Matthew Cockerill

Food, open science + tech tweets from founder of @ckbk (Spotify for cookbooks) Previously co-founder of open access publisher, BioMed Central. Also @MJCockerill

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@emollick Nice UI, but it seems to confuse itself when trying to distinguish Confounding from Reverse Causation. In fact you could almost say it confounds the two :-)

[ckbk @ckbk]

✨️✨️ It's a wrap for 2025! Here's our top 20 books & recipes of the year. Check out the full list here 👇
https://t.co/fMhDWV32GI

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

If you love cooking and cookbooks, now's the best time of year to get a @ckbk membership (or give one as a gift subscription!)

[ckbk @ckbk]

ckbk gives full access to more than 1,000 cookbooks. Award-winning books from Rose Levy Beranbaum, Mark Bittman and Nik Sharma. Pro chef titles from Wayne Gisslen and the CIA. Nostalgic classics from Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Robert Carrier, Keith Floyd and Ken Hom. It's all included in our half-price Black Friday offer https://t.co/EJQeIHHFDf

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@mbeisen @NIH APCs at least have the virtue of transparency. Why would you want a scientific comms system where funding and costs are opaque? That would enable bloodsucking, if anything, surely.

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@elonmusk ok

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@VPrasadMDMPH It’s not as if this intervention is impossible to randomize and test directly, using their existing measurement approach to track the effectiveness of the intervention at (a) increasing exercise and (b) decreasing dementia

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@VPrasadMDMPH In which case the journal really shouldn’t get away with a title which so strongly implies causation to have been established…

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@TricksyTrixie @tony_vandongen @EsotericCD Yay - a fellow cat fud fan - that one will never leave me 😂

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@Cryx315071 @tony_vandongen @EsotericCD I drank coffee at work from that mug for, like, 15 years :-) extra resonance thanks to our family name…

[ckbk @ckbk]

This is happening tomorrow — ckbk co-founder @mjcockerill and EYB co-founder Jane Kelly will be answering all your cookbook-related questions.
There still just time to reserve your spot... https://t.co/Rbhty2mscr

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

'In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good."… anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can… Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money…
Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good.'

[Cory Doctorow NO LONGER ON TWIT TER @doctorow]

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed *magic* - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

1/

[ckbk @ckbk]

📣👏 Happy #PublicationDay to @EleanorFordFood for her beautiful new book A Whisper of Cardamom @ckbk subscribers can access in full today.🙌 Food writer @ramonaandrews interviews Eleanor to discover more about the spices that feature in her favourite recipes https://t.co/kQVoVVpR4W @MurdochBooks_UK

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@cshperspectives But the poet knows when and where recitation is appropriate and permitted in ethical and intellectual property terms. And will (hopefully) not pass off another’s work as their own, and will cite the source when quoting verbatim (e.g. in a review) ChatGPT needs similar safeguards

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@cshperspectives I think the analogy with human reading is important. A poet may read, learn and be able to recite a lot of poetry by heart. It’s an somewhat unavoidable side effect of thoroughly learning *from* the text that you actually end up learning the text itself. (1/2)

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

Yes. This is 100% the type of use we envisioned at @BioMedCentral when rolling out open licensing so that open access articles could be built on and reused and mined and aggregated + read by computers, not just humans. How best to meet @creativecommons attribution reqt though?

[Michael 英泉 Eisen @mbeisen]

This is amazing! @PLOS is the 7th largest single source of training data for ChatGPT! Without commenting on the legality or ethics of their use of proprietary content, this is a type of use we envisioned at its founding and which we explicitly chose to enable (ht @weinberz).

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@ProfBrianCox @Eschertology @pauljbarton Similarly we don’t really know that nucleic acids are the only viable route to heredity. They currently dominate (ignoring prion strains and epigenetics for now), but that could be just because on earth they rapidly outcompete all alternatives.

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@ProfBrianCox @Eschertology @pauljbarton We have one datapoint which is that the eukaryotic cell worked out really well and has played a key role in multicellular life on Earth. But we don’t know what might have happened if eukaryotic cell hadn’t emerged. Quite possibly a different solution would have come to dominate…

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@MarianneLevy Something odd here. This article quotes £4bn of maternity compensation *in a decade*.
https://t.co/f96zDaMgYR

[Matthew Cockerill @opentechmatt]

@liamealbee @joshmnicholson @AcadLibsNorth The fake but plausible citations are definitely one of the freaky things about ChatGPT. It also frequently makes up direct quotes and awards/honours to individuals which didn’t happen. It’s a bullshitter par excellence.