Brigitte Nerlich
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How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI
June 21, 2024
Looking at what’s going on in AI sometimes makes me feel like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, When he first visited the Trobriand Islands of then British New Guinea about a century ago, he became fascinated by the magic words that the islanders used and the actions they were believed to perform. Visiting the land of …
A new language for a new biology? Let’s talk about it!
June 14, 2024
Philip Ball has written a book that introduces lay readers to entirely new dimensions of biology and reveals the intricate complexity of living organism: How Life Works. In the process of detailing the biological complexities of life, Phil also does something else; he scrutinises old ways if talking about life and takes apart old metaphors …
Biochar in the news
June 7, 2024
In this blog post Carol Morris, Catherine Price and I want to present two articles on a rather niche topic relating to climate change mitigation – niche but nevertheless interesting and important: biochar. What is biochar? Biochar is amongst a growing suite of approaches developed to address the climate crisis by removing carbon dioxide from …
AI safety: It’s everywhere but what is it?
May 24, 2024
AI Safety is the new black. It is everywhere. As Alex Hern wrote from the Seoul AI safety summit on Tuesday “The hot AI summer is upon us” and with it the hot AI safety summer…. When you look at this timeline for “AI safety” on the news database Nexis, you can see that the …
Digging Deep into Stories in Science Communication
May 17, 2024
This book review was first published in SciComm Book reviews for the Public Understanding of Science Blog. It is reposted here with permission. The official print version is also now available here. I reviewed two books: Bloomfield, E. F. (2024). Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. University of California Press. Seethaler, S. L. (2024). Beyond …
Milk, reservoirs and spillovers: Bird flu in cows
May 10, 2024
On 26 April my sister emailed me from the United States and said “I might have to go over to oat milk”. She was alarmed by reports that bits of bird flu virus had been found in pasteurised milk. She has not gone over to oat milk yet. It seems that there is almost no …
Seeding clouds – seeding doubts
May 3, 2024
In 2009, two things happened in climate change discussions that at first glance seem to be quite unconnected. Firstly, the Royal Society released a seminal report on ‘geoengineering’—the deliberate alteration or creation of weather and climate conditions (which is generally considered unwise). Secondly, the ‘climategate‘ controversy emerged, portraying climate scientists as clandestinely tampering with or …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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