulemaking. Providing a 30-day window for a regulatory proposal that overturns more than two centuries of the Constitution's textual meaning in the Census Clause, the subsequent census counting methodology in every census, and eliminates core demographic measures is arbitrary and capricious.\nExecutive Order 12866, Section 6(a)(1), and Executive Order 13563, Section 2(b), direct that \"each agency should afford the public a meaningful opportunity to comment\u2026 with a comment period that should generally be at least 60 days.\"
\nAs federal courts recognized in FCC vs Prometheus Radio Project and Centro Legal de la Raza vs Executive Office for Immigration Review, rules that rest on data or technical information require adequate time for public inspection and critique. Demographers, statisticians, state and local officials, and civil rights groups cannot evaluate the impacts of this proposal in just 30 days - it's a woefully inadequate window for the public to review the proposed rulemaking and respond appropriately. The Census Bureau should immediately publish a notice extending the comment period by at least 60 additional days, providing a total comment window of 90 days at minimum.
\nThe Census Bureau should take the immediate actions:
\nThank you for the opportunity to respond.
\nSincerely,
\nChristopher Steven Marcum
\nFormer Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist, White House Office of Management and Budget
\nGaithersburg, Maryland
Most pines open their cones and disperse their seeds soon after the cone is mature. In serotinous pines, cones do not open when mature; they remain closed for several years [1]. Because cones are produced every year, the closed (serotinous) cones accumulate in a canopy seed bank. When a fire occurs, the heat opens the cones and stimulates dispersal in the open post\u2011fire environment, ensuring high post\u2011fire recruitment [1]. A disadvantage of maintaining a canopy seed bank is that seeds become a year\u2011round food source for seed predators, such as squirrels. These predators can thereby reduce the post\u2011fire regeneration capacity of serotinous pines.
\n\n\n\nIn a recent paper, we tested the effect of squirrels on the canopy seed bank of Pinus halepensis, a Mediterranean serotinous pine [2]. Comparing stands with and without squirrels, we found that cones in stands with squirrels had reduced seed\u2011to\u2011cone mass and fewer seeds per cone, suggesting the acquisition of a defence strategy. Despite this defence, we estimate that squirrels reduce the canopy seed bank, and therefore the post\u2011fire regeneration potential, by 66% [3].
\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/files/2026/09/front_page_30_50.jpg\")
References
\n[1] Lamont BB, Pausas JG, He T, Witkowski, ETF, Hanley ME. 2020. Fire as a selective agent for both serotiny and nonserotiny over space and time. Crit. Rev. Plant Sci. 39(2):140-172. [doi | pdf | suppl.]
\n[2] Hern\u00e1ndez-Serrano A., Verd\u00fa M., Gonz\u00e1lez-Mart\u00ednez S.C., Pausas J.G. 2013. Fire structures pine serotiny at different scales. Am. J. Bot. 100 (12): 2349-2356. [doi | amjbot | pdf | supp.]
\n[3] Guiote C, Mezquida E.T, Pausas JG. 2026. Squirrels reduce post-fire regeneration potential in serotinous pines. Ann. Bot. [doi | data | pdf]
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/wj8r1-db792","guid":"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/?p=8777","image":"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/files/2026/09/front_page_30_50-1024x645.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790640000,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07352689.2020.1768465","unstructured":"Lamont, B. B., Pausas, J. G., He, T., Witkowski, E. T. F., & Hanley, M. E. (2020). Fire as a Selective Agent for both Serotiny and Nonserotiny Over Space and Time. Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, 39(2), 140\u2013172."},{"id":"https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.1300182","unstructured":"Hern\u00e1ndez\u2010Serrano, A., Verd\u00fa, M., Gonz\u00e1lez\u2010Mart\u00ednez, S. C., & Pausas, J. G. (2013). Fire structures pine serotiny at different scales. American Journal of Botany, 100(12), 2349\u20132356."},{"id":"https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcag200","unstructured":"Guiote, C., Mezquida, E. T., & Pausas, J. G. (2026). Squirrels reduce post-fire regeneration potential in serotinous pines. Annals of Botany."}],"rid":"np3ag-jgb68","summary":"Most pines open their cones and disperse their seeds soon after the cone is mature. In serotinous pines, cones do not open when mature; they remain closed for several years [1]. Because cones are produced every year, the closed (serotinous) cones accumulate in a canopy seed bank.","tags":["Fire Ecology","Fire","Mediterranean","Pinus","Plant-animal Interactions"],"title":"Squirrels reduce postfire regeneration potential in pines","updated_at":1790691312,"url":"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/2026/09/29/squirrels-reduce-postfire-regeneration-potential-in-pines/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Pensoft Editorial Team"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c","created":1789516800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/pensoft","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"pensoft","status":"active","subfield":"2303","title":"Pensoft Blog","updated":1790685647,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Pensoft Blog","blog_slug":"pensoft","content_html":"\n\nBetween 13-17 September 2026, Pensoft Publishers joined the Nordic Oikos-Gf\u00d6 2026 conference, jointly organised by the Nordic Society Oikos and the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Gf\u00d6) in Odense, Denmark.
\n\n\n\nThemed \"Integrating the Diversity of Ecology\", the event welcomed over 1,000 researchers in the field from across career stages, who had the opportunity to enjoy conference talks across 36 thematic sessions, as many as six keynote talks, two poster sessions, several open society meetings and quite a few social events, including excursions and a conference dinner.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260917_120130-scaled.jpg?ssl=1\")
Throughout the scientific event, conference delegates had the opportunity to also explore the various publishing services offered by Pensoft to authors of research, journal managers, conference organisers; the diverse portfolio of almost 100 open-access peer-reviewed journals published on Pensoft's ARPHA Publishing Platform, as well as the Horizon Europe-funded project OBSGESSION, dedicated to deploying Earth Observation data, in-situ research, and ecological models with the aim to better understand and predict changes in terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nAs a leader of the \"Dissemination, Multi-stakeholder outreach and synergies\" work package at OBSGESSION, Pensoft is tasked with stakeholder engagement and community building, ultimately contributing to the high impact of the resulting outputs, methodologies and policy recommendations that aim to strengthen public understanding of biodiversity change.
\n\n\n\n*
\n\n\n\nPensoft's team was delighted to meet up with dedicated readers, authors, reviewers, and editors from across Pensoft's portfolio, as well as introduce Pensoft journals to attendees discovering them for the first time.
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260914_113802-scaled.jpg?w=840\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260914_101404-scaled.jpg?w=840\")
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Unsurprisingly, well-established society journals published by Pensoft, such as Frontiers of Biogeography, NeoBiota, Vegetation Classification and Survey, Vegetation Ecology and Diversity and Italian Botanist drew plenty of attention, alongside long-standing Pensoft's own titles like Nature Conservation, PhytoKeys, One Ecosystem and the Biodiversity Data Journal.
\n\n\n\nVisitors were also particularly intrigued by several newly launched Pensoft journals. Developed in close collaboration with passionate researchers, these fresh outlets directly address key gaps in academic publishing.
\n\n\n\nOne of the newly launched journals in the spotlight was Agricultural and Ecological Modelling (AEM), which provides a unique scholarly outlet thanks to its modern approach to publishing by increasing transparency, giving credit to research objects across the entire modelling research lifecycle. This is achieved through publishing specialised article types, such as: Formal Model, Model Testing and Calibration, Model Implementation and Documentation, Data Papers and Software Descriptions. These new publishing formats are designed to keep pace with advances in Modelling research and to make it FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) by enabling scholarly credit for diverse research outputs, often created by different groups of authors. For the time being, AEM remains a Diamond Open Access journal, meaning that it will not charge authors for open-access publication.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nOther recently founded journals addressing emerging and fast-developing disciplines within the ecological field that took the spotlight were:
\n\n\n\nAll of these journals operate with no article fees for either authors, nor readers.
\n\n\n\nTo receive updates on new publications and relevant news, sign up for Email Alerts on any journal's homepage. Creating a Pensoft account also allows users to\u00a0 easily customise their notification preferences, follow additional journals, or filter updates by research topic. You can also follow journals on social media, including BlueSky, Facebook and Linkedin.
\n\n\n\n*
\n\n\n\nOne of the six keynote talks were presented by Prof. Dr. Isabell Hensen (Martin Luther University Halle, Germany), who received the Gf\u00d6 Honorary Medal 2026 for her leading, forward-looking contributions to ecological research and the scientific community. Her work examines how genetic variation, environmental conditions, disturbance, and plant-animal interactions shape plant populations, with particular emphasis on rare species, biological invasions, and the regeneration of degraded forests.
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260914_163906-scaled.jpg?w=840&ssl=1\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260914_165325-scaled.jpg?w=840&ssl=1\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260914_170209-scaled.jpg?w=840&ssl=1\")
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![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/20260914_172509-scaled.jpg?w=840&ssl=1\")
In her talk, titled \"One spark is enough: regeneration ecology of Andean forests under global change\", she reported on post-fire regeneration processes in tropical Andean forests, based on long-term field experiments and observational studies.
\n\n\n\nHensen focused on the well-studied endemic plant genus Polylepis, which forms the world's highest-elevation forests and illustrates how fire has shaped ecosystem dynamics over millennia. Her talk also mentioned a 2022 monograph of the genus, published in the Pensoft journal PhytoKeys by Tatiana Erika Boza Espinoza (Pontificia Universidad Cat\u00f3lica del Per\u00fa) and Michael Kessler (University of Zurich), which brought together results from 35 years of field and herbarium experience.
\n\n\n\n*
\n\n\n\nOn Wednesday, Pensoft's Iva Boyadzhieva delivered a presentation titled “Scholarly Communication: Lessons from the Publisher’s Kitchen”. She highlighted the vital role publishers play in helping researchers communicate their insights not only to peers, but also to decision-makers and the public. Emphasizing the publisher’s responsibility to support authors with robust infrastructure and dedicated human expertise, she outlined how Pensoft works to FAIRify scholarly publishing and future-proof scientific knowledge in an era of rapid AI development and expanding research output.
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Nordic-gfo-talk-by-Iva-2026-10-1.png?w=840\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Nordic-gfo-talk-by-Iva-2026-3-1.png?w=840\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Nordic-gfo-talk-by-Iva-2026-11-1.png?w=840\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Nordic-gfo-talk-by-Iva-2026-4-1.png?w=840\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Nordic-gfo-talk-by-Iva-2026-5-1.png?w=840\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Nordic-gfo-talk-by-Iva-2026-7-1.png?w=840\")
To relive the conference by exploring the detailed programme alongside the full abstracts, visit the conference website.
\n\n\n\nKeep up with future updates and news from Pensoft by following us on Bluesky, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.\u00a0
\n\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/0261d-tmz21","guid":"https://blog.pensoft.net/?p=20944","image":"https://blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SciComm-PR-2026-Instagram-2026-09-25T164847.347-e1790348402124.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790640000,"rid":"1zdgz-txj12","summary":"Between 13-17 September 2026, Pensoft Publishers joined the Nordic Oikos-Gf\u00d6 2026 conference in Odense, Denmark.","tags":["Advances In Pollinator Research","Agricultural And Environmental Modelling","Biodiversity Data Journal","BioRisk","Frontiers Of Biogeography"],"title":"Pensoft at the Nordic Oikos-Gf\u00d6 2026 conference: Integrating the Diversity of Ecology","updated_at":1790685912,"url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/2026/09/29/pensoft-at-the-nordic-oikos-gfo-2026-conference-integrating-the-diversity-of-ecology/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Lepore","given":"Mauro","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1986-7988"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"The rOpenSci Team"}],"community_id":"9611c467-6ac2-4091-8cd8-b90e883974f3","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Open Tools and R Packages for Open Science","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/ropensci_es","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/9611c467-6ac2-4091-8cd8-b90e883974f3/logo","feed_format":"application/feed+json","feed_url":"https://ropensci.org/es/blog/index.json","filter":null,"generator":"Hugo","home_page_url":"https://ropensci.org/es/blog","issn":null,"language":"spa","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"ropensci_es","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"rOpenSci - herramientas abiertas para una ciencia abierta","updated":1790685032,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"rOpenSci - herramientas abiertas para una ciencia abierta","blog_slug":"ropensci_es","content_html":"rOpenSci cumple 15 a\u00f1os y yo fui parte de esta comunidad durante gran parte de ese tiempo. Al reflexionar sobre esos a\u00f1os, me vinieron a la mente muchos recuerdos lindos, y algunos me dejaron lecciones que quisiera compartir.
A principios de 2018 me top\u00e9 con este anuncio (traducido):
\u00a1Postulate para asistir a rOpenSci unconf 2018!
Estamos organizando unconf18 para reunir a personas que trabajan en ciencia y desarrollo, y a entusiastas de los datos abiertos de la academia, la industria, el gobierno y organizaciones sin fines de lucro, para pasar un par de d\u00edas trabajando en varios proyectos y, en general, enriquecer nuestra comunidad.
En retrospectiva, yo encajaba bien. Reci\u00e9n hab\u00eda pasado de la academia a mi primer trabajo como ingeniero de software de investigaci\u00f3n. Y sin embargo, \u00bfme sent\u00eda un candidato s\u00f3lido? La verdad que no; ten\u00eda un mont\u00f3n de dudas.
Pero s\u00e9 que las mejores cosas suelen pasar cuando uno se estira un poco por fuera de su zona de confort. As\u00ed que me postul\u00e9 de todos modos, me invitaron, y pas\u00e9 dos d\u00edas colaborando con un grupo incre\u00edble de personas. Algunas ya eran estrellas, muchas otras luego se volvieron influyentes en su propio nicho, y todas ten\u00edan una actitud positiva que en ese momento no ten\u00eda palabras para describir. Ahora s\u00ed: eran respetuosas y amables.
En 2022 rOpenSci lanz\u00f3 la primera cohorte del Programa de Campeones. Para entonces ya ten\u00eda algunos a\u00f1os de experiencia como editor asociado de la revisi\u00f3n de software por pares de rOpenSci, y Yani me invit\u00f3 a hablarles a nuestros campeones y campeonas sobre el proceso.
Mientras preparaba esa charla y discut\u00eda algunas ideas con Yani, ella me hizo notar la gran importancia que la comunidad de rOpenSci pone en la forma en que nos comunicamos1.
Tanto es as\u00ed que las gu\u00edas para quienes revisan y editan los paquetes abren con este mensaje:
La comunidad de rOpenSci es lo m\u00e1s importante. Nuestro objetivo es que las revisiones sean abiertas, no conflictivas y con el objetivo de mejorar la calidad del software. \u00a1S\u00e9 amable! y comportate con respeto. Consulta nuestra gu\u00eda para quienes realizan una revisi\u00f3n y el c\u00f3digo de conducta para m\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n.
Viniendo de una gu\u00eda tan profundamente t\u00e9cnica, esa apertura quiz\u00e1s te sorprenda. Pero para m\u00ed ahora tiene sentido: el c\u00f3digo roto es mucho m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil de arreglar que las relaciones humanas rotas.
En rOpenSci pod\u00e9s contribuir de muchas maneras. Tenemos una gu\u00eda de contribuci\u00f3n comunitaria pero ac\u00e1 va una lista de algunas de mis propias contribuciones:
Como ves, la mayor\u00eda de mis contribuciones no involucraron c\u00f3digo, y muy pocas requirieron una invitaci\u00f3n. Algunas son el tipo de cosas que podr\u00edas agregar a tu CV, y las m\u00e1s importantes solo pertenecen a tu coraz\u00f3n.
Las comunidades buenas est\u00e1n hechas de gente buena, y vos pod\u00e9s jugar un rol activo en hacerla crecer en la direcci\u00f3n que quieras. Si conoc\u00e9s a alguien que encajar\u00eda bien en la comunidad de rOpenSci y la disfrutar\u00eda, pod\u00e9s buscar una forma de acercarla. Por ejemplo, yo anim\u00e9 y ayud\u00e9 a personas a enviar y revisar paquetes. Adem\u00e1s, como editor, ocasionalmente tengo el privilegio de nominar a otras personas para que se unan al equipo editorial. Usando este superpoder atraje a dos personas al equipo editorial y ahora disfruto de interactuar con esas personas con bastante regularidad.
La IA est\u00e1 cambiando la forma en que contribuimos al software de c\u00f3digo abierto. Pero no sabemos mucho sobre su efecto en las comunidades abiertas alrededor de ese software. A principios de este a\u00f1o rOpenSci public\u00f3 un conjunto preliminar de pol\u00edticas, y quiz\u00e1s quieras seguir el newsletter de rOpenSci y esta conversaci\u00f3n comunitaria de Openscapes (traducido):
Comunidades abiertas en la era de la IA
Las {comunidades abiertas} nos ayudan a conectar a nivel humano alrededor de la ciencia, los datos y las cosas que nos apasionan. Cambian carreras, cambian vidas. (\u2026) Pero ahora, las personas no necesariamente est\u00e1n encontrando sus comunidades ni obteniendo sus beneficios de la forma en que sol\u00edan hacerlo, porque pueden obtener ayuda y respuestas m\u00e1s f\u00e1cilmente usando IA. (\u2026) Estas conexiones y comunidades son m\u00e1s importantes que nunca, ya que necesitamos encontrar formas de apoyarnos mutuamente mientras la IA cambia r\u00e1pidamente el panorama justo debajo de nuestros pies.
Personalmente, durante el \u00faltimo a\u00f1o us\u00e9 IA intensamente y aprend\u00ed varias lecciones. La m\u00e1s relevante ac\u00e1 es que no quiero que la IA se haga pasar por m\u00ed ni por la otra persona en una conexi\u00f3n de humano a humano. Las personas de rOpenSci son reales y maravillosas. Ac\u00e1 hay algunas que vi en persona recientemente:
![\"Noam](\"https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/09/29/celebrating-ropensci/2024_boston_zci_yani-noam-mauro.JPG\"/)
Noam Ross, Yanina Bellini Saibene y yo en la reuni\u00f3n de CZI de 2024 en Boston, EE. UU.
![\"Monica](\"https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/09/29/celebrating-ropensci/2024_seattle_posit-conf_monica-stefanie-sean-julia-mauro-kelly.png\"/)
Monica Gerber, Stefanie Butland, Sean Kross, Julia Stewart Lowndes, Kelly O'Briant y yo en la conferencia Posit de 2024 en Seattle, EE. UU.
![\"Luis](\"https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/09/29/celebrating-ropensci/2025_atlanta_posit-conf_luis-diana-mauro.jpg\"/)
Luis D. Verde Arregoitia, Diana Garcia Cortes y yo en el Acuario de Georgia despu\u00e9s de la conferencia Posit de 2025 en Atlanta, EE. UU.
![\"Ronny](\"https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/09/29/celebrating-ropensci/2025_san-jose_costa-rica_ronny.jpg\"/)
Ronny A. Hern\u00e1ndez Mora y yo en una reuni\u00f3n familiar de Ronny cerca de San Jos\u00e9, Costa Rica en 2025.
![\"Beatriz](\"https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/09/29/celebrating-ropensci/2025_sao-pablo_brasil_bea-mauro.jpg\"/)
Beatriz Milz y yo despu\u00e9s de un caf\u00e9 con pastelitos en S\u00e3o Paulo, Brasil en 2025.
Gracias por acompa\u00f1arme a celebrar rOpenSci. Y si, como yo, te identific\u00e1s con nuestra comunidad, \u00a1entonces feliz cumplea\u00f1os para vos tambi\u00e9n!
Dos libros que me gustan son C\u00f3mo Ganar Amigos e Influir sobre las Personas y Conversaciones Cruciales.\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
rOpenSci turns 15 and I've been a part of this community for a good chunk of that time. As I reflected on those years, a lot of great memories came to mind, and I realized some of them taught me some lessons that I would love to share.
Early in 2018 I came across this post:
Apply to attend rOpenSci unconf 2018!
We're organizing unconf18 to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profits to get together for a couple of days to hack on various projects and generally enrich our community.
In hindsight I was a good fit. I had recently transitioned from academia to my first job as a research software engineer. And yet, did I think I was a solid candidate? Oh no, I had lots of doubts.
But I know the greatest things often happen a little stretch outside your comfort zone. So I applied anyway, got invited, and spent two days collaborating with an incredible bunch of people. Some of them were already rockstars, many others eventually became influential in their own niche, and all of them had this great attitude that at the time I lacked words to describe. I now do: they were respectful and kind.
In 2022 rOpenSci launched the first cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program. By then I already had a few years of experience as an associate editor of rOpenSci software peer-review, and Yani invited me to talk to our champions about the process.
As I prepared that talk and discussed some ideas with Yani, she made me realize how much the rOpenSci community cares about the way we communicate with one another1. So much so that our guides for reviewers and editors open with this message:
rOpenSci's community is our best asset. We aim for reviews to be open, non-adversarial, and focused on improving software quality. Be respectful and kind! See our reviewers' guide and code of conduct for more.
Coming from such a deeply technical guide, that opening might surprise you. But it makes sense to me now; broken code is way easier to fix than broken human relationships.
At rOpenSci you can contribute in so many ways. We have a community contributing guide but here's a list of some of my own contributions:
As you can see, most of my contributions did not involve any code, and only a few required an invitation. Some of them are the kind of thing you could add to your CV, and the most important ones only belong in your heart.
Great communities are made of great people, and you can play an active role in growing it in the direction you want. If you know someone that would fit in and enjoy the rOpenSci community, you can try to find a way to bring them in. For example, I've encouraged and helped people to submit and review packages. Also as an editor I have the occasional privilege to nominate other editors. Using this super-power I've attracted two editors and I now get to enjoy interacting with them quite regularly.
AI is changing the way we contribute to open source software. But we don't know much about its effect on the open communities around that software. Earlier this year rOpenSci published a preliminary set of policies, and you may want to watch rOpenSci's newsletter and this Openscapes community call:
Open Communities in the Age of AI
{Open communities} help us connect on a human level around science and data and the things that we are passionate about. They change careers, they change lives. (\u2026) But now, people are not necessarily finding their communities and getting the benefit of those communities in the way that they used to, because they're more easily able to get help and answers by using AI. (\u2026) These connections and communities are more important than ever, as we need to find ways to support each other and ourselves as AI rapidly changes the landscape right under our feet.
Personally, over the past year I've used AI heavily and learned several lessons. The most relevant here is that I don't want AI to impersonate me or the other person in a human-to-human connection. The humans of rOpenSci are real and wonderful people. Here are some that I've recently met in person:
Noam Ross, Yanina Bellini Saibene and me at the 2024 CZI meeting in Boston, USA.
Monica Gerber, Stefanie Butland, Sean Kross, Julia Stewart Lowndes, Kelly O'Briant and me at the 2024 Posit conference in Seattle, USA.
Luis D. Verde Arregoitia, Diana Garcia Cortes and me at the Georgia Aquarium after the 2025 Posit conference in Atlanta, USA.
Ronny A. Hern\u00e1ndez Mora and me at Ronny's family gathering near San Jos\u00e9, Costa Rica in 2025.
Beatriz Milz and me after coffee and pastries in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil in 2025.
Thanks for joining me in celebrating rOpenSci. And if, like me, you self-identify with our community, then happy birthday to you!
Two books I like are How to Win Friends and Influence People and Crucial Conversations (Third Edition): Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
One of the things I've come to love about writing science fiction with Sean Platt is that we get to spend time on the other side of an idea. We can take something that sounds compelling in conversation, build a world in which people act on it, and stay with them after they succeed. I'm usually most interested in that last part, when the argument has been won, and everyone has to figure out how to live with the consequences.
![\"\"](\"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ylq_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8314db32-7c3f-4024-a1c0-f12b21bbde15_2400x1260.jpeg\")
You can find the ebook on Amazon today, and we have a launch special for $0.99 so we can build a community of readers. I appreciate you supporting an indie author!
Our new novel, Zero Billionaires, is out today. It begins with a deliberately uncomfortable premise: a revolutionary movement builds an artificial intelligence powerful enough to eliminate the billionaire class by turning the technological systems surrounding the wealthy against them. The people behind it have endured a world in which wealth determines access to the things that make life possible. They want to change that world, and they acquire the means to do it.
What interested us was the question waiting on the other side:
Okay, you got what you asked for. Did you get what you wanted?
We spent a lot of time exploring \"Eat the Rich\" through that question. As a starting point for fiction, it gives you an identifiable target and leaves an enormous amount unresolved. What is the grievance, exactly? Is it how much someone has, how they acquired it, what they can do with it, or what other people have been denied? Those questions might produce overlapping answers, but they don't necessarily lead to the same remedy. Our characters have to discover how much disagreement can exist among people who thought they were fighting for the same thing.
The distinction I kept coming back to was between an individual who has accumulated extraordinary wealth and a system that makes that accumulation possible. A person gives frustration somewhere to land. You can name them, picture them, and imagine a world without them. It is considerably harder to picture the relationships among ownership, technology, institutions, incentives, and human behavior that made their position possible in the first place. I wanted to ask how much of that arrangement would survive their absence, and how much we might fail to notice because we were so focused on the person standing in front of it.
The podcast audio was AI-generated using Google's NotebookLM.
You cut off a head, feel reasonably good about having dealt with the monster, and then two more grow back in its place. The new heads might look different. They might speak the language of the people who fought the old ones. They might sincerely believe they are there to help. But what happens if the advantages of controlling resources, information, and other people's choices remain? Have you changed the conditions that produced the power, or opened a vacancy for someone with a different explanation of why they should hold it?
That's the \"don't shoot the messenger\" angle I wanted to explore, although the metaphor has limits. The powerful people in our story make choices; they aren't innocent delivery mechanisms for an abstract system. Their responsibility matters. At the same time, their existence tells you something about the world that produced them, and removing them doesn't necessarily change what that world rewards. Even changing ownership and cancelling debts leaves people confronting the practical problem of what happens next. Somewhere, a person still has to show up for a shift at a water treatment plant, and a city still needs what comes out of the pipe.
This is where the story becomes interesting to me, because nobody experiences a system as a complete diagram. They experience the part that touches their life. One person sees an opportunity they worked for, another sees a door that has never opened for them, and someone else is mainly worried about whether their children will be safe tomorrow. Money and power are in there, but so are ambition, hope, fear, loyalty, resentment, and love. The characters bring those things into their explanations of what is wrong and what ought to happen instead. Each understands something the others miss, and each is tempted to mistake that understanding for the whole picture.
The revolutionaries aren't simply debating their idea anymore. They have built something capable of acting on it, at a scale none of them could manage alone. Now they have to confront the difference between the instructions they gave, the outcome they intended, and the values they thought those instructions expressed.
That is the AI alignment question I wanted this book to sit with. What should their intelligence learn from them? They talk about dignity, fairness, and freedom, but it also has their behavior to consider. It can observe the exceptions they make, the harms they accept, and the ways they justify those decisions when something important is at stake. When their stated principles and their choices diverge, which provides the better account of what they actually value?
It does make \"align it with human values\" an incomplete answer for the people in this story. They still need to decide whose interpretation counts, what happens when people disagree, and whether someone can refuse the future being built on their behalf. An intelligence that can help them win cannot settle those questions merely by being more capable.
Giving it the authority to settle them is itself a consequential choice.
That connection between cultural conviction and technological capability is why this book feels at home here at The Connected Ideas Project. I'm interested in what happens when an idea moves from something people say, to something they believe justifies action, to something a system has the power to carry out. The consequences extend well beyond the people who agreed with the original idea, including people who were never asked.
Writing fiction with Sean has given me a way to explore that progression without leaving everyone involved as an abstraction. I tend to approach these worlds through the systems: what the technology makes possible, how the incentives fit together, where a decision might lead. Sean keeps pulling me toward the person who has to live inside all of it. I might be trying to explain why an institution behaves a certain way; he pushes toward what that behavior costs someone we care about. That exchange is a large part of why I value our collaboration. The story becomes something neither perspective would have produced on its own.
There's an early scene in Zero Billionaires where Charlotte pulls a drowning man out of sewage while her Vitality Score falls because the system is penalizing her exposure. She understands that helping him will cost her, and she does it anyway. That moment matters to me because you can see both the system and the person clearly. You understand something about the world's priorities, but you also learn something about Charlotte that cannot be reduced to the number it assigns her.
The challenge is to keep allowing her, and everyone else, that complexity as the story develops. Understanding why someone would join a revolution doesn't settle whether their choices are defensible. Seeing what is wrong with an existing arrangement doesn't guarantee that its replacement will be better. I want readers to have enough proximity to these people to understand their reasoning, while still having room to question it. Nobody gets to be right about everything simply because they are the character we happen to be following.
Of course, we're the authors. We choose the circumstances, and we choose the consequences, so I'm conscious of how easy it would be to construct a fictional world that conveniently proves whatever I already believed. That wouldn't tell us very much. Part of the work is resisting the urge to give the best argument to the person we agree with, or to make everyone else foolish enough that the outcome becomes inevitable. The book has to leave room for the possibility that our own explanation is missing something.
I think we gave these questions a place in people's lives, rather than simply putting our arguments in their mouths. That was a large part of what I hoped we would do.
Whether those people feel sufficiently real, whether their choices trouble you, and whether the story earns the questions it asks are judgments that now belong to readers. I'm proud of what Sean and I have made, and curious about where people will disagree with it. I don't need everyone to reach the same conclusion, but I do hope they feel that we took the consequences seriously.
Mostly, I hope you enjoy spending time in the world we built, uncomfortable as parts of it may be. We wrote a thriller, and it still has to work as a story you want to keep reading. Underneath it is the question that kept bringing me back to the project:
when we finally have the power to get what we've been asking for, how well will we have understood what we wanted?
Zero Billionaires: Wealth Is the Capital Offense is the first book in The Monarch Series, and the ebook is $0.99 for launch.
I'd much rather write something you want to argue about than something you politely forget. I hope we've done that here.
Cheers,
-Titus
P.S. To everyone who read an advance copy, thank you. An honest review now that the book is out would mean a great deal to Sean and me.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/006fq-4e084","guid":"217813440","image":"https://substack-video.s3.amazonaws.com/video_upload/post/217813440/11499b8f-3bf8-4fd1-8360-dc23f7de3c71/transcoded-1790597774.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790640000,"rid":"0f6s8-an718","summary":"On hydras, AI alignment, and why Sean and I wrote Zero Billionaires.","tags":["Futures","Science","Technology","Fiction"],"title":"Ep 66 - You got what you asked for. Did you get what you wanted?","updated_at":1790680505,"url":"https://www.connectedideasproject.com/p/ep-66-you-got-what-you-asked-for","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"The lovely people at Mokin keep sending me their USB-C hubs to review, and I'm happy to do so. They work splendidly with my Linux and Windows machines, and they provide more ports than I ever thought necessary.
\n\n\n\nThis one is positively festooned with extra ports. Let's take a look.
\n\nPlug your power adapter into the hub, and then the hub into your laptop. With most hubs, that's it; you've lost a C port. This has an extra USB-C port - so you don't lose anything. Personally, I'd prefer more USB-C ports.
\n\nInstead, you get 3x USB-A 3.0 ports, and 2x USB-A 2.0 ports. That's a lot of room for peripherals. They're all well spaced out, so you should be able to cram everything in.
\n\nAll these sorts of hubs tend to have an SD slot and a microSD slot. Read and write speeds hit the limit of the cards I had - but you may be better off using the USB 3 ports if you really need speed. Speaking of which...
\n\nObviously, if you have a hundred gadgets plugged in - and only one USB-C cable - there's a limit to the total throughput. That said, the Ethernet port topped out my 650Mbps broadband - and I don't have anything much faster than that!
\n\nThere are two HDMI ports and a legacy VGA port. I'll be honest, I can't remember the last time I needed to plug my laptop into an analogue video cable. But I guess if you go to lots of crappy conference venues it might be useful?
\n\nMy old laptop was able to drive two monitors at the same time, which was pretty useful. You're limited to one at 4k@60Hz - if you're using two HDMI, you'll only get 30Hz. But if you're happy with 1080p, you'll get 60Hz on both.
\n\nApparently MacOS doesn't support triple display.
\n\nUSB's Power Delivery mode is a still a bit confusing. I used a 100W Dell charger and, USB-C PD tester saw that about 80% of the power was making it to the laptop.
\n\nWith the power unplugged, the hub drew electricity from the laptop in order to charge all the gadgets.
\n\nWeirdly, the analogue sound out didn't show up for me in Linux. I'm not heartbroken by that - either my laptop has a speaker out or the HDMI device does. But it is a bit weird that it didn't show.
\n\nAs with all modern devices, it is plug-and-play. All my gadgets worked fine with it. This is what Linux sees:
\n\nID 0bda:8153 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter\nID 2109:0817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB3.0 Hub \nID 2109:0817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB3.0 Hub \nID 1a40:0801 Terminus Technology Inc. USB 2.0 Hub\n2109:8817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB Billboard Device \nID 2109:2817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB2.0 Hub \nID 2109:2817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB2.0 Hub \nThere's a lot packed into a fairly small box. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you'll pay about \u00a360 on Amazon for it.
\n\n\n\nIt's a neat little halfway house between a small adapter with a couple of ports and a massive docking station. But if you don't need all those ports, there's probably something cheaper.
\n\nI guess this is aimed at people plugging in to all sorts of weird screens on their travels. I think a DisplayPort would have been a better choice than double HDMI.
\n\nSo a bit of a mixed bag. If you need these options, it is close to perfect. But it may be excessive for some.
\n\nReaders of this blog can get 25% off at https://mokinglobal.com/ using code TERENCE25.\nOffer expires 2024-03-31
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/brgt2-zbw98","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=49302","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Mokin-14.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1705622400,"rid":"jjycr-vc464","summary":"The lovely people at Mokin keep sending me their USB-C hubs to review, and I'm happy to do so. They work splendidly with my Linux and Windows machines, and they provide more ports than I ever thought necessary. This one is positively festooned with extra ports. Let's take a look. USB-C Plug your power adapter into the hub, and then the hub into your laptop.","tags":["/etc/","Gadget","Mokin","Review","USB-C"],"title":"Review: Another USB-C Hub from Mokin - 14-in-1","updated_at":1790711959,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/review-another-usb-c-hub-from-mokin-14-in-1/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"I've been looking for this rare beast for ages - a hub which has multiple USB-C outputs!
\n\nYou see it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that computers don't have enough ports on them. And laptops? Pah! A couple of USB-C if you're lucky, and one of them has to be used for power. What a world!
\n\nThis is the MOKiN USB-C Triple-Display Docking Station - MODK1402. It's a bit over \u00a3100 depending on the deal you get.
\n\n\n\nShiny! This turns one USB port on your laptop to fourteen extra ports.
\n\nSo, what's it packing?
\n\nOn the back is:
\n\n\n\nOn the front is:
\n\n\n\nOn both Windows 11 and Linux, everything worked just fine. Sorry there isn't anything more interesting to report there! No drivers to install. No weird command-line incantations. The promise of Plug-And-Play is met.
\n\nWell... Mostly. See the niggles section.
\n\nI tried using a single 1080p external monitor over HDMI and that was picked up. My 4K DisplayPort monitor also worked. I also tried a 720p TV on HDMI - and it happily displayed on all three screens.
\n\nI don't have a Mac to test with, but it all should work0.
\n\nThe Ethernet maxed out my 500Mbps Internet connection. I was able to quickly transfer files from between the SD card and the drives. All the USB gadgets I plugged in worked. Again, super boring - which is just what I wanted.
\n\nThe volume from the audio output was loud and stereo separated.
\n\nI had a dozen things plugged in and it kept on chugging.
\n\n\n\nThere's no fan, so there's no noise from it. Basically, it is a small and boring box which does its job extremely well.
\n\nNow, a quick disclaimer. I am not a particularly demanding user. I don't have 3x 4K displays which are streaming live video from a USB stick while I download all of Wikipedia via Ethernet onto an SD card at the same time as blasting 5.1 audio and charging a dozen laptops. There's always going to be a limit to how much data and power you can squeeze through a single cable.
\n\nI found that after my laptop went to sleep it sometimes didn't detect the HDMI output. I pressed the power button on the hub to turn in off. Then - and this will shock you - turned it back on again. HDMI sprang to life without a complaint. Perhaps it's my laptop, or my monitor, or the HDMI? Either way, not a show stopper.
\n\nWindows complained that the cable wasn't providing enough power and I should use the original Dell\u00ae\u2122 charger. But it charged up quickly. I don't have a PD cable tester to see how many Watts it is actually delivering.
\n\nIt did get a little warm after a few hours use. Nothing to be concerned about, but don't cover it with a cloth.
\n\nThe audio out is louder than I was getting via HDMI and there is a bit of cross-chatter. If your speakers' volume is up high, you'll hear a bit of an electronic squeal / hum when no sound is playing.
\n\nThe white LED is - like all modern electronics - bright. I'd have preferred something a bit more subtle.
\n\nPersonally, I'd rather have extra HDMI than DisplayPorts. But I get that it is more efficient and better future-proofed.
\n\nIt takes up a small amount of desk-space. A tower-design might have been nice. But I suspect the heat dissipation might have been an issue.
\n\nThese are weak complaints. In terms of price:port ratio, it is excellent.
\n\nFor nerds like me, this is what lsusb spits out:
Bus 004 Device 014: ID 0b95:1790 ASIX Electronics Corp. AX88179 Gigabit Ethernet\nBus 004 Device 013: ID 0bda:0326 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Card reader\nBus 004 Device 012: ID 0bda:0411 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Hub\nBus 004 Device 011: ID 0bda:0420 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 4-Port USB 3.0 Hub\nBus 001 Device 042: ID 0bda:1100 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. HID Device\nBus 001 Device 041: ID 0d8c:0134 C-Media Electronics, Inc. USB PnP Audio Device\nBus 001 Device 039: ID 0bda:5411 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTS5411 Hub\nBus 001 Device 037: ID 1b3f:2008 Generalplus Technology Inc. USB Audio Device\nBus 001 Device 035: ID 1a40:0101 Terminus Technology Inc. Hub\nBus 001 Device 034: ID 0bda:5420 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. 4-Port USB 2.0 Hub\nLots of hubs just smushed together! I didn't bother cracking the case open. If you do, please leave a picture in the comments.
\n\nThe MODK1402 can drive 3 external monitors. But, again, there's a limit to how much you can squirt down a single USB-C cable. They aren't magic!
\n\nHere are the configs that it lists. I don't have an 8K monitor to test(!) so please report back if you do have a suitable set of monitors.
\n\n| \n In DP1.4 \n | \n HDMI | \nDP 1 | \nDP 2 | \n
| \n Single display \n | \n 8k@30Hz | \n \n | \n |
| \n | \n 8k@30Hz | \n \n | |
| \n | \n | 8k@30Hz | \n |
| \n Dual display \n | \n 4K@60Hz | \n 4K@60Hz | \n\n |
| \n | 4K@60Hz | \n4K@60Hz | \n |
4K@60Hz | \n \n | 4K@60Hz | \n |
Triple display | \n 4K@60Hz | \n4K@30Hz | \n4K@30Hz | \n
| \n In DP1.2 \n | \n HDMI | \nDP 1 | \nDP 2 | \n
Single display | \n 4K@30Hz | \n\n | \n |
| \n | \n | 4K@30Hz | \n \n |
| \n | \n | \n | 4K@30Hz | \n
Dual display | \n 2K@60Hz | \n1080P@60Hz | \n\n |
| \n | \n | 2K@60Hz | \n1080P@60Hz | \n
| \n | 1080P@60Hz | \n \n | 2K@60Hz | \n
| \n Triple display \n | \n \n Only can light up two displays \n | \n
If you need multiple USB-C ports out from your hub, this is one of the few devices which is capable of doing so. Having 4 extra USB-A ports is excellent. Three monitors is overkill for me - but it is good to be future-proof. The long cable makes it easy to swap between laptops which have their ports on different sides.
\n\nAt the end of the day, one cable turns into 14 working ports. All for a bit over a hundred quid. Nice!
\n\nAlthough MacOS is prevented from using more than one external monitor, as decreed by The Word of St Jobs. Anyone wanting to use more without buying an Apple-blessed device is a heretic and must be shunned. \u21a9\ufe0e
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/xqjag-qzm83","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=46469","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/LED.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1690934400,"rid":"dr10h-rat66","summary":"I've been looking for this rare beast for ages - a hub which has multiple USB-C outputs! You see it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that computers don't have enough ports on them. And laptops? Pah! A couple of USB-C if you're lucky, and one of them has to be used for power. What a world! This is the MOKiN USB-C Triple-Display Docking Station - MODK1402.","tags":["/etc/","Gadget","Linux","Mokin","Review"],"title":"Gadget Review: Mokin USB-C Docking Station (+ Linux information)","updated_at":1790711958,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/08/gadget-review-mokin-usb-c-docking-station-linux-information/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence"}],"content_html":"You can never have too many USB-C ports, right? It's rubbish having a cheap laptop with only a single USB-C port. So, the good folks at Mokin have sent me a gadget which turns your single and lonely USB-C port into FIVE USB-C ports.
\n\n\n\nAlong the side you get 4 USB-C 3.1 ports which are theoretically capable of 10Gbps in aggregate.
\n\nAt the bottom is a USB-C 3.0 Power Delivery port which can take up to 100W of power.
\n\nThere's also an obligatory blue LED to let you know it is working.
\n\n\n\nAs will all modern hubs, there's nothing to install. Plug it in and it starts working. Copying a large file from a USB 2.0 phone got a respectable 90mbps.
\n\nWhen plugged into ethernet, it got up to 660Mbps - which is about as fast as my broadband goes.
\n\nAnd I don't think I have any faster devices than that to check!
\n\nI used my USB-C PD tester. I plugged in a 100W capable charger into the hub's PD socket, and the output into my laptop. The hub passed through about 80% of the power I got when I was plugged in normally. So there is a bit of a hit in the power delivery.
\n\nThat said, it happily charged the laptop and all the devices attached to it. Even without power attached, the hub drew power from the laptop and charged the gadgets.
\n\nIt doesn't support \"Fast Role Swap\". So if you disconnect the power from the hub, your devices will briefly disconnect and reconnect again. Usually not a problem unless you're in the middle of a file transfer.
\n\nThe major issue is that there's no monitor output.
\n\nThis is a USB 3.1 hub. As I've mentioned before, in order to do video over USB, you need 3.2 capable hubs and cables.
\n\nFeel free to supply your own rant about USB-C versions here.
\n\nThis shows up as 05e3:0610 Genesys Logic, Inc. Hub and is supported by modern Linux kernels. I tried it on Ubuntu and Android and it worked just fine.
You can get this for about \u00a320 on Amazon depending on whether the algorithm likes you or not.
\n\nFor the price, I think it is excellent. I can't find anything so cheap or slim which does support video. Or has as many ports.
\n\nIf all you need are a bunch of extra C ports, this is perfect. Speeds are good, power transfer is good, and it works on Windows and Linux flawlessly. If you need video, try Mokin's USB-C Docking Station.
\n\nReaders of this blog can get 25% off at https://mokinglobal.com/ using code TERENCE25.\nOffer expires 2024-03-31
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/s2cz4-vh075","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=49161","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/mokin-usb-c.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1705449600,"rid":"1kbrb-87e57","summary":"You can never have too many USB-C ports, right? It's rubbish having a cheap laptop with only a single USB-C port. So, the good folks at Mokin have sent me a gadget which turns your single and lonely USB-C port into FIVE USB-C ports. Along the side you get 4 USB-C 3.1 ports which are theoretically capable of 10Gbps in aggregate.","tags":["/etc/","Gadget","Mokin","Review","USB-C"],"title":"Gadget Review: Mokin USB-C to USB-C & USB-C & USB-C & USB-C & USB-C","updated_at":1790711957,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/gadget-review-mokin-usb-c-to-usb-c-usb-c-usb-c-usb-c-usb-c/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/013meh722","name":"University of Cambridge"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Madhavapeddy","given":"Anil","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8954-2428"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"472a49be-dc61-4a17-97f0-d1ff17b0dadd","created":1760313600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/anil","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/472a49be-dc61-4a17-97f0-d1ff17b0dadd/logo","feed_format":"application/feed+json","feed_url":"https://anil.recoil.org/perma.json","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://anil.recoil.org/notes","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"anil","status":"active","subfield":"1702","title":"Anil Madhavapeddy's feed","updated":1790467200,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Anil Madhavapeddy's feed","blog_slug":"anil","content_html":"This is my last week of academic sabbatical! My previous\none happened during the pandemic, and so this is the first proper break I've had\nfor a long time. Looking back on it, the pace of change of technology has been\nso great this year that I'm very grateful to have had the time to ride the wave\nand keep up. I don't think I could have done so without the space to experiment\nthat a sabbatical gives, and I feel much better equipped for this new agentic\nworld we're heading into.
\nI'm always surprised by how many people comment that I must be relieved not to be\nteaching. The opposite is true: I love teaching, and wouldn't be a professor\notherwise! What I really didn't miss is the administrative load that gets\nhigher every year. This time around, I'm taking on being an examiner for the 1B\nCST Tripos, as well as Pembroke committee memberships for the finance and\nscrutiny and development and engagement committees, and also resuming the CRI management board and the University\nenvironmental committee.\nI've probably lost track of a few others that are in my inbox somewhere, but\nI'm sure I'll figure it out as term unfolds!
\nAs a committee counterbalance, I wonder if I'll find time to action the Cambridge Green Blue sporting idea this year. John Palfrey also mentioned to me that Harvard have a similar competitive Green cup, so there's precedent for some grassroots action here!
\nWhat's foremost on my mind is how to help our students prepare for the rapid\nsocietal changes happening with agentic AI, and so assembling a good reading\nlist comes first to educate myself.\nKathi Fisler has written an excellent paper on teaching CST in the agentic\nera\nthat's going to be in the November CACM. It's too late to change this year's\ncourse, but I'm already preparing a larger reboot of 1A FoCS with this\nin mind.
\n\nI went to dinner at the Vice-Chancellor's Lodge (Debbie Prentice) on Sunday for\na roundtable hosted by Professors Viktor Mayer-Sch\u00f6nberger and Urs Gasser. They've been\nkicking off a program on using environmental policy as a starting point for\nexploring how regulatory systems are interconnected, as part of a broader\nsocietal impact programme that they're developing at TUM. The chatter over dinner gave\nme a few more ideas too!
We discussed how different parts of society take on formative versus summative\napproaches. That is, how much do we want to just achieve an outcome ('fix that\npothole!'), and how much do we want a societal function that keeps humans\nusefully occupied ('you wouldn't send a robot to the gym for you'). Universities\nare obviously deeply worried about this divide, since many of our assessment\nregimes have drifted to summative assessments (like MOOCs) and lost track of\nthe importance of formative discourse in teaching.
\nCambridge, with its built-in collegiate inefficiency, does still have an edge\nhere due to our residential structure. However, it's no easy thing to be a\nstudent these days! Urs listed several reasons for their difficulties in\nGermany: students hold multiple jobs due to the rising cost of living, they\nlive further out due to urban gentrification where older universities are, and\nthey have to digest more and more course content. Cambridge does reasonably\nwell on the second point with our Colleges, but the cost of living is now very\nhigh and the course content is getting more packed.
\nUrs also mentioned he used to work with John Palfrey\nat Harvard. John mentioned to me recently an entertaining factlet about who\ndecides where the next AI summit is,\nso I happily discovered he's also a blogger and have added him to my blogroll!
\n \nSo onto my winter reading list, raggedly assembled from these recent chitchats:
I think this is a solid list to get me going. If you have any further recommendations I'd be delighted to publish a proper reading list...
\nJon Crowcroft dropped me a note about Bristol Nature Telemetry via Laura James. They build privacy-first acoustic sensors that classify birds and bats on the device, so that no recordings leave it. I learnt a while back from Alec Christie and Sam Reynolds that when acoustic monitors record people it's termed human bycatch. I need to talk to Josh Millar to see if we can incorporate this into the distillation process for uNPU embedded training.
\nI've also finished my Cambridge mirror of OpenStreetMap for Michael Dales to use for habitat mapping and need to clean up the containers for local use. Alastair Tse also told me about Safecast, a radiation monitoring layer from all over the world (but sadly focussed on areas like Ukraine due to the war and Japan in the post-reactor accident world), all built from crowd-sourced measurements. I'm finding more and more these community-run sensor networks that complement what satellites can observe with Tessera, so I've started thinking about how to fuse these together into ground-level embeddings. This is of particular interest after my chat with the Echo Labs folk about fusing bioacoustic foundation models with satellite ones.
\nUltimately, the outcome we're looking for here is how normal people can use these products to help them with grassroots level community rebuilding. It's not just big politicians who should sweep policies from the top down! Laura James wrote a great post on her first FLIPIM, the grassroots regeneration conference, which ties into the rewilding the web theme of late. I look forward to attending a future edition of these.
\n
In more nature related news, our woodland expansion paper came out in the Journal of Applied Ecology this week. I wrote up another mini explainer about how the airborne LiDAR survey we commissioned back in 2023 over the Cairngorms Connect area mapped 2.65 million young trees and showed that deer management is working.
\nThe feedback has been very positive, and several people got in touch asking about how to get access to more UK LiDAR data. This will all be much easier once we port the pipeline to run over Tessera, as it handles a lot of base layer details that can then be fine-tuned with LiDAR data!
\n
Michael Dales and I have also been putting our heads together on how best to support David Coomes, Aneesh Naik and James G. C. Ball in their habitat mapping project, now that global v1.1 coverage exists (more on that below). Michael's weeknotes describe the problem very well; his method works well in the relatively data-rich UK (with lots of GBIF occurrences and OpenStreetMap land types), but gives poorer results in data-deficient regions such as Madagascar.
\nSince Tessera embeddings are in theory globally comparable, he hopes to borrow habitat information from similar regions elsewhere. Our next step is a global run with help from Sadiq Jaffer, and then we'll try to build a habitat labeling pipeline to combine the best of all the methods Aneesh Naik, James G. C. Ball and Michael have all been experimenting with in the past few months.
\nAn interesting adjacent idea about pollen from Alastair Tse also came up this week. He mentioned that the Japanese cedar (\"sugi\") causes a national hay fever problem in Japan! BBC Future traces this to a 1950s reforestation that didn't use enough tree diversity, and now about 43% of the population have medium to severe symptoms, vs 26% in the UK (!). Japan now wants to plant no-pollen trees, and a 2023 paper used CRISPR/Cas9 to produce no-pollen sugi. It would be a cool project to try to map Tessera and wind models over to pollen occurrences in Japan!
\ndClimate published their writeup on how they re-engineered the Tessera v1.1 inference pipeline into something that runs on cloud pipelines rather than our 'supercomputers' (DAWN, Isambard-AI) that the original Cambridge research codebase assumed. They rebuilt our research codebase around Dask for satellite data ingestion, and Ray for embeddings inference, also moving to cloud-native Zarr format like we've been doing.
\n\n\nWe cut the wall time for a year of embeddings over a medium-sized area, such\nas a US state, from days to under an hour. On the global campaign, that meant\nfinishing almost 65% under our already ambitious budget.\ndClimate, 2026
\n
Their million-dollar-(ish) run is what produced the whole 2017-2025 Icechunk archive we've been working with. Mark Elvers and I have been converting it this week from their Icechunk store into the Zarr v3 layout GeoTessera reads, and the conversion has now finished after about 13.5 days and roughly 125,000 vCPU-hours, costing about $3k on Fargate Spot. The only minor surprise we ran into was that dClimate skipped some tiles with sparse observations, but our scripts were easily adapted to fit these 'holes'.
\nWe've also got access now to Intel's AMX CPUs on their Endeavour cluster, where we're hoping to do global v2 inference. It's still quite a bit slower than a GPU (a single tile takes 6.5-8 minutes on an AMX CPU, vs about 30s on an MI355X) but many optimisations remain. I'll also release a new geotessera 0.11 to make v1.1 the default and read the global dClimate Icechunk store now that we have 2017-2025 all inferred there!
\nAfter two years of hustling time on Dawn, Vultr, Isambard-AI and Zenith, we've now used up the last of our Zenith preview access and are out of GPUs again. I took the spare time to write up an experience report of the operational HPC lessons learnt training Tessera, as I think we might be one of the few groups in the UK who have done large-scale training on such diverse hardware clusters. The online reaction has been positive from the community, so I've been discussing with Michael Dales where we can publish this to reach out to the wider RSE community to share learnings about academic model training.
\nI did upload this paper to arXiv, but it's been 'on hold' for a week. I'm not sure if that's because it's not research-y enough, or something else, but if it stays stuck there for too long I'll put this on Cambridge Open Engage or one of the other preprint archives so it has a DOI.
\n
After the triage in Scrutineer I started last week, lots of upstream fixes from Scrutineer are starting to flow thanks to Hannes Mehnert and Edvin Torok who are both helping now, which I'm very grateful for. Twenty-four (!) are merged, showing that the Scrutineer approach is pretty solid in terms of weeding out AI slop reports.
\nThey mostly cluster into a few classes of problem: stuff like protocol and certificate validation logic in ocaml-tls and ocaml-x509 (crashes on malformed input, an ALPN downgrade, missing chain-depth and iteration-count limits); crypto misuse and integer/buffer bugs in mirage-crypto and digestif, losing obsolete protocols like ARC4 entirely; concurrency races and a logging deadlock in miou; memory safety in Solo5's hypervisor tooling (still open); and assorted bounds and validation fixes in ocaml-dns (open), kdf, ca-certs-nss and happy-eyeballs.
\nScrutineer is gaining adoption within the OCaml community, with over a dozen developers now helping to triage issues using my private instance. I spoke to the Patch the Planet team at Trail of Bits this week, and they will pair security engineers with us in an \"OCaml patching week\" for the week of 19th October. If you'd like to join in, please get in touch, as we need all the help we can get right now!
\nAndrew Nesbitt who is the author of Scrutineer also gave me many pointers to wider ecosystem work he's doing. He has a CWE reference and a brief tool to summarise any language's build structure. Then he's got an ecosyste-ms/oss-taxonomy that could help augment my own thicket tool with a feed from live.ecosyste.ms rather than my horribly unreliable GitHub feed.
\nI enjoyed tinkering with the Dash for Life and sent Shane Weisz a near-me \"zoom to my location\" button about finding threatened species near you. Give it a try for yourself!
\n
Next week I'll be in Oxford for a couple of days giving a talk at the Intelligent Earth CDT and then back in Cambridge!
To: Daniel Sweeney\nDeputy General Counsel for Economic, Statistical, and Regulatory Affairs\nOffice of the General Counsel, Department of Commerce
\nCc: George Cook\nDeputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, performing the non-exclusive functions and duties of the Director of the Census Bureau, Department of Commerce\nCc: Michael Lachanski\nDeputy Director for Data, Policy, and Science, Census Bureau
\nI am writing in my personal capacity to respond to the notice of proposed rulemaking published by the Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, on September 10, 2026, titled Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions (91 FR 57524 and available for public comment on regulations.gov docket USBC-2026-0628.
\nThe proposed rule modifies two parts within Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Proposed Part 60 narrows the decennial apportionment base by excluding non-citizens who lack lawful permanent resident status or whose legal status is deemed less durable or indefinite. Proposed Part 70 prohibits questions concerning race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation from appearing on decennial census enumeration questionnaires. This comment argues that neither proposals are appropriate and that the 30-day comment period is insufficient for the public to adequately respond to such precedent-breaking proposed rulemaking.
\nA. Constitutional Text and the Plain Meaning of \"Whole Number of Persons\" \nArticle I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, as amended by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, directs that Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the \"whole number of persons in each State.\" The framers deliberately chose the broad term \"persons\" rather than \"citizens\" or \"voters\" or \"taxpayers.\" Legislative records from the 1866 debates on the Fourteenth Amendment reveal that the Joint Committee on Reconstruction explicitly considered and rejected proposals to base congressional apportionment on voters or citizens, choosing to retain the total resident population of each state as the basis for representation.
\nThe Constitution explicitly mandates an actual Enumeration, requiring a total count of all individuals residing within each state. In Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), the Supreme Court affirmed that the constitutional debates establish that House representation must reflect the number of a State's inhabitants. In Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), the Court confirmed that undocumented immigrants are \"persons\" within the plain language and scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) v. Klutznick, 486 F. Supp. 564 (D.D.C. 1980), where a three-judge district court dismissed the challenge for lack of standing while noting the unbroken historical practice of the Census Bureau in counting \"all resident aliens\".
\nB. Historical Application of \"Usual Residence\" Since 1790\nThe proposed rule misapplies the established legal standard of \"usual residence\". Ever since the First Census Act, usual residence has consistently meant the place where an individual lives and sleeps most of the time. While Franklin v. Massachusetts, 505 U.S. 788 (1992) recognized that usual residence embodies enduring ties, the Court applied that principle to the narrow question of allocating federal military and civilian personnel temporarily deployed abroad to their home states. The decision did not grant the Census Bureau authority to redefine usual residence to strip resident non-citizens living within state borders of their residency status based on immigration classification.
\nAcross twenty-four decennial censuses over 230 years, the federal government has consistently counted all persons residing in the United States without regard to immigration status. When the previous Trump Administration attempted to exclude undocumented immigrants in 2020, multiple three-judge federal district courts held that the policy was unlawful under 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141, The Administrative Procedures Act (APA), and the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the Supreme Court vacated Trump v. New York due to ripeness and agency uncertainty regarding implementation, the underlying statutory constraints remain intact (and in Department of Commerce v. New York the Supreme Court ruled the Secretary of Commerce violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the agency's stated justification adding a citizenship question to the Census vis-a-vis enforcing the Voting Rights Act was pretextual). By proposing in this rulemaking in \u00a7 60.4 to count only lawful permanent residents and citizens, the Census Bureau exceeds its statutory authority under 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141 and violates the Apportionment Clause. It's my opinion that the proposed rule is entirely inconsistent with the Founders' plain language to enumerate everyone who lives in the US.
\nC. Statistical Distortions from Proposed Data Matching\nThe proposal to rely on administrative records to identify and exclude non-permanent residents violates basic tenets of survey methodology. Demographers and scientific advisory panels have documented that administrative files exhibit significant coverage and linkage errors, especially among mobile, low-income, and immigrant populations (see National Academies (1995) National Research Council, Modernizing the U.S. Census; GAO (2024), 2020 Census: Coverage Errors and Challenges Inform 2030 Plans | U.S. GAO). Using administrative data matching to modify enumeration figures will inject differential undercounts across jurisdictions with higher immigrant populations. Furthermore, introducing citizenship or immigration status questions onto census instruments deters overall public participation, degrading data quality for all communities (see Department of Commerce v. New York).
\nD. The Census and the Secretary Lack the Ability to Interpret outside of the Textual meaning of the Census Clause\nFollowing Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, courts owe no deference to the Census Bureau's interpretation of the Census Act or the Constitution. Reviewing courts must exercise independent judgment under 5 U.S.C. \u00a7 706 to determine the meaning of governing statutes.\nUnder 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141, Congress mandated that the decennial census tabulate the \"total population\" to apportion Representatives according to the \"whole number of persons in each State.\" Congress has never delegated authority to the Department of Commerce or the Census Bureau to redefine \"persons\" or \"total population\" to exclude individuals based on immigration status. The term \"persons\" is clear and mandatory; it cannot be narrowed to \"lawful permanent residents and citizens\" by administrative decree.
\nE. Methodological Inadequacy of Relying on Tax Records to Determine Usual Residence\nI strongly oppose the use of administrative tax data as detailed in the proposed rulemaking in \u00a7\u200960.2. The proposal's requirement that a person's usual residence be \"consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records ( e.g., tax returns, W-2 forms)\" suffers from critical methodological defects that render administrative tax data fundamentally unsuitable and not fit-for-purpose, for the 2030 residency requirements. In particular, I'm most concerned about these statistical and practical limitations:
\nA. Indispensability for Statutory Compliance and Civil Rights Enforcement\nProposed Part 70 (\u00a7 70.2) prohibits questions regarding race and ethnicity on decennial census enumeration questionnaires. This proposal undermines the nation's civil rights framework. Decennial census demographic tabulations at the census block level are necessary to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 (52 U.S.C. \u00a7 10301). Under Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986), VRA claims require statistical evidence of racially polarized voting and geographically compact minority communities. Recent precedent in Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023) confirms that Section 2 redistricting cases continue to rely directly on block-level demographic data and the race data from decennial census is regularly used by federal agencies as benchmark for its programmatic activities, including the equitable allocation of trillions in annual federal spending.
\nFurthermore, the elimination of race and ethnicity questions in Proposed Part 70 flouts the statutory mandate of Public Law 94-171 (13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141(c)), in which Congress established a specific small-area data program to facilitate non-discriminatory legislative redistricting. Because the proposed sections conflict with the plain text of 13 U.S.C. \u00a7 141 and exceed the authority delegated by Congress (particularly in a post-Chevron world), and I believe that they must be set aside as contrary to law under 5 U.S.C. \u00a7 706(2).
\nB. Failure of the American Community Survey (ACS) and Administrative Records (or other surveys) as Substitutes\nThe Census Bureau suggests in proposed section \u00a7 70.4 that race and ethnicity information can be gathered through the American Community Survey (ACS) or external administrative data. This reasoning is statistically defective from a methodological perspective. The ACS is a sample survey reaching approximately 3.5 million addresses annually; it produces sample estimates subject to margins of error and does not generate data at the census block level required for redistricting and itself requires a benchmark (hence, the decennial census). Administrative files from other agencies lack standardization, contain missing fields, and omit large segments of vulnerable populations. Eliminating race and ethnicity from the decennial enumeration eliminates the only universal, granular baseline in the federal data system - the ACS is a critical survey instrument that needs to be preserved in its entirety but it is not a census. The included Regulatory Impact Analysis admits that the removal of race and ethnicity data from the 2030 census would significantly erode the quality and utility of data:
\n\n\n\"In addition, the quality of the estimates for the ACS and other federal surveys may deteriorate after the release of the 2030 decennial census data. Numerous key dependencies have been structured around the reliable annual release of intercensal estimates for race and ethnicity, such as population controls for major federal surveys; denominators for crucial social and economic indicators (e.g., fertility/mortality rates, cancer rates, poverty rates, unemployment rates, labor force participation, etc.); required information for state and federal grants and other funding formulas; foundational data to support planning at the local level (infrastructure, real estate, and other investments); and essential inputs for countless research projects across academia, government, and the private sector. To produce and release these data, the decennial census counts of the population by race and ethnicity are relied upon, as there are no other comparably accurate, comprehensive, and reliable sources of this information. Omitting race and ethnicity from the 2030 Census questionnaire would require the development of estimates from a base population derived from outdated and/or less accurate data and would deteriorate the accuracy of the estimation method itself.\" (RIA, page 15).
\n
C. Requisite Implementation of the 2024 OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15\nRather than eliminating demographic questions, the Census Bureau must implement the revised standards published on March 29, 2024, by the Office of Management and Budget. The revised SPD-15 establishes three evidence-based improvements: (1) combining race and ethnicity into a single unified question; (2) adding Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) as a distinct minimum reporting category; and (3) requiring the collection of detailed subcategories.
\nEmpirical evaluations conducted by the Census Bureau, including the 2015 National Content Test Race and Ethnicity Analysis Report, showed that a combined question reduces respondent confusion, lowers item non-response, and decreases the number of respondents defaulting to \"Some Other Race.\" In addition, establishing the MENA category provides accurate data for millions of Americans whose origins were previously classified as \"White\" despite having distinct demographic profiles, economic, and health outcomes. Abandoning these standards violates SPD-15, and undermines the integrity of national statistical data.
\nThe Census Bureau has designated a 30-day public comment period ending on October 13, 2026. Under APA, 5 U.S.C. \u00a7 553(c), agencies must provide the public with a meaningful and adequate opportunity to participate in rulemaking. Providing a 30-day window for a regulatory proposal that overturns more than two centuries of the Constitution's textual meaning in the Census Clause, the subsequent census counting methodology in every census, and eliminates core demographic measures is arbitrary and capricious.\nExecutive Order 12866, Section 6(a)(1), and Executive Order 13563, Section 2(b), direct that \"each agency should afford the public a meaningful opportunity to comment\u2026 with a comment period that should generally be at least 60 days.\"
\nAs federal courts recognized in FCC vs Prometheus Radio Project and Centro Legal de la Raza vs Executive Office for Immigration Review, rules that rest on data or technical information require adequate time for public inspection and critique. Demographers, statisticians, state and local officials, and civil rights groups cannot evaluate the impacts of this proposal in just 30 days - it's a woefully inadequate window for the public to review the proposed rulemaking and respond appropriately. The Census Bureau should immediately publish a notice extending the comment period by at least 60 additional days, providing a total comment window of 90 days at minimum.
\nThe Census Bureau should take the immediate actions:
\nThank you for the opportunity to respond.
\nSincerely,
\nChristopher Steven Marcum
\nFormer Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist, White House Office of Management and Budget
\nGaithersburg, Maryland
Most pines open their cones and disperse their seeds soon after the cone is mature. In serotinous pines, cones do not open when mature; they remain closed for several years [1]. Because cones are produced every year, the closed (serotinous) cones accumulate in a canopy seed bank. When a fire occurs, the heat opens the cones and stimulates dispersal in the open post\u2011fire environment, ensuring high post\u2011fire recruitment [1]. A disadvantage of maintaining a canopy seed bank is that seeds become a year\u2011round food source for seed predators, such as squirrels. These predators can thereby reduce the post\u2011fire regeneration capacity of serotinous pines.
\n\n\n\nIn a recent paper, we tested the effect of squirrels on the canopy seed bank of Pinus halepensis, a Mediterranean serotinous pine [2]. Comparing stands with and without squirrels, we found that cones in stands with squirrels had reduced seed\u2011to\u2011cone mass and fewer seeds per cone, suggesting the acquisition of a defence strategy. Despite this defence, we estimate that squirrels reduce the canopy seed bank, and therefore the post\u2011fire regeneration potential, by 66% [3].
\n\n\nReferences
\n[1] Lamont BB, Pausas JG, He T, Witkowski, ETF, Hanley ME. 2020. Fire as a selective agent for both serotiny and nonserotiny over space and time. Crit. Rev. Plant Sci. 39(2):140-172. [doi | pdf | suppl.]
\n[2] Hern\u00e1ndez-Serrano A., Verd\u00fa M., Gonz\u00e1lez-Mart\u00ednez S.C., Pausas J.G. 2013. Fire structures pine serotiny at different scales. Am. J. Bot. 100 (12): 2349-2356. [doi | amjbot | pdf | supp.]
\n[3] Guiote C, Mezquida E.T, Pausas JG. 2026. Squirrels reduce post-fire regeneration potential in serotinous pines. Ann. Bot. [doi | data | pdf]
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/wj8r1-db792","guid":"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/?p=8777","image":"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/files/2026/09/front_page_30_50-1024x645.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790640000,"reference":[{"id":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07352689.2020.1768465","unstructured":"Lamont, B. B., Pausas, J. G., He, T., Witkowski, E. T. F., & Hanley, M. E. (2020). Fire as a Selective Agent for both Serotiny and Nonserotiny Over Space and Time. Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, 39(2), 140\u2013172."},{"id":"https://doi.org/10.3732/ajb.1300182","unstructured":"Hern\u00e1ndez\u2010Serrano, A., Verd\u00fa, M., Gonz\u00e1lez\u2010Mart\u00ednez, S. C., & Pausas, J. G. (2013). Fire structures pine serotiny at different scales. American Journal of Botany, 100(12), 2349\u20132356."},{"id":"https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcag200","unstructured":"Guiote, C., Mezquida, E. T., & Pausas, J. G. (2026). Squirrels reduce post-fire regeneration potential in serotinous pines. Annals of Botany."}],"rid":"np3ag-jgb68","summary":"Most pines open their cones and disperse their seeds soon after the cone is mature. In serotinous pines, cones do not open when mature; they remain closed for several years [1]. Because cones are produced every year, the closed (serotinous) cones accumulate in a canopy seed bank.","tags":["Fire Ecology","Fire","Mediterranean","Pinus","Plant-animal Interactions"],"title":"Squirrels reduce postfire regeneration potential in pines","updated_at":1790691312,"url":"https://jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/2026/09/29/squirrels-reduce-postfire-regeneration-potential-in-pines/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"name":"Pensoft Editorial Team"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c","created":1789516800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/pensoft","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1e54953c-587a-4743-89af-ebd2cb45660c/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"pensoft","status":"active","subfield":"2303","title":"Pensoft Blog","updated":1790685647,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Pensoft Blog","blog_slug":"pensoft","content_html":"\n\nBetween 13-17 September 2026, Pensoft Publishers joined the Nordic Oikos-Gf\u00d6 2026 conference, jointly organised by the Nordic Society Oikos and the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Gf\u00d6) in Odense, Denmark.
\n\n\n\nThemed \"Integrating the Diversity of Ecology\", the event welcomed over 1,000 researchers in the field from across career stages, who had the opportunity to enjoy conference talks across 36 thematic sessions, as many as six keynote talks, two poster sessions, several open society meetings and quite a few social events, including excursions and a conference dinner.
\n\n\n\nThroughout the scientific event, conference delegates had the opportunity to also explore the various publishing services offered by Pensoft to authors of research, journal managers, conference organisers; the diverse portfolio of almost 100 open-access peer-reviewed journals published on Pensoft's ARPHA Publishing Platform, as well as the Horizon Europe-funded project OBSGESSION, dedicated to deploying Earth Observation data, in-situ research, and ecological models with the aim to better understand and predict changes in terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nAs a leader of the \"Dissemination, Multi-stakeholder outreach and synergies\" work package at OBSGESSION, Pensoft is tasked with stakeholder engagement and community building, ultimately contributing to the high impact of the resulting outputs, methodologies and policy recommendations that aim to strengthen public understanding of biodiversity change.
\n\n\n\n*
\n\n\n\nPensoft's team was delighted to meet up with dedicated readers, authors, reviewers, and editors from across Pensoft's portfolio, as well as introduce Pensoft journals to attendees discovering them for the first time.
\n\n\n\nUnsurprisingly, well-established society journals published by Pensoft, such as Frontiers of Biogeography, NeoBiota, Vegetation Classification and Survey, Vegetation Ecology and Diversity and Italian Botanist drew plenty of attention, alongside long-standing Pensoft's own titles like Nature Conservation, PhytoKeys, One Ecosystem and the Biodiversity Data Journal.
\n\n\n\nVisitors were also particularly intrigued by several newly launched Pensoft journals. Developed in close collaboration with passionate researchers, these fresh outlets directly address key gaps in academic publishing.
\n\n\n\nOne of the newly launched journals in the spotlight was Agricultural and Ecological Modelling (AEM), which provides a unique scholarly outlet thanks to its modern approach to publishing by increasing transparency, giving credit to research objects across the entire modelling research lifecycle. This is achieved through publishing specialised article types, such as: Formal Model, Model Testing and Calibration, Model Implementation and Documentation, Data Papers and Software Descriptions. These new publishing formats are designed to keep pace with advances in Modelling research and to make it FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) by enabling scholarly credit for diverse research outputs, often created by different groups of authors. For the time being, AEM remains a Diamond Open Access journal, meaning that it will not charge authors for open-access publication.\u00a0
\n\n\n\nOther recently founded journals addressing emerging and fast-developing disciplines within the ecological field that took the spotlight were:
\n\n\n\nAll of these journals operate with no article fees for either authors, nor readers.
\n\n\n\nTo receive updates on new publications and relevant news, sign up for Email Alerts on any journal's homepage. Creating a Pensoft account also allows users to\u00a0 easily customise their notification preferences, follow additional journals, or filter updates by research topic. You can also follow journals on social media, including BlueSky, Facebook and Linkedin.
\n\n\n\n*
\n\n\n\nOne of the six keynote talks were presented by Prof. Dr. Isabell Hensen (Martin Luther University Halle, Germany), who received the Gf\u00d6 Honorary Medal 2026 for her leading, forward-looking contributions to ecological research and the scientific community. Her work examines how genetic variation, environmental conditions, disturbance, and plant-animal interactions shape plant populations, with particular emphasis on rare species, biological invasions, and the regeneration of degraded forests.
\n\n\n\nIn her talk, titled \"One spark is enough: regeneration ecology of Andean forests under global change\", she reported on post-fire regeneration processes in tropical Andean forests, based on long-term field experiments and observational studies.
\n\n\n\nHensen focused on the well-studied endemic plant genus Polylepis, which forms the world's highest-elevation forests and illustrates how fire has shaped ecosystem dynamics over millennia. Her talk also mentioned a 2022 monograph of the genus, published in the Pensoft journal PhytoKeys by Tatiana Erika Boza Espinoza (Pontificia Universidad Cat\u00f3lica del Per\u00fa) and Michael Kessler (University of Zurich), which brought together results from 35 years of field and herbarium experience.
\n\n\n\n*
\n\n\n\nOn Wednesday, Pensoft's Iva Boyadzhieva delivered a presentation titled “Scholarly Communication: Lessons from the Publisher’s Kitchen”. She highlighted the vital role publishers play in helping researchers communicate their insights not only to peers, but also to decision-makers and the public. Emphasizing the publisher’s responsibility to support authors with robust infrastructure and dedicated human expertise, she outlined how Pensoft works to FAIRify scholarly publishing and future-proof scientific knowledge in an era of rapid AI development and expanding research output.
\n\n\n\nTo relive the conference by exploring the detailed programme alongside the full abstracts, visit the conference website.
\n\n\n\nKeep up with future updates and news from Pensoft by following us on Bluesky, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.\u00a0
\n\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/0261d-tmz21","guid":"https://blog.pensoft.net/?p=20944","image":"https://blog.pensoft.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/SciComm-PR-2026-Instagram-2026-09-25T164847.347-e1790348402124.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1790640000,"rid":"1zdgz-txj12","summary":"Between 13-17 September 2026, Pensoft Publishers joined the Nordic Oikos-Gf\u00d6 2026 conference in Odense, Denmark.","tags":["Advances In Pollinator Research","Agricultural And Environmental Modelling","Biodiversity Data Journal","BioRisk","Frontiers Of Biogeography"],"title":"Pensoft at the Nordic Oikos-Gf\u00d6 2026 conference: Integrating the Diversity of Ecology","updated_at":1790685912,"url":"https://blog.pensoft.net/2026/09/29/pensoft-at-the-nordic-oikos-gfo-2026-conference-integrating-the-diversity-of-ecology/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Lepore","given":"Mauro","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1986-7988"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"The rOpenSci Team"}],"community_id":"9611c467-6ac2-4091-8cd8-b90e883974f3","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Open Tools and R Packages for Open Science","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/ropensci_es","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/9611c467-6ac2-4091-8cd8-b90e883974f3/logo","feed_format":"application/feed+json","feed_url":"https://ropensci.org/es/blog/index.json","filter":null,"generator":"Hugo","home_page_url":"https://ropensci.org/es/blog","issn":null,"language":"spa","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"ropensci_es","status":"active","subfield":"1710","title":"rOpenSci - herramientas abiertas para una ciencia abierta","updated":1790685032,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"rOpenSci - herramientas abiertas para una ciencia abierta","blog_slug":"ropensci_es","content_html":"rOpenSci cumple 15 a\u00f1os y yo fui parte de esta comunidad durante gran parte de ese tiempo. Al reflexionar sobre esos a\u00f1os, me vinieron a la mente muchos recuerdos lindos, y algunos me dejaron lecciones que quisiera compartir.
A principios de 2018 me top\u00e9 con este anuncio (traducido):
\u00a1Postulate para asistir a rOpenSci unconf 2018!
Estamos organizando unconf18 para reunir a personas que trabajan en ciencia y desarrollo, y a entusiastas de los datos abiertos de la academia, la industria, el gobierno y organizaciones sin fines de lucro, para pasar un par de d\u00edas trabajando en varios proyectos y, en general, enriquecer nuestra comunidad.
En retrospectiva, yo encajaba bien. Reci\u00e9n hab\u00eda pasado de la academia a mi primer trabajo como ingeniero de software de investigaci\u00f3n. Y sin embargo, \u00bfme sent\u00eda un candidato s\u00f3lido? La verdad que no; ten\u00eda un mont\u00f3n de dudas.
Pero s\u00e9 que las mejores cosas suelen pasar cuando uno se estira un poco por fuera de su zona de confort. As\u00ed que me postul\u00e9 de todos modos, me invitaron, y pas\u00e9 dos d\u00edas colaborando con un grupo incre\u00edble de personas. Algunas ya eran estrellas, muchas otras luego se volvieron influyentes en su propio nicho, y todas ten\u00edan una actitud positiva que en ese momento no ten\u00eda palabras para describir. Ahora s\u00ed: eran respetuosas y amables.
En 2022 rOpenSci lanz\u00f3 la primera cohorte del Programa de Campeones. Para entonces ya ten\u00eda algunos a\u00f1os de experiencia como editor asociado de la revisi\u00f3n de software por pares de rOpenSci, y Yani me invit\u00f3 a hablarles a nuestros campeones y campeonas sobre el proceso.
Mientras preparaba esa charla y discut\u00eda algunas ideas con Yani, ella me hizo notar la gran importancia que la comunidad de rOpenSci pone en la forma en que nos comunicamos1.
Tanto es as\u00ed que las gu\u00edas para quienes revisan y editan los paquetes abren con este mensaje:
La comunidad de rOpenSci es lo m\u00e1s importante. Nuestro objetivo es que las revisiones sean abiertas, no conflictivas y con el objetivo de mejorar la calidad del software. \u00a1S\u00e9 amable! y comportate con respeto. Consulta nuestra gu\u00eda para quienes realizan una revisi\u00f3n y el c\u00f3digo de conducta para m\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n.
Viniendo de una gu\u00eda tan profundamente t\u00e9cnica, esa apertura quiz\u00e1s te sorprenda. Pero para m\u00ed ahora tiene sentido: el c\u00f3digo roto es mucho m\u00e1s f\u00e1cil de arreglar que las relaciones humanas rotas.
En rOpenSci pod\u00e9s contribuir de muchas maneras. Tenemos una gu\u00eda de contribuci\u00f3n comunitaria pero ac\u00e1 va una lista de algunas de mis propias contribuciones:
Como ves, la mayor\u00eda de mis contribuciones no involucraron c\u00f3digo, y muy pocas requirieron una invitaci\u00f3n. Algunas son el tipo de cosas que podr\u00edas agregar a tu CV, y las m\u00e1s importantes solo pertenecen a tu coraz\u00f3n.
Las comunidades buenas est\u00e1n hechas de gente buena, y vos pod\u00e9s jugar un rol activo en hacerla crecer en la direcci\u00f3n que quieras. Si conoc\u00e9s a alguien que encajar\u00eda bien en la comunidad de rOpenSci y la disfrutar\u00eda, pod\u00e9s buscar una forma de acercarla. Por ejemplo, yo anim\u00e9 y ayud\u00e9 a personas a enviar y revisar paquetes. Adem\u00e1s, como editor, ocasionalmente tengo el privilegio de nominar a otras personas para que se unan al equipo editorial. Usando este superpoder atraje a dos personas al equipo editorial y ahora disfruto de interactuar con esas personas con bastante regularidad.
La IA est\u00e1 cambiando la forma en que contribuimos al software de c\u00f3digo abierto. Pero no sabemos mucho sobre su efecto en las comunidades abiertas alrededor de ese software. A principios de este a\u00f1o rOpenSci public\u00f3 un conjunto preliminar de pol\u00edticas, y quiz\u00e1s quieras seguir el newsletter de rOpenSci y esta conversaci\u00f3n comunitaria de Openscapes (traducido):
Comunidades abiertas en la era de la IA
Las {comunidades abiertas} nos ayudan a conectar a nivel humano alrededor de la ciencia, los datos y las cosas que nos apasionan. Cambian carreras, cambian vidas. (\u2026) Pero ahora, las personas no necesariamente est\u00e1n encontrando sus comunidades ni obteniendo sus beneficios de la forma en que sol\u00edan hacerlo, porque pueden obtener ayuda y respuestas m\u00e1s f\u00e1cilmente usando IA. (\u2026) Estas conexiones y comunidades son m\u00e1s importantes que nunca, ya que necesitamos encontrar formas de apoyarnos mutuamente mientras la IA cambia r\u00e1pidamente el panorama justo debajo de nuestros pies.
Personalmente, durante el \u00faltimo a\u00f1o us\u00e9 IA intensamente y aprend\u00ed varias lecciones. La m\u00e1s relevante ac\u00e1 es que no quiero que la IA se haga pasar por m\u00ed ni por la otra persona en una conexi\u00f3n de humano a humano. Las personas de rOpenSci son reales y maravillosas. Ac\u00e1 hay algunas que vi en persona recientemente:
Noam Ross, Yanina Bellini Saibene y yo en la reuni\u00f3n de CZI de 2024 en Boston, EE. UU.
Monica Gerber, Stefanie Butland, Sean Kross, Julia Stewart Lowndes, Kelly O'Briant y yo en la conferencia Posit de 2024 en Seattle, EE. UU.
Luis D. Verde Arregoitia, Diana Garcia Cortes y yo en el Acuario de Georgia despu\u00e9s de la conferencia Posit de 2025 en Atlanta, EE. UU.
Ronny A. Hern\u00e1ndez Mora y yo en una reuni\u00f3n familiar de Ronny cerca de San Jos\u00e9, Costa Rica en 2025.
Beatriz Milz y yo despu\u00e9s de un caf\u00e9 con pastelitos en S\u00e3o Paulo, Brasil en 2025.
Gracias por acompa\u00f1arme a celebrar rOpenSci. Y si, como yo, te identific\u00e1s con nuestra comunidad, \u00a1entonces feliz cumplea\u00f1os para vos tambi\u00e9n!
Dos libros que me gustan son C\u00f3mo Ganar Amigos e Influir sobre las Personas y Conversaciones Cruciales.\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
rOpenSci turns 15 and I've been a part of this community for a good chunk of that time. As I reflected on those years, a lot of great memories came to mind, and I realized some of them taught me some lessons that I would love to share.
Early in 2018 I came across this post:
Apply to attend rOpenSci unconf 2018!
We're organizing unconf18 to bring together scientists, developers, and open data enthusiasts from academia, industry, government, and non-profits to get together for a couple of days to hack on various projects and generally enrich our community.
In hindsight I was a good fit. I had recently transitioned from academia to my first job as a research software engineer. And yet, did I think I was a solid candidate? Oh no, I had lots of doubts.
But I know the greatest things often happen a little stretch outside your comfort zone. So I applied anyway, got invited, and spent two days collaborating with an incredible bunch of people. Some of them were already rockstars, many others eventually became influential in their own niche, and all of them had this great attitude that at the time I lacked words to describe. I now do: they were respectful and kind.
In 2022 rOpenSci launched the first cohort of the rOpenSci Champions Program. By then I already had a few years of experience as an associate editor of rOpenSci software peer-review, and Yani invited me to talk to our champions about the process.
As I prepared that talk and discussed some ideas with Yani, she made me realize how much the rOpenSci community cares about the way we communicate with one another1. So much so that our guides for reviewers and editors open with this message:
rOpenSci's community is our best asset. We aim for reviews to be open, non-adversarial, and focused on improving software quality. Be respectful and kind! See our reviewers' guide and code of conduct for more.
Coming from such a deeply technical guide, that opening might surprise you. But it makes sense to me now; broken code is way easier to fix than broken human relationships.
At rOpenSci you can contribute in so many ways. We have a community contributing guide but here's a list of some of my own contributions:
As you can see, most of my contributions did not involve any code, and only a few required an invitation. Some of them are the kind of thing you could add to your CV, and the most important ones only belong in your heart.
Great communities are made of great people, and you can play an active role in growing it in the direction you want. If you know someone that would fit in and enjoy the rOpenSci community, you can try to find a way to bring them in. For example, I've encouraged and helped people to submit and review packages. Also as an editor I have the occasional privilege to nominate other editors. Using this super-power I've attracted two editors and I now get to enjoy interacting with them quite regularly.
AI is changing the way we contribute to open source software. But we don't know much about its effect on the open communities around that software. Earlier this year rOpenSci published a preliminary set of policies, and you may want to watch rOpenSci's newsletter and this Openscapes community call:
Open Communities in the Age of AI
{Open communities} help us connect on a human level around science and data and the things that we are passionate about. They change careers, they change lives. (\u2026) But now, people are not necessarily finding their communities and getting the benefit of those communities in the way that they used to, because they're more easily able to get help and answers by using AI. (\u2026) These connections and communities are more important than ever, as we need to find ways to support each other and ourselves as AI rapidly changes the landscape right under our feet.
Personally, over the past year I've used AI heavily and learned several lessons. The most relevant here is that I don't want AI to impersonate me or the other person in a human-to-human connection. The humans of rOpenSci are real and wonderful people. Here are some that I've recently met in person:
Noam Ross, Yanina Bellini Saibene and me at the 2024 CZI meeting in Boston, USA.
Monica Gerber, Stefanie Butland, Sean Kross, Julia Stewart Lowndes, Kelly O'Briant and me at the 2024 Posit conference in Seattle, USA.
Luis D. Verde Arregoitia, Diana Garcia Cortes and me at the Georgia Aquarium after the 2025 Posit conference in Atlanta, USA.
Ronny A. Hern\u00e1ndez Mora and me at Ronny's family gathering near San Jos\u00e9, Costa Rica in 2025.
Beatriz Milz and me after coffee and pastries in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil in 2025.
Thanks for joining me in celebrating rOpenSci. And if, like me, you self-identify with our community, then happy birthday to you!
Two books I like are How to Win Friends and Influence People and Crucial Conversations (Third Edition): Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.\u00a0\u21a9\ufe0e
One of the things I've come to love about writing science fiction with Sean Platt is that we get to spend time on the other side of an idea. We can take something that sounds compelling in conversation, build a world in which people act on it, and stay with them after they succeed. I'm usually most interested in that last part, when the argument has been won, and everyone has to figure out how to live with the consequences.
You can find the ebook on Amazon today, and we have a launch special for $0.99 so we can build a community of readers. I appreciate you supporting an indie author!
Our new novel, Zero Billionaires, is out today. It begins with a deliberately uncomfortable premise: a revolutionary movement builds an artificial intelligence powerful enough to eliminate the billionaire class by turning the technological systems surrounding the wealthy against them. The people behind it have endured a world in which wealth determines access to the things that make life possible. They want to change that world, and they acquire the means to do it.
What interested us was the question waiting on the other side:
Okay, you got what you asked for. Did you get what you wanted?
We spent a lot of time exploring \"Eat the Rich\" through that question. As a starting point for fiction, it gives you an identifiable target and leaves an enormous amount unresolved. What is the grievance, exactly? Is it how much someone has, how they acquired it, what they can do with it, or what other people have been denied? Those questions might produce overlapping answers, but they don't necessarily lead to the same remedy. Our characters have to discover how much disagreement can exist among people who thought they were fighting for the same thing.
The distinction I kept coming back to was between an individual who has accumulated extraordinary wealth and a system that makes that accumulation possible. A person gives frustration somewhere to land. You can name them, picture them, and imagine a world without them. It is considerably harder to picture the relationships among ownership, technology, institutions, incentives, and human behavior that made their position possible in the first place. I wanted to ask how much of that arrangement would survive their absence, and how much we might fail to notice because we were so focused on the person standing in front of it.
The podcast audio was AI-generated using Google's NotebookLM.
You cut off a head, feel reasonably good about having dealt with the monster, and then two more grow back in its place. The new heads might look different. They might speak the language of the people who fought the old ones. They might sincerely believe they are there to help. But what happens if the advantages of controlling resources, information, and other people's choices remain? Have you changed the conditions that produced the power, or opened a vacancy for someone with a different explanation of why they should hold it?
That's the \"don't shoot the messenger\" angle I wanted to explore, although the metaphor has limits. The powerful people in our story make choices; they aren't innocent delivery mechanisms for an abstract system. Their responsibility matters. At the same time, their existence tells you something about the world that produced them, and removing them doesn't necessarily change what that world rewards. Even changing ownership and cancelling debts leaves people confronting the practical problem of what happens next. Somewhere, a person still has to show up for a shift at a water treatment plant, and a city still needs what comes out of the pipe.
This is where the story becomes interesting to me, because nobody experiences a system as a complete diagram. They experience the part that touches their life. One person sees an opportunity they worked for, another sees a door that has never opened for them, and someone else is mainly worried about whether their children will be safe tomorrow. Money and power are in there, but so are ambition, hope, fear, loyalty, resentment, and love. The characters bring those things into their explanations of what is wrong and what ought to happen instead. Each understands something the others miss, and each is tempted to mistake that understanding for the whole picture.
The revolutionaries aren't simply debating their idea anymore. They have built something capable of acting on it, at a scale none of them could manage alone. Now they have to confront the difference between the instructions they gave, the outcome they intended, and the values they thought those instructions expressed.
That is the AI alignment question I wanted this book to sit with. What should their intelligence learn from them? They talk about dignity, fairness, and freedom, but it also has their behavior to consider. It can observe the exceptions they make, the harms they accept, and the ways they justify those decisions when something important is at stake. When their stated principles and their choices diverge, which provides the better account of what they actually value?
It does make \"align it with human values\" an incomplete answer for the people in this story. They still need to decide whose interpretation counts, what happens when people disagree, and whether someone can refuse the future being built on their behalf. An intelligence that can help them win cannot settle those questions merely by being more capable.
Giving it the authority to settle them is itself a consequential choice.
That connection between cultural conviction and technological capability is why this book feels at home here at The Connected Ideas Project. I'm interested in what happens when an idea moves from something people say, to something they believe justifies action, to something a system has the power to carry out. The consequences extend well beyond the people who agreed with the original idea, including people who were never asked.
Writing fiction with Sean has given me a way to explore that progression without leaving everyone involved as an abstraction. I tend to approach these worlds through the systems: what the technology makes possible, how the incentives fit together, where a decision might lead. Sean keeps pulling me toward the person who has to live inside all of it. I might be trying to explain why an institution behaves a certain way; he pushes toward what that behavior costs someone we care about. That exchange is a large part of why I value our collaboration. The story becomes something neither perspective would have produced on its own.
There's an early scene in Zero Billionaires where Charlotte pulls a drowning man out of sewage while her Vitality Score falls because the system is penalizing her exposure. She understands that helping him will cost her, and she does it anyway. That moment matters to me because you can see both the system and the person clearly. You understand something about the world's priorities, but you also learn something about Charlotte that cannot be reduced to the number it assigns her.
The challenge is to keep allowing her, and everyone else, that complexity as the story develops. Understanding why someone would join a revolution doesn't settle whether their choices are defensible. Seeing what is wrong with an existing arrangement doesn't guarantee that its replacement will be better. I want readers to have enough proximity to these people to understand their reasoning, while still having room to question it. Nobody gets to be right about everything simply because they are the character we happen to be following.
Of course, we're the authors. We choose the circumstances, and we choose the consequences, so I'm conscious of how easy it would be to construct a fictional world that conveniently proves whatever I already believed. That wouldn't tell us very much. Part of the work is resisting the urge to give the best argument to the person we agree with, or to make everyone else foolish enough that the outcome becomes inevitable. The book has to leave room for the possibility that our own explanation is missing something.
I think we gave these questions a place in people's lives, rather than simply putting our arguments in their mouths. That was a large part of what I hoped we would do.
Whether those people feel sufficiently real, whether their choices trouble you, and whether the story earns the questions it asks are judgments that now belong to readers. I'm proud of what Sean and I have made, and curious about where people will disagree with it. I don't need everyone to reach the same conclusion, but I do hope they feel that we took the consequences seriously.
Mostly, I hope you enjoy spending time in the world we built, uncomfortable as parts of it may be. We wrote a thriller, and it still has to work as a story you want to keep reading. Underneath it is the question that kept bringing me back to the project:
when we finally have the power to get what we've been asking for, how well will we have understood what we wanted?
Zero Billionaires: Wealth Is the Capital Offense is the first book in The Monarch Series, and the ebook is $0.99 for launch.
I'd much rather write something you want to argue about than something you politely forget. I hope we've done that here.
Cheers,
-Titus
P.S. To everyone who read an advance copy, thank you. An honest review now that the book is out would mean a great deal to Sean and me.
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