Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16eDx3zoA2/

NPR - The year red-blooded patriotic American high-school jocks replaced migrant farm workers!

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program.

(1/15)

#ArteConcert is so amazing! I don't remember who on Mastodon first pointed me to it but it's *so good*. Thanks to whoever you are.

If you don't know it, Arte is a a European public service channel and Arte Concert is their live music. The live concert performances are top quality and it's all free to watch, with *no ads* (thanks EU!).

This evening I've been watching a jazz concert by Hiromi's Sonicwonder. Earlier in the week I watched Moderat live at the Grand Palais in Paris. I've discovered fantastic African blues musician Fatoumata Diawara and Cuban funk musician Cimafunk and singer song-writer Asaf Avidan. There's everything from metal to electronic to jazz to classical.

While a lot of the internet has been turning to ad-filled spyware goop, Arte Concert is a wonderful exception.

This is me feeling grateful.

https://www.arte.tv/en/arte-concert/

#music #concerts

This was a brave project with an ambitious goal and I think it kicks the legs out from some shaky, simplistic assumptions about cycle time, and how we use software metrics in general. We've also got a huge bank of code, statistical approaches, and methodology along with our preprint so others can replicate our work or use it as a learning example.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05040

Two open positions in my lab to develop scientific software with python and javascript.

Software: CATMAID

Documentation:
https://catmaid.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Source code:
https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID/

Example:
https://l1em.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/?pid=1&zp=108250&yp=82962&xp=54211&tool=tracingtool&sid0=1&s0=3&help=true

If you have experience with #SQL (#postgresql), #python and its many libraries (particularly #django), #rust, and #javascript, write to me and let's discuss.

Examples of open issues: https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID/issues

Brits can sleep safely tonight, after the heroic work of the Metropolitan Police. The Reverend Sue Parfitt, 83, a retired priest, was arrested in Parliament Square for holding a sign which read:

“I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Under British law, this now puts her in the same category as an ISIS or Al-Qaeda terrorist. The courts may impose a prison sentence of up to 14 years, to protect the public against the existential threat posed by this very dangerous woman.

You may have heard that globalchange.gov and all the national reports on climate change have gone down.

We got em all on #sciop, a webrip and all the PDFs extracted: https://sciop.net/datasets/globalchange-gov-webrip

Edit: context - https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-national-assessment-nasa-white-house-057cec699caef90832d8b10f21a6ffe8

Americans make fun of the European regulation on data protection (GDPR), regularly ("cookie banner law").
And then a data leak happens, and they're like: why do we even have this data around? who decided to keep admission forms for ten years?
GDPR is based on sound principles. The US should use it.

A recent comic on the US giving international tourists the Big Brother treatment

#comic #cartoon #uspol #travel #firstamendment #privacy

Over my years in academia, I helped create a variety of free online mathematical materials. Pirouette is a Spirograph clone that runs in a web browser. I hope you and your students enjoy the software! Read more:

https://www.diffgeom.com/blogs/free-online-math-materials/pirouette/

#Math #MathArt #ITeachmath

Dear practitioners in statistics and data scientists:

In writing a data file, are there any standard ways, symbols, or notation, to indicate that some ordinal or continuous values of some datapoints are right- or left-censored?

Very grateful to anyone who share their uses and experience – as well as references!

[Edit: adding tag for R]

#statistics #datascience #rstats

Please share widely: I'm still looking for a postdoc in computational genomics to join my team in Oxford. If you want to help develop better ways to detect AML from epigenetic profiles in blood, then get in touch:

https://cutt.cx/analytics/masto1

Great team and environment, 3-year secured funding, ideal for transition to independence!

#jobs #academia #science #job #FediHire

"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. […] Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ML #MachineLearning #Learning #ChatGPT #OpenAI #Llama #Ollama #LMStudio

I recently saw a highly accomplished woman I know demonstrating a new AI product that, of course, has a female name.

When the product launch was shared on LinkedIn, the C-level men didn't share the name of the woman doing the demo, in spite of her being in all the photos, just the name of the AI.

I'm still mad.

#UsPol #NIH #Academia

NIH scientists publish declaration criticizing Trump’s deep cuts in public health research

Some quotes:

"The NIH that I'm working in now is unrecognisable to me. Every day I go into the office and I wonder what ethical boundary I'm going to be asked to violate, what probably illegal actions am I going to be asked to take"

"It's particularly frustrating when we are being sold this lie that this is being done in the name of efficiency. Because when we terminate these studies, when they're 50, 60, 70, 80% complete, we're not saving the 1 or 2 million dollars left at the tail end of the study, we are wasting the 3 or 4 million dollars that have already been invested."

New computer with Windows pre-installed? Want to install #Linux 🐧 instead?

You pay for #Windows, even if you don’t use it. That’s unfair and non-transparent.

#Refund4Freedom from @fsfe & @ItaLinuxSociety defends your right to get refunds for unused pre-installed software! 😎

https://refund4freedom.org/

The campaign starts in #Italy 🇮🇹 but will later be extended.

FSFE & ILS support your right to choose your operating system. They also support #EndOf10 to prevent e-waste!

#GetYourWindowsRefund

"As these tools become more powerful and affordable, #skepticism in #media will grow. But the question isn't whether we can trust what we see and hear. It's whether we can trust who's showing it to us. In an era where anyone can generate a realistic video of anything for $1.50, the #credibility of the #source becomes our primary anchor to #truth. The medium was never the message—the #messenger always was."

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/ai-video-just-took-a-startling-leap-in-realism-are-we-doomed/