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Bastian Greshake Tzovaras

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is an open/citizen science activist and researcher with a background in biology and bioinformatics. He worked as a senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute and Inserm. In 2011, he founded openSNP. He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2018. In 2017 he joined the Open Humans Foundation as the Director of Research.
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OpenstreetmapCommonsPeer ProductionMappingOsmOther Social Sciences
Published

Last weekend was the 21st birthday of OpenStreetMap (OSM), and with some friends we celebrated the occasion with a little mapping party. Our plan was to combine flying drones to collect aerial imagery and collecting street-level imagery with more traditional field mapping. Due to high winds, we mostly ended up with street-level imagery and doing field mapping though, using a variety of tools.

FediverseMastodonPanoramaxOpenstreetmapBotOther Social Sciences
Published

tl;dr: I made a Mastodon Bot that posts updated statistics for the Panoramax federation alongside randomly selected images once a day. Since posting about Panoramax about a year ago, I’ve been an active contributor, uploading around 530,969 360° images taken during trips in Europe and here in Argentina.

GovernanceCommunityCitizen SciencePeer-productionDemocracyOther Social Sciences
Published

In some ways, there has been little news in the iNaturalist ‘GenAI’ story: Beyond some vague posturing towards “going to work on improving ways to get feedback from the community” , saying (but not demonstrating) that they are ‘listening’, and somehow doing some ‘webinar’ at some point in the future, there’s been very little commitment from any iNaturalist staff or leaders.

IndiewebBlogWebsiteLinksOther Social Sciences
Published

tl;dr: Inspired by this conversation started by Ethan Marcotte, I’ve gone ahead and added a small link blog to this website too. Instead of having links of interest disappear into the stream of time that is my Mastodon timeline, I thought it would be nice to collect them also here, in a more findable way.

TypingPainKeyboardSplit KeyboardOther Social Sciences
Published

tl;dr: It’s been around 6 weeks using an ergonomic split keyboard. Inspired by Peter’s blog post about his experiences in changing to a split keyboard (and alternative keyboard layouts), I wanted to share bit of my own journey of using an ergonomic split keyboard: As part of the “elder millennials” , I grew up around early DOS computers and their command-line, followed by an early internet that for lack of real

TagMeOther Social Sciences
Published

tl;dr: Here’s a small addition to how you can also scramble images so that “AI” scrapers will end up with a poisoned data set Earlier this year, I’ve written about how I setup this static website to not only serve human-readable data, but also “poisoned data” to mess with the scrapers that are used to collect the training data sets for generative “AI”. As static website deployments via Codeberg Pages et al. aren’t offering a