Charles Pence / is on Nostr

📚 philosopher and historian of biology • digital humanist • science and technology in society

🏫 PI, Pence Lab • director, CEFISES • UCLouvain, Belgium • Collegium, Royal Academy of Belgium

📓 Executive Editor, Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (@ptpbio) • books @ Elsevier, Cambridge UP

👨‍🦲 he/him • 🇺🇸➡️🇧🇪 • en/fr (presque) • partner of @juliapence • posts deleted after 6mo

🎈 music • sports (#rusg) • running • video games

Last Notes

2024-11-05 10:22:24

Come be my colleague at UCLouvain! Job in economic/social ethics, philosophy of economics, political philosophy, etc. Diffuse widely, we're very interested in international candidates! https://jobs.uclouvain.be/PersonnelAcademique/job/An-academic-in-Economic-and-social-ethics/1135369501/
#philosophy #job :boost_requested:

2024-08-25 09:05:28

- reply

@npub1knz…c73p I've been struggling for a week now not to make some kind of bad "posterior probability" joke

2024-08-09 08:44:48

After getting burned too many times, I'm working on a list of requirements for future master's students who want to work with me. So far, I have: (1) have to meet at least one time per semester, (2) have to have sent me all the text at least once, with at least 3 weeks of warning, before I'll authorize the submission of the thesis, and (3) have to respect intermediate deadlines if we fix them for parts of your work before the end. Anybody else have ideas or models for this kind of "contract"?

2024-07-03 12:38:45

- reply

@npub1knz…c73p Fantastic news! Congrats, and welcome to the brain drain ;)

2024-06-28 11:48:09

FediHiveMind: I remember seeing a flurry of links a few months back to the effect that all extant LLM-generated text detectors perform more or less no better than chance. Does anybody have links that they could send along to this effect? May need them for work-policy-related reasons. :boost_requested: #chatgpt #gpt #llm #llms

2024-06-15 18:45:19

It's always interesting to see how students will sometimes grab onto what feel to me like throwaway remarks. In talking about experimentation, I randomly tossed in the distinction between repeating and replicating an experiment (not even in my notes, just occurred to me while talking about Galileo's inclined plane), and it's shown up in like 1/3 of their exam answers about experimentation.

2024-05-26 11:32:13

Oh. Take notes, Belgium, this is what you'll get, no matter how much the rightists might say otherwise https://www.science.org/content/article/new-dutch-right-wing-coalition-cut-research-innovation-and-environmental-protections

2024-04-18 06:50:02

I dunno a thing about their methodology, but the claim here from a net research firm is that 49.6% of all net traffic is now bots, of which 32% is malware bots scanning for attack surfaces. That's of *all traffic on the internet.*
Dead internet theory looks less and less conspiratorial by the day.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2024/04/18/automated-bots-internet-traffic/

2024-04-02 18:50:21

- reply

@npub153s…cvd9 "UT has shut down programs like Monarch, which helped undocumented students navigate school applications, internships and financial aid" *what*

2024-02-06 10:03:50

After being a professor for nine and a half years, it finally happened: I arrived at the room for my course, at the hour specified
and nobody came