Malcolm Noble
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malcolmjnoble.bsky.social
Malcolm Noble
@malcolmjnoble.bsky.social
760 followers 500 following 920 posts
Bibliographer & historian with broad interests, incl. business and economic hisotry, queer print, oral history, co-operative HE. he/him www.malcolmnoble.co.uk
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malcolmjnoble.bsky.social
Malcolm Noble @malcolmjnoble.bsky.social · Nov 11
Hi! I am an economic and social historian with broad, interdisciplinary interests that need a thread. C19th local government finance, business history, co-operative education, and queer print are my principal preoccupations; there are others. 1/
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
murmz.bsky.social
I’m co-chairing the program committee for the 4S conference in Toronto this year. Looking forward to seeing lots of submissions!
keanbirch.bsky.social Kean Birch @keanbirch.bsky.social · 1d
I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation

Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures".

Open panel submissions portal is open! ls!

Deadline: 2nd February 2026

www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...
About the Conference
www.4sonline.org
January 14, 2026 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
typetweets.bsky.social
Don't forget the deadline is looming for submitting proposals for the PrintNetworks/CPHC annual conference which this year is in Cornwall. The theme is Print, Printing and Industrial Heritage (surfboards welcome!) www.cphc.org.uk/updates/2025...
Print, Printing and Industrial Heritage — CPHC
Call for papers
www.cphc.org.uk
January 7, 2026 at 10:49 AM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
DELL EXEC: Consumers are “not buying based on AI. In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

@pcgamer.com #CES
www.pcgamer.com/hardware/del...
Dell seems to be the first to realise we don't actually care about AI PCs
"What we've learned over the course of this year, from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI."
www.pcgamer.com
January 6, 2026 at 11:26 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
davidallengreen.bsky.social
Great.

Now someone is going to blow Boudica's trumpet, and who knows what will then happen.

www.bbc.com/news/article...
Thetford dig unearths Iron Age war trumpet and boar standard
The discoveries are "extraordinarily rare", say the archaeologists who helped find them.
www.bbc.com
January 7, 2026 at 9:54 AM
malcolmjnoble.bsky.social
#sqrlpix
infinito.bsky.social InfinITO @infinito.bsky.social · 8d
07:00 Uhr: Frühstück
09:00 Uhr: Zweites Frühstück
11:00 Uhr: Elf-Uhr-Imbiss
13:00 Uhr: Mitagessen
15:00 Uhr: Nachmittags-Tee
18:00 Uhr: Abendessen
21:00 Uhr: Nachtmahl
Eichhörnchen schnuppert am Nussangebot auf einem Holzkobel. Eichhörnchen hat ein Stück Walnuss in den Pfoten und futtert daran.
January 7, 2026 at 10:19 AM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
bencollins.bsky.social
There we go. That there’s a headline.
Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter
A look inside Elon Musk’s big tent
www.ft.com
January 6, 2026 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
andydiggle.bsky.social
30 Rock "What a week" meme: "What a year, huh?" "Lemon, it's January 3rd."
January 3, 2026 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
pastglasgow.co.uk
The Glasgow Corporation Lighting Department lamp base of 1902, at the entrance to the Botanic Gardens. Manufactured in Possilpark at the Saracen Foundry, and given a colourful makeover in 2025, there are now probably more of these in Halifax, Nova Scotia than in Glasgow.
January 3, 2026 at 10:37 AM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
nkalamb.bsky.social
“I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company.

The driver sees $0 of it.”

www.reddit.com/r/confession...
I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I’ve been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine. You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that’s literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent. First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up. We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non-priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better. But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I’m quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior. If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperati…
January 2, 2026 at 9:36 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
romanceofbooks.bsky.social
Snowdrops illustrated by Frederick Edward Hulme for ‘The Garland of the Year, or, The Months: their poetry and flowers : with twelve chromographs of flowers, one for each month.’ London, 1873.

From my personal collection. ❄️

#FrederickEdwardHulme #LanguageofFlowers #chromolithograph #snowdrops
January 1, 2026 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
librarycongress.bsky.social
Happy New Year! We love sharing these pro-book posters from the Works Projects Administration Poster Collection in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest.
Poster for statewide WPA Library Project, Illinois, showing an illustration of a child pulling a sled full of books toward a house. Text reads: "January--A year of good reading ahead."
January 1, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
arburtonworld.bsky.social
Anyone interested in Wagner may like to know that tomorrow the German TV station 3Sat is showing all 4 parts of the Ring. Production from Zurich Opera 2024, Noseda conducing. Starts 8am UK time.
December 31, 2025 at 9:55 PM
malcolmjnoble.bsky.social
Mind-bogglingly greedy acceptance of gifts of suits, mind-bogglingly evil schemes to take gold from refugees, mind-bogglingly inept policies on winter fuel and child support, &c &c. Rather, it speaks of some modicum of decency in at least some people; alas not in this government.
duncanweldon.bsky.social Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15d
Mind bogglingly low.
December 31, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
appuhn.bsky.social
The politics here are reprehensible but also really sad. He was a great scholar once. He had philological skills that no one has anymore. There are very few people who could produce that kind of work today. And to some extent, that's what this is about. He's mad that our field lost its former status
nkalamb.bsky.social Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 16d
The reason this Harvard history professor decided he was done with one of the best and most privileged jobs in the world was, in his own words, because he was forced to lecture in a mask during peak Covid.

I’m not making this up.
My decision to retire was not a sudden one. I am coming to the end of a four-year retirement contract that I signed in the fall of 2021. That year I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university’s strict Covid regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country’s uncritical acceptance of The Science and its proclivity, when backed by public power, for tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education.
December 31, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
thiagokrause.bsky.social
Dear Dutch historians, I'm trying to find Amsterdam price currents in the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia. McCusker (1991) says that there are dozens of them, starting in 1734. I searched the website and did not find much, and what I did find I could not access. Any advice?
Digital Inventory :: Sejarah Nusantara
Digital Inventory
sejarah-nusantara.anri.go.id
December 27, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
niblick-iii.bsky.social
Guys guys guys, I found the archive of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (it's not an achievement, they've not hidden them) - you can watch every single one since they started televising them in the 60s:

www.rigb.org/christmas-le...

I love watching them every year, now I can see them all!
Watch the Royal Institution CHRISTMAS LECTURES archive
Watch all the Royal Institution CHRISTMAS LECTURES back to 1966, when the lectures were first televised.
www.rigb.org
December 30, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
joshuakosman.bsky.social
graphic design is my passion
arthistory.bsky.social Art Viewer @arthistory.bsky.social · 16d
The San Francisco BallEEEEEEETTTT 's new logo
new logo for the San Francisco Ballet, all caps except the last four letters of "ballet" become wider and wider til the T's horizontal bar looks like an very bad illustration of an unbalanced post and lintel
December 30, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
lizziedearden.bsky.social
Well this is making me feel old
December 30, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
edinburghlibraries.bsky.social
Earlier in the year, we worked with the Incorporated Trades of Edinburgh who told the story of Edinburgh as a City of Industry, focused on the Incorporated Trades, an organisation which was established in the 1500s and still continues today.
Find out more on Our Town Stories -
zurl.co/YXnaV
Colourful skyline of the city of Edinburgh with the coats of arms of the various Incorporated Trades of Edinburgh above.
December 30, 2025 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
helsinkiupress.bsky.social
'Rays of Language' expands horizons in #papyrological #linguistics and historical #sociolinguistics. Edited by Bentein and Vierros, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of #language used in the everyday written culture of the ancient #Mediterranean.

Read the #OAbook at: doi.org/10.33134/HUP...
December 29, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
skeetsofgrass.bsky.social
They live in other young men, O kings,
December 29, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
alisabokulich.bsky.social
CFP: Society for the Study of Measurement will be held at the University of Edinburgh
June 22-25, 2026. Submit proposals for papers, symposia, & poster on any topics in the theory, history, philosophy, & application of measurement by January 15, 2026 app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/80364...
#HPS
Topics Please see below for a non-exhaustive list of suggested topics; we particularly welcome contributions that make contact with this year's conference theme: Ground Truth and Validity. While the notion of measurement validity is comparatively familiar, ground truth may need more of an introduction. The concept of ground truth has origins in remote sensing, where it is used to contrast the outcomes of a near or ground level measurement with outcomes of a remotely sensed measurement. From these origins, the concept has now moved to a wider use, particularly in machine learning contexts, where it denotes data assumed to be true, which can then be used to calibrate and validate machine learning data. The time seems ripe for a more careful investigation from a measurement perspective of the concept of ground truth-both in its original understanding and in its more metaphorical use. Measurement and Simulation • Connections between measuring and simulating • Can simulation substitute for measurement? Measurement and Data Science Measurement and Data Science • Measurement and data quality • Measurement and data analysis • Measurement and Al Models in Measurement • The role of models in measurement • The role of models in justifying measurement results • Models, intersubjectivity, objectivity, validation Models of Measurement • The general structure of the measurement process • The structure of measurement in social and human sciences • Transduction and calibration in measurement • History of the conception of the structure of measurement History, Philosophy and Sociology of Measurement The structure of measurement in social and human sciences • Transduction and calibration in measurement • History of the conception of the structure of measurement History, Philosophy and Sociology of Measurement • Exploration across sciences with diverse philosophical perspectives • New quantification and measurement approaches • Epistemological and metaphysical approaches to measurement Measurement Applications and their conceptual foundations in any area of science • Life & Health Sciences
December 29, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
amreports.bsky.social
Our photographer Alex Kormann captured the exact moment the presses stopped for the last time in Minneapolis, ending a 158 history of locally printed newspapers.
December 28, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Malcolm Noble
oldenoughtosay.com
As many of us begin Christmas meal prep, allow me to share the advice that my ER nurse sister puts in the chat every year:

A dropped knife has no handle. Jump away. Let it fall. You can pick it up and wash it.
December 24, 2025 at 6:31 PM
malcolmjnoble.bsky.social
What a splendid prospect. I would feel obliged to add a slug of kirsch to those berries and a dribble of triple sec to the clementines to help the fruit keep overnight.
December 23, 2025 at 11:04 AM