When people obsess about numbers, it looks like either success or failure must be imminent. So it is at the moment with Mastodon, the much talked-about potential alternative to Twitter as the latter continues its path through turmoil towards an unknown future. By some accounts, the bubble has burst on…
In May 2022, the first episode of Ideas to Innovation podcast Season 2 from Clarivate brought into sharp focus the devastating impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on scientific research and innovation in that country. In December, episode 9 shone a spotlight on the work of two highly-cited researchers…
Last week Twitter relaunched Twitter Blue, its new subscription service that offers premium features like account verification and a range of services such as greater prominence for your tweets, the ability to edit your tweets after publication, and to see less ads. It costs $8 per month ($11 per month…
Trying to explain in simple terms what NFTs are is often a challenge. Getting your head around ‘non-fungible‘ is a hurdle that can take you down rabbit holes to end up with hundreds of words in your explainer, resulting in confusion and glazed eyes from your explainee. Clever AI to…
The advent of creating images where an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm does the heavy lifting in the actual creation process has evolved in leaps and bounds during 2022. Previously-niche names like DALLE-2 (and its creator OpenAI), Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are now in the wider mainstream vocabulary as more people…
If you’ve ever been involved in editing or creating content on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, you’ll know it’s not something you’d typically approach casually. Creating new pages and editing existing ones is not an easy task for beginners. While there are myriad rules, policies and customs you must comply with,…
Look at these four images of some well-known people who have died in the past 30 years. They probably look familiar and I’d guess you will be able to easily identify all of them. Left to right from top: Princess Diana (died 1997), Freddie Mercury (1991), Michael Jackson (2009), and…
In August, I had the great pleasure and distinct honour of being in conversation with Jerry Harrison, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee through his role with Talking Heads, one of the most critically-acclaimed New Wave rock bands of the 1980s. Our conversation was for an episode of…
