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Brigitte Nerlich

Brigitte Nerlich

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Posts by Brigitte Nerlich

Mud, metaphors and politics: Meaning-making during the 2021 German floods

This post is a brief summary of an article Rusi Jaspal and I wrote in the aftermath of the 2021 floods in Germany. Many more floods have happened since then in many more parts of the world. The article was published online in 2023 and has only just come out in print, in June 2024, …

AI safety: It’s everywhere but what is it?

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

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 …

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Milk, reservoirs and spillovers: Bird flu in cows

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 …

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Seeding clouds – seeding doubts

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 …

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From contamination to collapse: On the trail of a new AI metaphor

I wrote my first ever post about AI and ChatGPT on 6 January 2023. Amongst other things, I talked about the danger of ‘knowledge pollution’. I wanted to highlight the dangers of a gradual corruption of our knowledge base. Knowledge pollution ChatGPT and many other bots or AIs like it are based on large language …

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Hunting for AI metaphors

Thousands of articles and blog posts have been written about generative AI, especially ChatGPT. Some or these, especially blog posts, are about metaphors. As a metaphor hunter (see image!) I feel a bit ashamed that I haven’t done much on metaphor and AI. A little bit yes; for example, on what metaphors ChatGPT uses about …

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Xenotransplantation

About 25 years ago, I first encountered something called Science and Technology Studies (STS) – a field that examines interactions between science and society (culture, policy etc.). One of the first articles I read, published in 1999, was by Nik Brown on xenotransplantation: “Xenotransplantation: Normalizing disgust”. Using ideas and concepts from STS stalwarts like Mary Douglas …

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Vaccine hesitancy in Europe: A conceptual exploration

Many things changed rather fast when the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world at the beginning of 2020. There were new social phenomena, like ‘social distancing’, a so-called non-pharmaceutical intervention intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus. There were new scientific and bodily phenomena, like quickly developed vaccines, so-called pharmaceutical interventions intended to stop …

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Genes, trains and eureka-moments

I was in the process of writing a blog post on metaphors in genetics and genomics which was getting longer and longer and I had some personal stuff to deal with. So, I stopped. I might come back to this another time. In the process of writing, I discovered that trains have been quite an …

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