Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

Troubling story in Times Higher Education by Philip Moriarty, Prof of Physics at University of Nottingham.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/im-being-docked-pay-boycotting-marking-i-teach-free#comment-68607. It's behind a paywall, so I'll summarise. His salary is 100% from EPSRC research fellowship, but he does some teaching (which he's v good at) bcs he likes it, is good at it, and is public-spirited. Now Uni is docking his pay bcs he participated in a marking boycott as part of industrial action.
#university #strike #administration 1/2

Any cell biologists out there in the #ScienceMastodon universe?

Highly recommend taking a look at this one day meeting in the UK in #Bristol - https://mellorlab.wordpress.com/actin-2023/

The #Actin meeting aims to "bring together the UK actin community for a day of informal talks and discussion."

There are short talks - mostly from #Postdocs and #PhD students, there's a poster session at lunch and prizes, too.

It's a friendly and inclusive conference and great for networking - check it out!

#CellBiology

This is great: you type your zip code into the app, and you're shown a complete list of books prohibited in your area; then download the e-reader, and these books are available to download.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/18/us-teens-banned-books-schools

I wonder if the book-banners will end up making these books more widely read than they ever were in libraries?

Dear journalists,

If you publish an article about a new scientific paper and you don’t include a link to the paper, you suck.

Sincerely,

Possum

Take the ability to block away, and Twitter immediately becomes utterly unusable for anyone who doesn’t revel in being overwhelmed by an avalanche of racist, misogynistic, bigoted filth - and that’s intentional, of course. An incitement of abuse.

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/elon-musk-x-twitter-block-feature-delete-1235699759/

San Franciscans: this is Wily. She is loose in San Francisco after escaping her dog sitter. We are not in town. If you see her, please call animal control.

Bots Are Better than Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/bots-are-better-than-humans-at-solving-captchas.html #machinelearning #academicpapers #Uncategorized #captchas

Reusing other researcher's work is inherent in science. Licensing plays a central role for reuse, so we should know how it works.

Open licenses you probably need for:

- Texts, data, media, ...: CC0 or CC-BY
- Software: MIT license

More on licenses:
https://heidiseibold.ck.page/posts/choosing-an-open-license

Please take two mins to watch this video from the TUC depicting how political decisions since 2010 have all but destroyed our once-great NHS, as waiting lists have soared from 4 to 7.5 million.

Wow! I never knew that Beethoven's "Für Elise" was actually written for a woman named Therese - and the letters these two names have in common:

E S E

may have inspired the alternating sequence of notes that starts this piece:

E E♭ E

Yes: in German E flat is called "Es" and pronounced like the letter S.

I also didn't know that Beethoven never published "Für Elise" in his life: he gave the score to Therese Malfatti, and it was transcribed and published by someone else after his death, and hers. Beethoven almost published an alternative more complicated version of the tune in 1822... but at the last minute decided not to.

I learned all this stuff from this video, which also includes a performance of the alternative version of "Für Elise". If you like the famous version, which is rather simple, this one may seem ludicrously fancy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jblFQ1whX5s

On that story about scientists leaving X and coming here. Please, please lean into the feature of hashtag following and tag your stuff. A lot of us would love to find you and hashtag discovery is the easiest way here.

#scientists #scientist #mastodon #followers #discovery #news

In the era of personalised medicine could the suggestion that a treatment is tailor-made to a patient boost the placebo? Find out from Dasha Sandra in the eLife Podcast https://elifesciences.org/podcast/episode88?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

The #Wasserstein distance (#EMD), sliced Wasserstein distance (#SWD), and the #L2norm are common #metrics used to quantify the ‘distance’ between two distributions. This tutorial compares these three metrics and discusses their advantages and disadvantages.

https://www.fabriziomusacchio.com/blog/2023-07-26-wasserstein_vs_l2_norm/

#OptimalTransport #MachineLearning

[EDIT] FLIP is saved!
https://newatlas.com/marine/flipping-flip-ship-saved/
---
Well it had to happen eventually. #Scripps is retiring FLIP (FLoating Instrument Platform). This is an amazing piece of engineering (and soooo weird on the inside - everything pivots, so walls become floors). The #ship to be towed out to a location, and it would literally flip, sinking most of the ship directly down to give a *very stable platform for #oceanography research. Launched in 1962.

https://maritime-executive.com/article/world-s-strangest-research-vessel-heads-for-scrapyard-after-51-years

Doing the #TidyTuesday early. Spam emails are more likely to contain certain characters compared to non-spam.

: https://github.com/borstell/tidytuesday/tree/main/2023/2023-08-15/

#RStats #tidyverse #ggplot2 #dataviz

My book "Building reproducible analytical pipelines with #rstats" is done! Buy a drm-free epub or pdf @leanpub : https://leanpub.com/raps-with-r/

Physical https://amazon.com/dp/B0C87H6MGF (check your local market place)

Read for free forever: https://raps-with-r.dev

#RStats #datascience

@caffinepwrd @davidtoddmccarty Over here, Tories and #brexshitters and the like appear to view the world as a negative sum game, and their aim is to make sure that everybody else other than them are the losers, even if they can't win themselves.