As we head into summer, I want to tell you about the bumper crop of new research papers we have from my amazing students and postdocs.

I'm working with a great "decentralised" team of research students/postdocs at Tilburg University, Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, and QMUL.

The papers I'll link here are preprints -- i.e these are the versions we submitted to journals/conferences, and there may be corrections or other edits in the final accepted versions. So here you can read our freshest research news!

• Learning to detect an animal sound from five examples -- This one is a BIG achievement, the first journal-length analysis of a large and long collaboration on "few-shot learning" for animal sound detection. It is led by Ines Nolasco and Shubhr Singh, both PhD students working with me. There's a big set of collaborators behind this one (see the author list), and our success is certainly thanks to them.
• Comparison between transformers and convolutional models for fine-grained classification of insects -- Our first publication on fine-grained image classification, led by Rita Pucci as part of her postdoc work in our EU-funded MAMBO project. Accepted to present at the Camera Traps, AI, and Ecology workshop.
• Feature Embeddings from Large-Scale Acoustic Bird Classifiers Enable Few-Shot Transfer Learning -- This one is from Burooj Ghani, but the work you see here is a new paper from his previous collaboration. There'll be more along these lines very soon.
• Adaptive Representations of Sound for Automatic Insect Recognition -- Led by Marius Faiß, originally as part of his MSc thesis at the University of Leiden, and now developed into a larger project at Naturalis.

The big picture, that you can perhaps see in these paper titles, is that a lot of our focus is on developing machine learning methods for species recognition. There are already plenty of papers and apps for species recognition e.g. of bird sounds, but in order to provide species recognition as a service and a tool at the continental scale there's a lot still to be done. Firstly, going beyond common cases such as birdsong takes some care and attention - I'm happy that we're contributing something to insect sounds (and insect images too) though more work is needed to bring it to the same level of maturity. Second, there are plenty of new developments in deep learning architectures, and still plenty of open questions about the best input representation to use with these, and so there's plenty to explore.

Since I'm thinking about ecology, philosophy, and multi-species coexistence, it was about time I read "Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene" by Donna Haraway. The book reflects a very wise approach to multi-species coexistence.

I found the overall message a good one -- but weirdly, to digest the overall message all I really needed was the title and the introductory chapter, which unpacks the delicately-constructed title and explains the slogans. Once I read the intro, I had already learnt pretty much everything I was going to get out of this book. The rest is repetition and elaboration of the themes.

Partly this is because the writing style is very unusual, and anyone approaching it should beware that they'll need to be patient with all the wordplay, meta-textuality and constructive ambiguity. The book is philosophy, yes. In some ways it helps to read it as poetry: the lessons you take from it are largely through allusion and metaphor. So you could instead describe it as non-fiction poetry.

I do understand Haraway's meta-textual point, that it matters HOW you think and construct ideas, and this is exactly why she chooses a "tentacular" way of building up the narrative points. There's real value there. For me it's approach contrasts neatly against Bruno Latour's "Down to Earth" which I read recently: Latour tries to construct a simple conceptual framework for ecological thinking, and the book is good, but he doesn't quite manage to convey his ideas clearly or crisply enough (due to the lack of a strict editor, in my opinion). On the contrary, Haraway's writing is very un-simplified, full of poetics, wordplay and repetition, but in part that's the point. The way it's written deliberately embodies the tangled "hot mess of compost" future that she advocates.

Chapter 2 however does contain additional clear detail: it's very clear on why "anthropocene" is a poor choice of term for our current era, and "capitalocene" is better; and then further why that term is wrong too, and the story to be told is "chthulucene".

Chapter 3 introduces some science-art projects, but not really working hard to persuade us that "science art" is of any real benefit for living our lives, beyond asserting that they are tentacular practices. The projects in this chapter feel rather small to me, and it's not clear what I learn from them. I love science art and have witnessed (and done) plenty of it, but I don't see what in particular it has to do with the Chthulucene. --- Almost anything can be described in tentacular form, i.e. weaving multiple distant connections together. The Black Mesa example is the strongest one in the chapter. But still... thus, what?

Some page-wise notes:

p4 Despair [e.g. climate nihilism] caused by the falsehood that "only if things work do they matter". A beautiful point.

p40-41 Intriguing praise & explication of Latour's position on the "earthbound".

p42-43 Criticising Latour's previous stories of strength, struggle and war in ecology. Latour must have read this before writing "Down to Earth"! That's why DtE seems such a pacifist text, and, as I noticed, can't seem to tell us how to resist the violence against us.

p43-44 Discussing Gaia in Latour and in others' works.

p105 nice philosopher's definition of "queer": "Not committed to reproduction of kind" (and also "having bumptious relations with futurities")

p165 The concept of "animism" seems to be thrown around casually here, and without unpacking it. Is it really a good thing to advocate? Animist beliefs could range from a simple appreciation of the tentacular (?!) to a literal spiritual animism as practised in some religions, and surely that's not baggage that Haraway really wants us to pick up?

--- I find out later online that there's a rather post-modern meaning of "animism" popularised in anthropology by Latour. I would have to read even more to be sure what baggage is really hanging on that word. It seems Latourian animism has something to do with rejecting the dualism where only humans can be the cause/instigator while "mere objects" cannot. The "animism" that rejects this dualism fits well with Haraway's multi-species and tentacular position.

In what I've read online, Latour seems to pitch "animism" as a rejection of "modern" dualistic thinking. But I see it differently: it seems to me that perfectly ordinary modern thinking (of the non-spiritual non-Cartesian type exemplified e.g. by many physicists) puts humans on the same level as everything else, with no special causal or "agent" role. To my mind, if "animism" has any meaning it is something that rejects this, it's something that asserts that causal chains can terminate in all kinds of things which we'd then think of as having "agency". In ordinary modern thought, there are no ends to the causal chains: causation circulates endlessly. And ... the latter seems to me more faithful to Haraway-style thinking of Chthulucenic sympoeisis!

I'm re-reading "Down to Earth" by Bruno Latour (2013). I recommend it: it's a short, accessible, imperfect but thought-provoking piece of climate philosophy. It's only around 100 pages yet it offers some tools for thought, for anyone wondering about the fundamentals of how we can achieve a sustainable society.

And also I'd like its cover art as a T-shirt please.

I do find it a valuable but imperfect book. Since I grew up obsessed with pure physics and I now work in ecology, I find really strong support in his frame of thought that de-thrones (astro)physics as the root of all science, and creates a new framework centred on interaction in the Critical Zone (i.e. the troposphere etc) -- in other words, scientific ecology is the fundamental science. He doesn't call it scientific ecology, he describes in various words the study he's hoping for (p93), yet it seems to be exactly that except a little more politically-engaged.

The diagrammatic thinking he uses is a memorable and useful way to argue for a new frame different from the "local-versus-global". It stayed with me from my first reading years ago. There's some confusion in his concepts of "globalisation-plus" and "globalisation-minus" -- although they are key concepts, he omits to define them precisely and so the reader gets a bit stuck (p13 onwards) trying to clarify which terms he's using for which ideas. It does get clarified later (p26? p30?). But it seems to me that Latour, as an eminent senior thinker, suffered here from not having a strict editor.

But then, the book really takes flight, especially in the second half. It ends with a sweet, sweet ode to Europe, which he includes as part of his own contribution to the project of self-description that he says we need. This ode is really beautiful, and touching for a European to read.

Some page-wise notes:

p2 He introduces the (correct) notion that, since the 1980s, the super-rich have decided to conspire against us all, and steal the Earth for themselves. ... and then he writes that what we need is a "map" of "where to land" ... not that we need a fucking revolution?? Why so tame? His readers are not the ones who need to be convinced of the "need to land"! --- How can I "look for a place to land" if powerful forces are determined to steal it from me?

p7 His strong analogy between the victims of empire/landgrabs/globalisation, and our own anxiety at being evicted from a stable future, is indeed a bit tasteless. But nonetheless I must admit it strikes a chord for me.

p46 Ecology has "succeeded" in changing politics "by introducing objects that had not previously belonged to" politics, but also failed because it's so often a marginalised party, and often placed in opposition to "economics" etc, the opposing needs then given greater salience. -- This is the core concern that comes back in his 2023 co-authored booklet: ecology is really about everything, not a fringe interest -- it encompasses economic concerns etc -- so how can we turn that truth into a political reality?

p73 "Nature" is too remote (distant), and also a catch-all term that loses meaning, so don't organise protest around that. --- Fair point he makes. But what "big idea" DOESN'T succumb to that? ... Well, it occurs to me that Extinction Rebellion's ideas are a good example, their very concrete demands (tell the truth, organise citizen's assemblies, etc). Latour expands and fills in his idea of "the terrestrial" in the second half of the book, and I think this is a valuable/handy concept indeed. Is it really robust against this distancing?

Latour then discusses a rather Lovelockian cybernetics of agents. It's not really clear to me why he distances his framing from Lovelock: earlier in the book he mentions Gaia but then unhelpfully remarks it would take too many paragraphs to state why that's not the right concept to work with (!). Here he specifically proposes limiting attention to the Earth's "Critical Zone", and this is essentially how (astro)physics gets dethroned. I think it's a good and clear proposition. Biologists know more than physicists about the critical zone; their knowledge is not provincial.

I'm gradually discovering that every culture has its own "stupid chips meal". (Note to Americans: he's British, he's referring to fries.)

In the UK we love a chip butty (chips in bread), and we struggle to justify it. But there are many other hard-to-justify dishes hiding out there. So far I've got this list, which looks to me like a pattern:

• UK: chip butty. Chips in bread. Chip sandwich. Chips in pitta. A bit basic.
• CA: poutine. A rather famous dish of chips and cheese curds topped with gravy.
• NL: kapsalon. Invented in 2003 (?) by a Dutch barber (?), it's now famous in the country: chips topped with salad, cheese, meat and sauce.
• BE: mitraillette. A chip butty with meat and sauce.
• FR: tacos français. It's hard to believe that the French could achieve possibly the stupidest version. This one manages to also trample all over the noble tex-mex lineage of the taco. The French "tacos" (spelt with an "s" even in the singular -- see how trashy?) is apparently a flour tortilla, but stuffed with chips, cheese, meat, and more. It's not at all reminiscent of a taco, just a cheap chips wrap. ... Oh and -- it's not even good.
• PT: ovos rotos. "Messy eggs" or "broken eggs" -- chips topped with fried eggs, ham (probably) and a mess of other stuff.

An emergent phenomenon. Chips with some or all of bread, cheese, meat, gravy, i.e. some protein and some sauce. Unhealthy, un-refined, un-pretty.

How far does this continue?

ChatGPT (and the other GPTs) is an example of "large language models" that are making a big splash at the moment due to their unprecedented abilities at generating plausible text on demand. Of course it's far from perfect -- for example, many people noticed its tendency to make up facts. But here at university we're noticing its impact. Many conversations around the coffee machine about how to grade students' work, and the extent to which students are using ChatGPT.

Students in my class have used ChatGPT to do the following:

• improve a piece of their own writing, to make it more formal/scientific (this has been mentioned pretty often, and I guess there's a lot of this going on);
• generate Python code for their exercise/project, or to help them work out "the next step" in some coding that they're working on;
• diagnose errors in their code (supplying it with the error message and the code snippet);
• convert formats e.g. convert an Excel table into Latex;
• suggestions for keywords or topics that they should look up while doing their literature search.

All of these are in my opinion pretty good, positive examples of how to use an AI assistant without defrauding the university system. As long as you can learn how to use an AI assistant without cutting out your learning process, it's a good "teaching assistant". That is the new skill to learn.

Our university department has had a very interesting reaction to the availability of these tools. Instead of a blanket "no" response (which would be understandable given the vastly increased risk of some types of cheating), we now ask for a "statement of technology" with every report (e.g. thesis), i.e. a statement of what technologies were used to accelerate the work, and how they were used. There are many technologies, e.g. auto-translation, or grammar-checking, and it's very coherent to include ChatGPT within a general policy.

The standard plagiarism-checking system (TurnItIn) can't detect this new type of auto-generation. That's certainly an issue, and we will have to wait and see how that plays out. But still, old-fashioned plagiarism happens, so we still use plagiarism checkers, and perhaps they will improve. We now have to teach students, not only how to avoid plagiarism in cited/quoted work etc, but what to do and what to avoid when using text-generation systems. It seems so far that, generally, students understand that

1. it would be fraudulent/plagiaristic to submit ChaptGPT text directly as if it was their own;
2. ChatGPT text might not get them the highest marks anyway;
3. but on the other hand, it's a useful tool that can help them to learn.

I asked one group if they thought students would be at a disadvantage if they didn't use this tech, and the answer was "Yes".

In general, ChatGPT produces plausible and fluent prose (or code), but it has a few drawbacks which means students need to be careful and critical with its outputs: It can be bland and generic, not really getting the incisive point. It often makes up facts, or people, or citations. It can generate bad code, or working-but-poor code that becomes hard to debug. It seems clear that students understand this.

Teachers also understand that their teaching methods must account for its existence: for example, instead of pretending we can insist that no students look at ChatGPT, some teachers use it to generate "example answers", and then the class is invited to critique those answers.

There's a political/systemic question, of the concentration of power in the company that controls this tech, that absorbs and privatises all of the text data that anyone might enter into the system. I think there will be rival systems, and truly open-source systems, with the same capabilities pretty soon. But all the same, this concentration leads to the same concentration of data that the search giants such as Google have capitalised on in recent decades - so, the same situation, but even more concerning as the power of these systems becomes more impressive.

I don't blame students for using this algorithm. For now, I don't want to use it myself, partly for these systemic reasons. The technology is powerful and useful. Can it be made truly open: available to all, without having to submit your data to some foreign company? Can it be held democratically accountable, so that its impacts can be managed by a political process that gives everyone an equal say (i.e. our governments)?

In principle, we can answer these systemic questions "yes" -- and hopefully we'll get there. But the issues aren't new, they're the same ongoing issues of the concentration of power and resources in modern highly-connected societies, in which data is one of the increasingly pivotal resources. Thus far we haven't really succeeded in keeping power and resource from becoming hyper-concentrated over the past 40 years. The issues aren't new, but they become more and more obvious.

(Further reading on the power dynamics: "ChatGPT and more: Large scale AI models entrench big tech power".)

A very simple loaf, good for a tea break - it's easy, only a handful of ingredients, and vegan too! I am told that it's a classic wartime recipe.

I only used one tbsp of sugar, to keep it on the un-sweet side, so you can have a slice of this buttered if you like. But if you'd like it more like a standard cake sweetness, you would simply add more sugar (e.g. double it).

This version of the recipe is adapted from Ganga/LifeTimeCooking whose nice post about it tempted me to do some baking today.

• 160g dried fruit (I used apricot, fig, raisin and date, all leftovers in the back of the cupboard)
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 mug of hot, strong tea (no milk)
• 250g plain flour
• 3 tsp baking powder (or omit this, if you use self-raising flour)
• 1 small tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 small tsp salt

Mix the dried fruit (chop any large ones like apricots) with the sugar and the hot tea. Soak for at least an hour or as long as you like.

Mix the flour, cinnamon, salt in a bowl. Pour the fruit mixture and its tea liquid over these. Mix to a thick batter - I had to add some milk to get it to a thick batter stage.

Bake in a lined loaf tin for 30-40 mins at 180C until skewer comes out clean. Cool 20 mins in the loaf tin, then remove onto a cooling rack. Serve with or without butter (doesn't need it).

I don't know how I came across it, but I found this "decolonised" version of Settlers of Catan. ... Decolonised? Well, now that you come to mention it, I hadn't really noticed that Settlers is all based on this mythical idea of a "land without a people", a "virgin territory" which in most historical cases wasn't actually empty.

Catan is a fictional hexagonal land, of course, and there aren't any aspects of the game that strongly hint at America, India, Haiti or any other specific historical colonisations. But once you see it, it's a bit hard to un-see it. So I've been keen to get a chance to play "First Nations of Catan" for a while, just to see if it plays well. Finally we had a go at it! So here's my report back.

BY THE WAY: let me acknowledge that -- as someone pointed out -- it's a bit suboptimal for me, a white Brit, to be playing a white American's game mod, in the name of decolonisation. There are other people who are much better placed than me to do the decolonising. But, well, we try to be allies and self-critical where we can, and if others can tell us more about what's good/bad from their perspective, I'll try to keep my ears open.

Before you read any more of this, I recommend having a look at the original blog about the modified game "First Nations of Catan" to see how it works. They tried to keep it similar to the original, and using the same pieces, but with one player taking the role of an indigenous people.

First thing to say: I liked the game! It immediately gives a very different feel from the pure Catan game because of the asymmetry: there's one player whose moves and whose capacities are different to the others, and so as a Settler player you have to manage your own balance of interests, between the two very different sub-strategies of competing against the other Settlers and competing against the First Nations player.

In our game, one of the Settlers won. The game was very balanced, I think, though the First Nations player reported that they were holding back a bit on their "attacks" rather than going all-out. But, as in a good game of ordinary Settlers, by the end most players were on the verge of 10 points and it wasn't clear who was going to be the winner.

There's a dymanic to this new game which I hadn't realised, but is obvious in retrospect: the First Nations player started off with quite a lot of power to shape the game, and it felt very strongly weighted in their favour --- but then as the game progressed the other players build up their settlements and got more of their own capacity to generate resources, the influence of First Nations player weakened. We've only played it once so I shouldn't make a claim about whether it's balanced, but to me it seemed like it was. It'll be interesting to play more, and to play more "for the win", to see what happens.

Did you know 2023 is the international year of MILLET? No??? Well don't worry, no-one seems to know about it, though it was decreed by the UN.

The BBC has a nice article about traditional millet in India. But neither the UN nor the BBC seems to be willing to share any recipes. What can I cook with millet? If the UN wants more millet, shouldn't it be the job of the rich world's foodies to get obsessed with it (like quinoa, banana blossom, avocado, ... whatever), so obsessed that the media worries about the global millet shortage?

(Edit: I think the UN's using Instagram to share millet recipes? (I don't use Instagram.) See e.g. this from Chef Pierre Thiam. But it doesn't seem to actually give the recipe details. Also the content I see there seems mainly to conist of "boil millet, and serve some food on top of it"...?)

I found not many recipes online. The two main categories of recipe in English seem to be: (a) very basic veggie burgers - after all, you can squish anything into a flat disc and call it a veggie burger; and (b) pilaf -- honestly, this Moroccan millet and roasted carrot pilaf looks fabulous and also easy, and I can't wait to try it.

In my old recipe books, I couldn't find many clues either. But I did indeed find a millet pilaf (in The New Classic 1000 Recipes by Wendy Hobson, 2003). It seems wise to turn to old recipe books here, because millet is a "forgotten food", used mainly for birdfeed nowadays. In the old millet pilaf recipe, the one thing they do that is not in online material is to toast the millet for 5 minutes in a hot pan before boiling it, to get some toasty flavour in it.

Then, the next challenge... obtaining millet! It's not in any supermarkets here. The only Dutch place I could find it is in Ecoplaza, essentially the whole-foods shop.

So: Experiment number 1. I'm making basic millet burgers:

• Put 90g millet in a hot pan (that's enough for 3 burgers), and shake it around for 5 minutes, until there's a slightly toasted smell. The smell in fact reminds me of bird food!
• Add plenty of boiling water and simmer gently for 30 minutes.
• Drain the millet in a sieve, let it cool. --- When I did this, I noticed that the texture became rather "porridgey", not just separated grains. This is encouraging for veggieburgers because it implies that they'll hold together pretty well.
• Now follow a basic veggieburger recipe such as this one (I augmented mine with parsley, peanut butter, soy, and breadcrumbs. But not too much of any of these, so that we can discern the character of the millet.)

And the results? Here:

• Good crust, when fried - looks a bit chickenburgery; better crust than homemade beanburgers.
• The burger was still too "squishy" for a burger - a common issue with homemade veggieburgers!
• The texture was pretty good - "bobbly" like giant couscous or pearl barley, while also a bit porridgey I guess.
• The taste was bland - only really tasted the small bit of peanut butter I added.

Experiment number 2. This Moroccan Millet & Roasted Carrot Pilaf recipe looks great... and, frankly, it is. The carrot and the spices go really well with the slightly nutty, and slightly "cakey" texture of the millet grain. It's quite similar to any grain-based cookery, really (e.g. couscous, pearl barley), but the texture is different --- "cakey" instead of having well-separated grains. Not inherently good or bad, but different. I recommend this recipe and I'll definitely cook it again.

Experiment number 3 was "Millet, squash and sweet corn pilaf" from a recipe book by Amy Chaplin. It was OK -- sweetcorn mixed in makes a good texture (though a touch mashed-potatoey overall), and the sweetness from the squash and sweetcorn are nicely balanced against the savouriness of the pumpkin seed and soy sauce. However, I'd say the dish needs to be made more interesting - I'd roast the squash instead of boiling, to get the usual lovely caramelisation on the squash, and also add some fresh herbs to it (I think mint would be good).

Experiment number 4: This Millet Masala Khichdi recipe -- I don't know "khichdi" but it's apparently a common Indian dish -- basically a dhal (lentil stew) but combined with grain to make a one-pot Indian midweek meal. It was very dhal in texture, unlike if we'd made it with rice. I'd say it's a good storecupboard dish to know.

Thus far... More research needed! Looking for other top tips, please message me about millet in 2023 :)