Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org
Senior lecturer at the Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE) and Edinburgh University.
Undergraduate Programme Director, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python. I study #heterogeneity in #pituitary (and other) cells.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.
Joined Oct 2022
Nicola Romanò
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Ig Nobel prize awarded to a researcher whose work shows data on longevity is 'rotten from the inside out.'
The so-called Mediterranean diet may be pension fraud.
Nicola Romanò
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Fun fact for #RStats: as of last month, it's been 10 years since @hadleywickham's "Tidy Data" paper was published in #JStatSoft
Nicola Romanò
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“Being a woman in tech is insane. We do not work in the same moral system model as most of the people that we interact with daily and we can’t talk about it, because when we do, we are the ones portrayed as crazy or hysterical.”
This is such an excellent piece.
Nicola Romanò
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An #Oklahoma teacher, Summer Boismier, had her teaching certificate revoked because she did a classroom display of #BannedBooks and gave her students a link to the #BrooklynPublicLibrary service providing free online access to banned books.
https://www.upworthy.com/oklahoma-revoked-this-teachers-license-for-standing-up-against-book-bans-shes-not-backing-down
From Boismier: "I've never had a teaching certificate revoked before last week, let alone revoked for informing [high school students] that libraries exist online too."
Nicola Romanò
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From @mmasnick: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/05/second-circuit-says-libraries-disincentivize-authors-to-write-books-by-lending-them-for-free/
"Even though this outcome was always a strong possibility, the final ruling is just incredibly damaging, especially in that it suggests that all libraries are bad for authors and cause them to no longer want to write. I only wish I were joking. Towards the end of the ruling (as we’ll get to below) it says that while having freely lent out books may help the public in the “short-term” the “long-term” consequences would be that “there would be little motivation to produce new works.”"
"there would be little motivation to produce new works" without profit motive?
the ENTIRE FANWORK INTERNET WOULD DISAGREE WITH YOU, which is probably, a sizeable if not majority of fiction writing in the past two decades, it contains some of humanity's longest works!
@BenAveling @tante GenAI doesn't create art. However, humans can use it, just as they use any other medium, to create art.
The thing is, the barrier to use it is extremely low, so everyone and their dog can have a go
at it. However, getting a good, meaningful, artistic output out of it is not trivial, and it's an art in itself.
My grandpa's neighbour was a self-proclaimed artist, who sit on his windowsill playing his songs on a guitar. Trust me, it was an horrifying experience. Yet, plenty of other people do create art using guitars (definitely not him, though).
I'm not a fan of the analogy with the photocopier, if not because it is technically wrong, and even if we forget the technicalities, collage art predates AI by at least a century.
Generative art has been a thing for a long time, way before the recent AI craze (for example, see Tyler Hobbs' work). Try it and you'll see how easy it is to generate something with it, and how incredibly difficult it is to generate something good with it.
Yes, with genAI you can type a quick caption to make "art" for your flyer (absolutely fine, maybe you don't have the budget to hire someone) or to post something on Instagram which will be forgotten the next day. OK let's move on.
But, aside from the fact that creativity isn't necessarily linked with difficulty, think of the possibilities when the new generation of artists will start mixing genAI content with live installations, or use it as base for their paintings or use it in creative ways that are not simply typing in a prompt and getting out an image.
We just need to learn how to filter out the noise.
Nicola Romanò
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Share an #rstats project you've started, or dreamt of, that's gone a bit stale. Lets face it individually we never have enough time. But it's still a project you'd love to finish (or start).
I’ve always wanted to create an open pkg for combining pre-pooled sequencing libraries from diff projects onto large seq lanes. Eval barcode compatibility, colour balance, maximise seq output etc. I built an initial version in a past role but always wanted to one for the community
#WeeklyRShare @danwwilson
Nicola Romanò
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This week's #inkscape update video is all about #extensions written in #python
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUOI4C_G8jU
Some background, some updates on work done these last few weeks and some cool new features coming in inkscape 1.4 for extension authors.
Nicola Romanò
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The material for my workshop “Databases for R”, held at posit::conf(2024), is available at https://pos.it/databases-24. One day of DBI, dbplyr, duckdb, duckplyr, dm — working directly on the database, or via Parquet files.
Drop me a line if you’re interested in me bringing this experience to your organization.
@ereinbergs I used Todoist for to-do list but recently I bought myself a whiteboard and I am switching back to that.
I also track my time using Toggl Track. I found that extremely useful to balance different activities and also to have a pragmatic way to decide what to do. I can say "Sorry I spend x% of my time doing xyz, I can't take on zyx as well"
Learning to sometimes say no to people is essential
And yes, if I need something done, I would block my calendar, allowing maybe 25% extra time for it. You need to learn to stick to those blocks.
But most importantly, if you didn't have time to do something... remember that the world is not going to end. Weekends are for resting, those things can wait until Monday.
Nicola Romanò
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My new #ImpostorSyndrome hack:
Whenever I hear comments about #scicomm not being ‘real’ science, or see the discipline excluded yet again from a drop-down list of STEM fields, career guides etc etc, I remind myself that the word ‘scientist’ was literally coined for a science communicator (and woman!) - the fabulous ✨ Mary Somerville ✨ (who you really should google, if you don’t know about her).
Hopefully that helps someone else feel better today too 🫶
Nicola Romanò
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In journal articles, does plain language boost citation impact? Do technical terms and insider jargon boost citation impact?
https://jlib.ut.ac.ir/article_98243_en.html
A new study in the field of #linguistics finds no strong evidence for either hypothesis. But I'm glad these authors took a look.
"Statistical tests showed a negative correlation between the use of difficult words in articles and the number of citations/altmetric scores, but this relationship was not statistically significant."
@MrHedmad Ok, it makes much more sense now, thanks for taking the time to explain!
@MrHedmad I'm not sure I totally get the point (but haven't read the book!). What is the alternative she is proposing? Also, I'm not totally sure why she argues that human contribution is disregarded, I would argue that it's much more put into focus, but I might be misreading her point.
@lwpembleton I'm wondering if we're so used to HDR and various automatic filters as standard on all phones that when we see a photo like this it looks odd?
Nicola Romanò
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Pretty cool:
My 2022 paper has now been viewed over 10 K times:
Ten simple rules for how you can help make your lab a better place as a graduate student or postdoc
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010673
Anyone knows where can I find a list of valid types for "Dataset Type" when searching for NCBI GEO Datasets?
The help pages only mention "expression profiling by high throughput sequencing" as an example.
@MylesRyden @terri Yet, we don't teach students how to do science well. A lot of the bad practices that are behind "bad science" could be mitigated by better teaching of statistics, data analysis, experimental design etc.
@lwpembleton It was 2005-2006, had to analyse some data from my PhD and whatever stats software was in the lab (prism likely) felt extremely limiting, so I switched to #rstats!
Coincidentally, it was the time I switched to #fedora and never looked back!
Senior lecturer at the Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE) and Edinburgh University.
Undergraduate Programme Director, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python. I study #heterogeneity in #pituitary (and other) cells.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.
Joined Oct 2022
