This week's #NewBooks at the library: Three very different books. I won a copy of #Fantasy Miniatures at auction. I adopted a damaged copy of #ForensicEntomology. And I bought a second-hand copy of Volume 1 of The Correspondence of #CharlesDarwin.
#Warhammer #Wargaming #GamesWorkshop #Insects #Entomology #Evolution #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon
ENTERTAINING, IMPRESSIVELY COMPREHENSIVE history of humanity’s long and confused journey to the discovery of germ theory is a work of popular science with all the propulsive energy of a mystery novel, even though we know the ending. A MINUS
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/so-very-small-thomas-levenson/1146072181?ean=9780593242735
Luís Mendonça de Carvalho edited the book ‘The Victorians: A Botanical Perspective. Volume 1’ (Springer), which provides us with a 'unique re-evaluation of the Victorian Age and presents a new historiography based on plants'.
There's a new issue of HoST — Journal of History of Science and Technology. It includes the themtic dossier "Towards a global history of eclipses_ Entanglements of disciplines, actors, and practices".
Available on #OpenAccess: https://sciendo.com/issue/HOST/19/1
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Second-hand copies of The Lying Stones of Marrakech (another one of the essay collections of #StephenJayGould), The Breath of a Whale: The Science and Spirit of Pacific Ocean Giants by Leigh Calvez, and The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee #Books #NaturalHistory #Whales #MarineBiology #Genetics #HistoryOfScience #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon
It's often said that journal publishing is still using 17th-century technology, but I think that's unfair. After all, they didn't have DOIs in the 1600s.
149 years ago today #GeorgeMurrayLevick was born. This British Antarctic explorer made observations on penguins considered too shocking for the world, as recounted in A Polar Affair, an unusual and colourful book of #PolarExploration, #Penguins, and perversion.
This week's #NewBooks at the library: I bought a second-hand copy of #JamesHutton: The Genius of Time from Birlinn Publishing and adopted a damaged copy of The Great Auk from Bloomsbury Sigma that I hope to review soon. Also very pleased to have found a second-hand copy of Peter Wellnhofer's classic The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of #Pterosaurs which was recommended by @markwitton for its section on the history of research (when Witton recommends, I listen).
#Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon #Geology #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Ornithology #Palaeontology #Paleontology @bookstodon
This week's #NewBooks at the library: Two academic books
- "Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain" from the University of Chicago Press; and
- "The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire" from Harvard University Press.
Completely unrelated, won at auction, a vintage artbook from #GamesWorkshop by John Blanche and one of my favourite illustrators, Ian Miller.
#HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Anthropology #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon
Congratulations to Quintino Lopes, whose paper about Armando de Lacerda and the Coimbra Phonetics Laboratory (co-authored with Francisco de Lacerda and Ana Simões) was the winner of the 2025 edition of the A. H. de Oliveira Marques Prize for Portuguese History! 
Full story: https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/quintino-lopes-aholiveira-marques-prize/
Now online: Videos from the workshop "Large Language Models for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science",
April 2-4, 2025, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5rAX6ywmP7O_nT99Osd74uino78BJMVT
Said Robert Proctor: “If you don’t like the science that’s out there, create some of your own. And then claim ‘we need more research.’ And then label your opposition as a bunch of close-minded fanatics.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/industry-weaponizing-science-agenda/
For most of history, the disciplines of science and philosophy are tightly connected, arguably even the same.
Alchemy was considered a science, and indeed people like Newton and Bacon dabbled in it. Facts and theories as we now know them are much different, and bordered on philosophical arguments. Experimentation wasn't a standard procedure, and a community of scientific professionals hardly existed.
#history #histodons #quote #bookstodon #historyOfScience
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90 segundos para a Ângela Salgueiro nos contar o que anda a fazer no projecto #PHONLAB, dedicado à História da fonética experimental em Portugal, nomeadamente ao Laboratório de Fonética Experimental instalado na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, em 1936, por Armando de Lacerda.
https://www.90segundosdeciencia.pt/episodes/ep-2026-angela-salgueiro/
In an paper published in History of Science, Inês Gomes and Frederico Ágoas examine ‘the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, specifically the impact of forestry science and fire management on land use and community dynamics in rural Portuguese mountains’.
An output of the #FIREUSES project!
On 25 May, the exhibition Angola: Saberes em movimento [Angola: Knowledge on the Move] will open at the Frei Manuel do Cenáculo National Museum in Évora, as part of the KNOW.AFRICA project.
We tell you all about it here: https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/knowafrica-exhibition-evora/
CEA: Une histoire spatiale qui commence en 1959
Pour traquer les poussières radioactives liées aux essais nucléaires, le CEA embarque un compteur Geiger dans un missile. À 100 km d’altitude, surprise : des rayons gamma viennent d’au-dessus. C’est le début de l’astrophysique au CEA.
CEA/D. Baclet/C. Jehanno/J.Labeyrie
https://www.cea.fr/Pages/actualites/sciences-de-la-matiere/aventure-astrophysique.aspx
This Wednesday, I'll be presenting part of my PhD research on the history of neuroscience in Argentina. The talk brings together scientometric analysis and qualitative research to explore how the field has taken shape, and the factors that influence it. Let me know if you're interested, I'd be happy to share the link
#neuroscience #STS #historyofscience #scientometrics #bibliometrics #Argentina
Last week, our students learned how to conduct a proper evaluation for an NLP experiment. To this end, we introduced a small textcorpus with sentences about Joseph Fourier, who counts as one of the discoverers of the greenhouse effect, responsible for global warming.
#ise2025 #nlp #lecture #climatechange #globalwarming #historyofscience #climate @fiz_karlsruhe @fizise @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique
Last leg on our brief history of NLP (so far) is the advent of large language models with GPT-3 in 2020 and the introduction of learning from the prompt (aka few-shot learning).
T. B. Brown et al. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. NIPS'20
https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/1457c0d6bfcb4967418bfb8ac142f64a-Paper.pdf
#llms #gpt #AI #nlp #historyofscience @fiz_karlsruhe @fizise @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique #ise2025
