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Members of the New Scientist Book Club give their take on Sierra Greer's award-winning science-fiction novel Annie Bot, our read for February - and the needle swings wildly from positive to negative Annie Bot by Sierra Greer was the Book Club's January read The New Scientist Book Club moved on from reading a classic piece science fiction in December - Iain M. Banks's - to an award-winning sci-fi novel in January: Sierra Greer's, which won the Arthur C. Clarke prize in 2025. I must admit, I was nervous to announce this one to my fellow readers. is the story of a sex robot, owned by a controlling and abusive man. It gets very dark in places, it has a number of sex scenes, and I wanted to make sure you all knew what you were getting into before getting started. That cupboard scene, some way into the book, was super disturbing, for example. It turns out my wariness was warranted.

Author Simon Stålenhag has a new work out this month. December is traditionally a quieter month for new releases from publishers and that's definitely true this year, with a sparser than usual science-fiction offering to chew over. That said, there are some intriguing titles out this month, and I'm looking forward to the new book from artist and author Simon Stålenhag, another illustrated dystopia, as well as a mysterious-sounding Russian novel, and the conclusion of Bethany Jacobs's excellent space opera trilogy. Jacobs has written a piece for the New Scientist Book Club about how the late Iain M. Banks inspired her own world-building. The Book Club is currently reading Banks's classic Culture novel - do join us .

"What does it really mean to upload your consciousness into intangible space?" In, the characters face an impossible choice: upload your mind into a virtual utopia, or crumble away in the abandoned physical world. Mind-uploading is familiar to us as a science fiction trope, often anchoring relationship dramas and philosophical inquiry. But what does it really mean to upload your consciousness into intangible space? Can the mechanics be extrapolated from our present-day science?

The purpose of this feasibility study was to examine the potential impact of reading digital interactive e-books on essential skills that support reading comprehension with third-fifth grade students. Students read two e-Books that taught word learning and comprehension monitoring strategies in the service of learning difficult vocabulary and targeted science concepts about hurricanes. We investigated whether specific comprehension strategies including word learning and strategies that supported general reading comprehension, summarization, and question generation, show promise of effectiveness in building vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills in the e-Books. Students were assigned to read one of three versions of each of the e-Books, each version implemented one strategy. The books employed a choose-your-adventure format with embedded comprehension questions that provided students with immediate feedback on their responses. Paired samples t-tests were run to examine pre-to-post differences in learning the targeted vocabulary and science concepts taught in both e-Books. For both e-Books, students demonstrated significant gains in word learning and on the targeted hurricane concepts. Additionally, Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) revealed that no one strategy was more associated with larger gains than the other. Performance on the embedded questions in the books was also associated with greater posttest outcomes for both e-Books. This work discusses important considerations for implementation and future development of e-books that can enhance student engagement and improve reading comprehension.

I've been playing around with ChatGPT for a few days. It's the new artificial intelligence product, released 10 days ago by OpenAI, that answers questions and has taken the tech world by storm (you can find it here and it's free to use, at least for now). My interest was piqued by this tweet from a senior research engineer at Microsoft, Shital Shah: "ChatGPT was dropped on us a bit over 24 hours. It's like you wake up to the news of first nuclear explosion and you don't know what to think about it but you know the world will never be the same again." Someone tweeted "Google is dead #ChatGPT", and someone else wrote: "ChatGPT writes and thinks much better than the average college student IMO -- it def undermines the purpose of the assignment."

This blog is a summary of the discussions that took place at the DataKind UK ethics book club on AI and medicine, on 22nd April 2020. Views represented here are those of attendees at the book club. By the time DataKind UK's ethics book club rolled around, our topic -- AI and medicine -- felt pretty timely. In groups, we discussed the contact-tracing methods being used by public health authorities around the world, and concerns that privacy might be a casualty of the public health response. While there might be legitimate arguments to pry into people's personal lives in the midst of a pandemic, we also wondered what happens after the crisis is over.

For the next installment of the informal TechCrunch book club, we are reading the fourth story in Ted Chiang's Exhalation. The goal of this book club is to expand our minds to new worlds, ideas, and vistas, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects doesn't disappoint. Centered in a future world where virtual worlds and generalized AI have become commonplace, it's a fantastic example of speculative fiction that forces us to confront all kinds of fundamental questions. If you've missed the earlier parts in this book club series, be sure to check out: Some questions for the fifth story in the collection, Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny, are included below. This is a much more sprawling story than the earlier short stories in Exhalation, with much more of a linear plot than the fractal koans we experienced before.

Data is becoming an increasingly mission-critical asset for organizations. How you collect it, move it, clean it, and analyze it can have a real and lasting impact on the bottom line. Organizations are under pressure to be faster, more strategic, and more cost-effective than the competition. As companies continue to walk down the data-driven decision-making path, many are realizing that one data expert is not enough. It's too complex and too much for one individual to handle.