nicky nicolson
@nickynicolson.bsky.social
👋 Software developer turned biodiversity informatics researcher: I use collaborative #OpenScience practices to build tools, analyse & mobilise natural history specimen data - at Kew & with partners worldwide. Fellow at the Institute for Research Software.
“While OpenAI admits to agents behaving ‘unpredictably’, they must also acknowledge their responsibility to monitor and prevent these risks,” Wikimedia said. “AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause.” arstechnica.com/security/202...
OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic
The reports of OpenAI agents harming third-party sites keep coming.
arstechnica.com
The community @ucl-arc.bsky.social worked hard to build a consensus on our policy for AI-assisted RSE @society-rse.org . We’re publishing it to help others learn from our efforts: doi.org/10.5522/04/3... Feedback most welcome.
AI-Assisted Software Development Policy for UCL Advanced Research Computing
This policy covers the use of large language models (LLMs) by ARC staff for software, systems and platform engineering, data analytics and computational statistics, modelling and simulation, and process automation — briefly "AI for programming". It covers model and tool selection, collaborative behaviour in teams, collaborator/customer interactions, future research directions, and education and training content for teaching software and systems engineering.A comprehensive review of AI-assisted software development, from tab-completion to multi-agent harnesses such as Codex and Claude Code, is beyond the scope of this policy. This policy does not directly address the broader questions surrounding LLMs: the provenance and copyright status, environmental impact, long-term labour market impact, and social and cultural implications, among others. Those are legitimate and live debates, and colleagues who have concerns should raise them within the appropriate ARC fora, their team and with line managers. We encourage open discussion of these issues in a spirit of disagreeing well.Creating a consensus policy is hard. This document is the result of extensive discussions within UCL's Advanced Research Computing Centre, and endeavours to set out principles and an overall position within which people holding diverse views on the topic can work. The authors acknowledge and are grateful for rich discussions and contributions from many people beyond those listed.
doi.org
"If AI had existed in the early aughts, we could not have accelerated Zotero’s conception, b/c we did not know exactly what we wanted...As programming increasingly becomes a caffeinated bender with magical bots, this measured pace & emphasis on communal thinking likely holds an important lesson." ❤️🔥
Dan Cohen@dancohen.org · 7d agoOn the 20th anniversary of Zotero's 1.0 release on October 5, 2006, I wrote a history of the collaboration and years it took to create the popular research tool now used by over 20 million people: newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...
🚨 #MUSEUMJOBS KLAXON🚨 We're looking for a Senior Digitiser and two Digitisers to work across @zoologymuseum.bsky.social & @camplantsci.bsky.social to help create biodiversity data for the researchers who need it, through #DiSSCoUK. 1. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/senior-... 2. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/digitis...
Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface
🌱 Joe Miller was at the @kewgardens.bsky.social this week, presenting at the State of the World's Plants & Fungi Symposium. Joe joined Maui Hudson whose presentation focused on the role of recognizing Indigenous provenance in herbarium collections through culturally appropriate metadata.💚 #SOTWPF
Behind almost every research study there's a collections specialist, a data manager, a technician or a bit of code that never makes the paper and never gets credited. The Hidden REF 2026 is open, and it recognises exactly those outputs and roles, the ones traditional assessment leaves out.
Hidden REF Competition 2026 - The Hidden REF
Hidden REF Competition 2026 The Hidden REF Competition celebrates all research outputs and everyone involved in their creation. The competition recognises a range of outputs that […]
hidden-ref.org
What is the charge? Training a chatbot? A succulent Chinese chatbot?
Simon@simonxix.com · 4mo agoSo what is the crime? Is the output of Claude copyrighted? Is Alibaba using Anthropic's product too much? If Alibaba's excessive use of Anthropic is damaging Anthropic's ability to offer their service, then how is that different from AI bots and scrapers effectively DDoSing open repositories?
In the 90 minutes after @theguardian.com article went live, BHL received more than US$2,500 in donations. Thank you to everyone helping keep biodiversity knowledge free and open. Please read, share, and help us build momentum.
A bonanza for fans of the natural world: the digital library sharing 64m pages of scientific knowledge with everyone
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an invaluable online archive of historic texts on species living and lost supplied by the world’s leading museums and universities. Now its future is in doubt
theguardian.com
Got a digitised collection that needs OCR? uv-scripts is a set of single-file Python scripts that OCR a whole image dataset to markdown in one command — 20+ open VLMs to pick from, nothing to install but uv. github.com/davanstrien/...
BBC Question Time now doing exact same with AI they did with Farage? This ‘expert’ panel on AI is a disgrace: not one critical voice. Gilbert works for Tony Blair to promote AI. Jones is govt chief AI booster (& Blair flunky). Riparbelli is industry. Gawdat is ex industry. And a Tory MP
Darren Jones MP@darrenpjones.bsky.social · 5mo agoLooking forward to talking about the future of the UK tomorrow on BBC Question Time and how we’re applying Labour values to the big challenges we face as a country. 👇
The "stop illustrating heatwaves (like yesterday's 34C when it should be about 17C) with pretty beach pics and people outside" challenge. Maybe if we showed the consequences (increased mortality risk, higher cost of cooling, discomfort) that might get the point across?
I sketched this out a few years ago. The HTML vs Markdown debate is conflating substrate with information density. The real question is what kind of feedback an artifact actually invites. Hi-fi invites parameter critique. Lo-fi invites paradigm critique.
🚨VACANCY: The Archives team is hiring a new Graduate Trainee for a 2-year role. They will be working in the Archives and Records Management team, gaining valuable experience pre-qualification. Deadline: 17 May 2026 Start date: 1 Sep 2026 Salary: £29,692 pa careers.kew.org/vacancy/arch... #KewLA
Archives Graduate Trainee - Careers | Kew Gardens
The Archives and Records Management team forms part of the Library and Archives department. Archive staff manage Kew’s historic record of activities, as well as collections and other documents relatin...
careers.kew.org
🔎 Spotted a suspicious record... maybe an erroneous entry? 🥁 Introducing.... rule-based annotations in GBIF! This new experimental tool allows users to mark certain occurrence data as suspicious to improve data cleaning and user feedback to publishers. 🔗gbif.link/rule-based...
Minority representation on TV causes outrage From the new Private Eye, in shops now.
Just a thought: How about we stop shaming the poor for buying things that may not be essential, and start shaming the rich for making a profit off things that are essential?
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵
The official home of the Python Programming Language
python.org
I'd also like to shout out @carpentries.carpentries.org for leading the way on this, having made a similar decision earlier this year.
Python was awarded a funding grant, funding grant asked Python foundation to remove all diversity and inclusion initiatives they have. Python foundation said no and rejected the grant. If you use Python, send a few dollars to the charity to keep it going. I’m pushing a dono on behalf of ScamGuard.
Python Software Foundation@python.org · 12mo agoPlease read our statement, share it with your networks, and support us if you can. www.python.org/sponsors/app... psfmember.org/civicrm/cont...
Calling botanical researchers, the School of Natural Science at Trinity College Dublin is hiring a tenure track Assistant Professor in Plant Biodiversity and Conservation. I know this is someone's dream job, so let me know if that is you and you want to chat! my.corehr.com/pls/trrecrui...
Here's your reach @turingway.bsky.social 😎supporting botanical research into the plant families that give us potatoes and coffee
Aureliano Bombarely@bombarelya.bsky.social · last yr.@sandyknapp.bsky.social opens the #SOLRUB2025 meeting talking about how wonderful are #Solanaceae species. New dating results are coming out soon. The family is older that we thought. Almost 90 MY. She closes her presentation talking about the importance of community.
Great closing quote from Graham Lee in this mornings Track A talk on Where do people come from? "RSE is more than a technical discipline, its a social movement aiming to revolutionise how research engages with software." - Graham Lee #RSECon25
Sorry to miss #RSECon25 - are the talks (or at least the keynotes) being recorded for later viewing?
Still a few weeks to register for some hands-on training and hacking on open-source tools for analysing animal motion, whole-brain microscopy with @brainglobe.info, and big imaging data. 🧠📈 Aug 11-15 at @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social in London. "Free as in beer" and travel stipends available.
SWC/GCNU Neuroinformatics Unit@neuroinformatics.dev · last yr.We're excited to announce the Neuroinformatics Unit Open Source Week, August 11-15 2025 in London, UK. Bringing together researchers and developers of open-source software for training, community-building and hacking. No cost and travel stipends available. neuroinformatics.dev/open-softwar... 1/
📢 Registration is now open 📢 Join us on 7-8 October 2025 at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum for the second Festival of Hidden REF! Explore the indicative schedule, learn more on our website or head straight to the registration page to secure your place! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-festiv...
We're not "over-diagnosing", we're getting BETTER at diagnosing. That was the point of all those years of research. And yes, more people are self-diagnosing, but that's because they are better informed. That was the whole point of raising awareness! #MentalHealth
Okay, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but BHL is an absolutely VITAL resource for ecologists and evolutionary biologists. There's no other database I'm aware of that provides digital access to species descriptions dating all the way back to the 1800s and beyond.
Rod Page@rdmpage.bsky.social · last yr."A New Future for the Biodiversity Heritage Library" blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/04/new-... Important changes for BHL @biodivlibrary.bsky.social which can no longer be hosted at #Smithsonian and needs a new home.
