Category: Uncategorized
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Is ‘cultural technology’ a metaphor for AI?
This morning, I opened Bluesky and saw a message from Matthew Cobb alerting me to an article in The Observer on “Ten metaphors for AI” by John Naughton. Metaphors for AI, c’est moi, I thought, and indeed in the online version there is a link to one of my posts. Wow. At the same time…
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Metaphors for AI: Three blog posts and a summary
Over the last few weeks I have written a trilogy of blog posts about metaphors for AI, trying to survey emerging metaphors as well as those studying those metaphors, and calling for a metaphor observatory. Three posts is a lot to read. For those who want to have a quick overview, here is one. I…
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Can Better Words Lead to Better Climate Action?
This is a cross-posting of the beginning of an article by Becca Warner for ATMOS magazine (thanks for the permission!). As this article contains some extracts from her interview with me, I thought it might make a good addition to the Making Science Public blog. To read Becca Warner’s article, please use this link! Article…
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Hello World!
Hello, welcome to my new Making Science Public Blog. I started blogging on the old Making Science Public blog maintained by the University of Nottingham in 2012. We have transferred all the hundreds of posts that I and colleagues have written since then to this new WordPress blog, as the University will close down its…
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Science, stories and the secrets of survival
I recently read a post on Bluesky by Adam Roberts, a British science fiction and fantasy novelist that said: “MODERN MAGIC MAKES MANIFEST MERLIN’S MEDIEVAL MYSTERIES”. I was instantly hooked and found out that this is a nicely alliterative rendition of the original title of a press release announcing that “Fragments of a rare Merlin…
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Metaphors, covid and communication
There is a great event happening this evening (12 March 2025) at UCL about “Communicating in a Crisis: Lessons Learned Five Years After Covid” with wonderful speakers. As I won’t be able to be there or to participate remotely, I thought I’d quickly highlight a few things about covid and metaphors, a topic that has…
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Science and politics: Some whimsical thoughts
On Monday morning I had a lot of time. I was in hospital getting an infusion of Vedolizumab. With observation etc. that takes about three hours. I scrolled on my phone and read some posts on Bluesky, while, at the same time, reading an old novel on my Kindle – a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.…
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Making mineralogy public: George Sand and Jules Verne
On 14 January, Richard Fallon, an expert on 19th/20th-century literature and science, posted on Bluesky: “More people ought to read George Sand’s 1864 romance Laura, Voyage dans le cristal: a delirious, phantasmagoric, mineralogical story that includes a trip to a prehistoric lost world at the North Pole”. I had read some stories by George Sand…
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Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
Today’s post is a guest post by Christian Gude. He has a PhD in synthetic biology from the University of Nottingham (where we met when I was still doing synbio and RRI at the SBRC) and is now working at Phenotypeca Ltd as IP Analyst in a multidisciplinary role between science and intellectual property. In…
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Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts
It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding…
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