maria bellantone 🇺🇦

#OpenScience @EURAC
Chemist with #MaterialsScience PhD
Former science editor & publisher
Migrant
Into periodic tables
Icecream expert
#Tsundoku

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

Blog by me on @LinkedIn:
Five things to remember when looking at #ResearchData https://t.co/usMhLnqQ5e
#DataSharing #DataViz

[NWS Austin/San Antonio @NWSSanAntonio]

Here is a full disk view of @NOAA’s GOES East satellite capturing the moon's shadow during the total eclipse! #Eclipse2024

[CoARA @CoARAssessment]

🌐 CoARA is looking for passionate individuals to join our Steering Board! We have five openings, including one Vice-Chair position! If you're eager to shape the future of our coalition, this is your chance! 🚀

🗓️Deadline: Nov 13📝 Find details here: https://t.co/to4PZSYLkF

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

@ALETranslation @scispace @ScholarAI_ @protocolsIO @Phil_Gooch @scholarcy @ResearcherLife_ @mathein @TimHVines Missed the 1st session, but will catch up with the next 6 #AI tool-up Tuesdays

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

Troubling signs of plagiarism found in hundreds of IEEE conference papers.
https://t.co/afdDkszqzo

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

@alvinfoo @ezdubs_bot english italian

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

The job title ‘research manager’ may no longer be fit for purpose, says @EvelinaBrannval. Describing these people as administrators or support staff does not capture the nature of their jobs.
I'm now one of them. I ❤ my job but ill at ease with job title
https://t.co/R3pPnRlLzr

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

@threadreaderapp get working on this, please

[Max Krahé @maxkrahe]

Beyond this, single biggest challenge remains: breaking up rent-seeking structures & transforming Italy's political capitalism from the extractive-malcoordinated to the cooperative-productive kind. Easier said than done.

https://t.co/YxXsNgKTNJ

29/n

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

@threadreaderapp please unroll

[Paolo Crosetto @PaoloCrosetto]

Note that the losers of the vote -- willing to keep IP but forced to transition to noIP -- *do* try to boycott by reducing effort.

But since they are not good players to start with, this has little effect.

Good players do not benefit from IP much; rent-seekers do.

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

Want to become a Marie Curie postdoc fellow? Join the #MSCAweek at @EURAC !
https://t.co/Mk3FSoycNN

[Richard Sever @cshperspectives]

Massive news: eLife to abolish accept/reject decisions: papers will just be “peer reviewed”. Others can argue about this, but lots of interesting consequences. 1/9 https://t.co/FedRxI62iC

[Maria J. Cruz @[email protected] @gravana]

#RoadtoOpenScience So glad to hear @tonyR_H calling for sustainable careers for all of those involved in the research process, not just researchers. We don't need a strict divide between researchers and professional support staff. 👏👏👏 cc @martateperek @dannykay68

[Hum @hum_works]

Excellent keynote at #STMFrankfurt today - "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
(Though we'd argue that most of your important data is more "countable" than you might think!)

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

In business models for OA session. Lots of comments on #DiamondOA, inspired by the excellent talk of @piotrr70. Commercial publishers can play a role in diamondOA, as publishing service providers, as long as research community remains in control of its output. #RoadToOpenScience

[SciencePOD @SciencePOD]

@niamhoconnor73 suggests deconstructing publication processes by disconnecting the peer-review from individual publications, via portable peer review. But adoption of such a post-modern #scicomms requires greater transparency of publishing services costs. #STMFrankfurt

[Ginny has moved to Bluesky @GinnyLDN]

Impressed with @Grimhawk1's talk at #STMFrankfurt about @GigaScience - a super flexible multilingual xml-first publishing platform - and on replacing APCs by covering costs with all sorts of other things from training to hacks that support grant-writing.

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

Key point by @marcschiltz1 on metrics and rankings. Just because you can come up with numbers and rankings doesn't mean that the evaluation system is "objective". Metrics can give a false feeling of objectivity. #RoadToOpenScience #researchassessment

[maria bellantone 🇺🇦 @mbellantone]

Sarahanne Field @SMirandaField: Think about #openscience as a buffet and scientists should be able to pick and choose, flexibility is important. #roadtoopenscience

[Kaveh Bazargan @kaveh1000]

The primary role of science and of publishing is disseminating knowledge. There must be trust between publishers and scientists – @PeterGluckman #stmfrankfurt