John Naughton’s article on ChatGPT, The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now – but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as Excel, inspired me to use it as the theme for the Digital Methods labs that I teach. It also seems sane that such tools will become part of the everyday. So far, it […]
We live in interesting times in terms of social media. I am preparing to teach social media APIs this coming term. Last year, we were caught by the Ukraine invasion and this year, we are wondering how Twitter is going to react, or even if it will last. The Nature article on Twitter and science […]
Like many people, I have been having a look at Mastodon for use and research. As I am currently updating my labs for next term, I thought that I’d have a slightly deeper look using R (the labs’ language) and the rtoot package. It is only a sketch but the existing work seems promising for […]
An article on the Verge, File Not Found, about issues in teaching computational skills resonates slightly. The User Interaction abstractions have made, in many cases, for sleek and shiny interfaces that hide the complexities of the software underneath. Lost a file? On a Mac, spotlight can find it. Need to use an app, just touch […]
