Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org
Senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE).
Undergraduate Programme Coordinator, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python.
My research is focused on how #heterogeneous behaviour in #pituitary (and other) cells shapes their function as a population.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.
Joined Oct 2022
Nicola Romanò
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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.
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Nicola Romanò
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#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.
Nicola Romanò
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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.
When designing a scientific experiment, a key factor is the sample size to be used for the results of the experiment to be meaningful.
How many cells do I need to measure? How many people do I interview? How many patients do I try my new drug on?
This is of great importance especially for quantitative studies, where we use statistics to determine whether a treatment or condition has an effect. Indeed, when we test a drug on a (small) number of patients, we do so in the hope our results can generalise to any patient because it would be impossible to test it on everyone.
The solution is to perform a "power analysis", a calculation that tells us whether given our experimental design, the statistical test we are using is able to see an effect of a certain magnitude, if that effect is really there. In other words, this is something that tells us whether the experiment we're planning to do could give us meaningful results.
But, as I said, in order to do a power analysis we need to decide what size of effect we would like to see. So... do scientists actually do that?
We explored this question in the context of the chronic variable stress literature.
We found that only a few studies give a clear justification for the sample size used, and in those that do, only a very small fraction used a biologically meaningful effect size as part of the sample size calculation. We discuss challenges around identifying a biologically meaningful effect size and ways to overcome them.
Read more here!
https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/EP092884
#experiments #ExperimentalDesign #effectsize #statistics #stress #research #article #power #biology
Nicola Romanò
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@steveroyle i guess when you remember that you are sending and receiving to a scholastically generated sequence of words it makes more sense. The existence of the paper is less relevant than the probability that this conversation would occur where a paper was real given that a PMID and DOI was supplied
Nicola Romanò
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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/
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
Nicola Romanò
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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.
Nicola Romanò
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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
@elduvelle See my other reply, but basically it's almost impossible to enforce so...
I believe having better assessments, that cannot be solved solely by using LLMs is a much better solution. It takes resources and effort, however!
@antoinechambertloir @johannes_lehmann @neuralreckoning It's naïve because it's almost impossible to enforce (and no matter what you tell students they continue to use them*). Let's say you suspect a student didn't write their essay, in 99% of cases you have no way of proving it.
AI detection tools are unreliable and are biased against non native English speakers ( https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00130-7 ).
The only way you can tell for sure is it the student admits to it or if they have fake references, but that's likely a very small minority of cases.
*obviously I am generalising. Some students do listen!
@johannes_lehmann @neuralreckoning I agree, we have a variety of courses in our programmes of study and some are more affected than others, depending on course objectives and how skilled the students are who take that course.
One thing is becoming very clear: completely banning the use of LLMs is naïve and ineffective. I have heard from various colleagues at universities that decided on that tactic and it's definitely not working for them.
@neuralreckoning We've started to see the effects of LLMs use in programming assignments. A lot of students prepare using LLMs and they don't really learn to engage with the code. They falsely believe that they are learning to program, but miserably fail when the exam is done without internet access.
Solution for next year: tutorials will be in exam conditions and we will show very clear evidence to students showing that they *will* fail if they solely rely on LLMs.
I'm not against using LLMs in certain situations (eg boilerplate code), but I think when you're learning they can actually be an obstacle.
Nicola Romanò
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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.
@elduvelle @neuralreckoning Of you're a bit more adventurous there's also Overleaf.
Nicola Romanò
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Nicola Romanò
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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/
Nicola Romanò
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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]
Nicola Romanò
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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!
23andMe fined £2.31 million for failing to protect UK users’ genetic data
Nicola Romanò
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"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
Senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE).
Undergraduate Programme Coordinator, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python.
My research is focused on how #heterogeneous behaviour in #pituitary (and other) cells shapes their function as a population.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.
Joined Oct 2022
