Prof at University College London, London / team leader at the Learning Planet Institute, Paris. Interested in environmental information and publics, citizen science, participatory mapping, and public engagement in science.
RE: https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUK/115978591367390827
AI is fundamentally mediocre - whatever it touches, because of the statistical force, go towards mediocracy. It improves anyone below the middle, but reduces the capacity of the half above it. The real damage is to the people at the 40-60 percentile who are being either discouraged from improving or reduced in their capacity.
The Brandenburg 3rd with Musica Antiqua Koln continues to be an amazing recording, 39 years after it was recorded. The second movement is so far that it's astonishing playing #EarlyMusic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20tau1ngCtY
check out the awesome programme for the @citizensciencenederland network day on thursday!! https://citizenscience.nl/p/programma ....still a few tickets if you've haven't registered yet ;) #CitizenScience
Are you in the UK? Do you have an hour to spare to watch the birds in your garden (or other greenspace) today, on Saturday, or on Sunday? đŠââŹ
Then you should totally do the Big Garden Birdwatch: https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/big-garden-birdwatch
It's #CitizenScience and it's good for the soul!
(Only open to participation January 23-25 2026, in case you see this later.)
The worst part, but speaking to the state of German Academia: Apparently you can become a professor at a "Cluster of Excellence" when you let an LLM do all the thinking for you. đ€·ââïž
«When two years of academic work vanished with a single click» - usually I don't like the "no backup? no compassion"-BOFH view, but in some casesâŠ
@gedankenstuecke and Nature publishing this is also about legitimising such use of GenAI as a tool for "develop grant applications, prepare teaching materials, refine publication drafts and design exam analyses." The result of this is a collapsing grant system which is overwhelmed with slop.
If you caught this news piece about the power of #CitizenScience to highlight the real scale of #plasticpollution issues https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/08/masses-of-toxic-litter-pours-from-rhine-into-north-sea-each-year-research-finds then you may also want to check out their research results: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-025-00007-5
Hooray! After four years of working on a paper that describes how the @ECSA Characteristics of Citizen Science were created, it is out. Describing the process, explaining the different domains, and explaining the relationships with ECSA 10 principles. There are plenty of useful things there. It is a useful partner to the Counters of Citizen Science paper from 2021 https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-128/v2 #CitizenScience #CommunityScience #Science #Research
@skyglowberlin You still remember what dial up speed is!
Whatâs your take on AI-assisted mapping in #OpenStreetMap? đ€
More map data is now created automatically, often with little human input. Our research looked at how the OSM community views AI-assisted mapping and whether AI-generated roads can be detected once theyâre in the database.
The results were mixedâgeometric and temporal cues help, but theyâre unstable.
Without clear tagging, data origins may become opaque.
@gedankenstuecke @richlv @mplouffe Agree that it's important to let the funder know! On the kind side, it can be emerging from insecurity and lack of confidence in writing, which is sad, too.
@mvexel it came out of a discussion with one of my colleagues at the MNHN (nat history museum here in Paris). He'll get in touch if you've got a bit of time!
@alesarrett @ascii_only thank you for these insights!
@ascii_only thanks for responding! I'll look up StreetComplete, and I'm aware of pois and accessibility (actually I'm running regular WheelMap vs Google Local Guide sessions with students :) ). Good point about accessibility that can get people interested. If there is a class of pois that you can think off?
@ryanhodnett congratulations! You're very special!
Call for papers in a special collection of Citizen Science: Theory and Practice: Finding concrete good-practice examples where #CitizenScience has directly informed decisions either at local or high-level scales remains challenging. Our special collection aims to address these gaps by documenting successful and unsuccessful cases, supported by analytical reflections. https://participatorysciences.org/2025/10/15/call-for-abstracts-policy-and-decision-making/
"The biased random number generator deleted my production database", people just really want to fool themselves into believing "AI" is real.
For years now I've said that no one would dare cross bridges or board a plane if civil/aerospace engineers worked like the majority of software engineers, and this whole hype just makes me point better than I ever could đ
UCLouvain summer school on #CitizenScience - summary and reflection. A fantastic week of immersive #ParticipatoryScience in Louvain-la-Neuve
New #OpenAccess book on #CitizenScience #Crowdsourcing and #Geography in Italian just out. Citizen Science, territorio e comunitĂ
Prospettive geografiche per la ricerca e azione by Venere Stefania Sanna, Cristina Capineri, Giacomo-Maria Salerno, Michela Teobaldi https://media.fupress.com/files/pdf/24/15909/44677
