Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

@suzantepas @jamesglave If I were in a car and saw someone waving a brick I would probably be scared and might break all of a sudden, which might be dangerous for those behind me. Also, if I saw someone waving bricks at cars I would probably call the police, which is probably not the desired outcome here. I think we should educate people more (everyone, motorists, cyclists and pedestrians alike) on how to behave on the road.

@arclight on the bright side, I've been seeing more and more students coming in the lab and using #R and documenting work in #RMarkdown from day 0, instead of using Excel. How did this happen? Well we taught them during their undergraduate years.
We're far from an ideal situation, but in a better place than we were 5 or 10 years ago.

@PhilippBayer doesn't really come as a surprise... I'd like to try running Gemma locally though

@PacificNic @reinhilde @jay_chi @VisionZeroYVR @jamesglave Not as dangerous as crossing at a red light IMO. You should respect the road code whether in a car, on a bike or on foot!
There's plenty of idiots who drive and there are also plenty of good drivers who respect cyclists. Similarly there's lots of cyclists who respect the rules and there are those who don't know how to ride a bike.

Blaming one part or the other doesn't solve problems unfortunately.

Also the grab a brick idea is dangerous. I suspect it would cause way more accidents than it prevents

@adamhsparks @johannes_lehmann I didn't mean it like that. As I said, change needs to come from the powers that be.
However, they won't change their mind unless there is some tangible evidence that those other things are important and that people are and want to be invested in them. This is about having your voice heard, and lobbying for changes to happen. I do agree that it's definitely harder for someone in a temporary position to do this, I know, I've been there and I'm not suggesting those people should do this alone; however academics who are beyond that point but maybe not at the top (I would consider myself as one) could lead by example and grassroot groups can lead change. That can be a very small step like "ok boss we're aiming for Nature (dream on) but in the meantime this goes to BiorXiv" or "we're putting this code on GitHub with a GPL licence and deposit our data for everyone to inspect" etc. This is hopefully followed by the realisation that those papers get cited, those data bring collaborations and so on. This is obviously only one small aspect of it, but you need to start somewhere

@adamhsparks @johannes_lehmann The problem with this type of issues is that you can't change things while keeping the status quo. Things need to change in academia. Number (as opposed to quality) of publications and impact factor are terrible ways of assessing whether someone should be promoted. There is so much more that should be assessed!
Quality of research, teaching, supervision of students, grants, engagement with the academic community/citizenship, engagement with the public and other research stakeholders, *real* commitment to open and reproducible research, and probably more!

This obviously requires people with power (e.g. those on promotion boards or funders) to change their mindset, but it also requires everyone to showcase, be proud and put effort towards their good practices, so that others start seeing the value in them and adopt them until they're widespread.
Things are slowly changing, but there is a lot of resistance, even in places that should be more "enlightened". The stark reality is that currently universities are run as businesses, and that is bad (I was recently asked if some research I'm doing is business critical. I don't know how I kept my cool.)

@teunbrand fair enough I didn't understand the use case! (And didn't know about geom_point_raster!)

@teunbrand good solution! I would avoid overloading geom_point though, something like geom_point_raster would be more meaningful. I know you can still use ggplot2:: to access the original version but that is prone to unwanted confusion.