Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

@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.

Are you based in the UK and interested in #teaching #statistics (in the #lifesciences but even outside!)? Would you like to discuss #challenges and #strategies with other people from different disciplines?

Then we invite you to a #workshop based upon a cross-UK survey of undergraduate teaching in study design and data analysis for #Biology, #Biomedical Science, #Medicine and #Psychology. The workshop aims to critically examine teaching practice with an eye on improving research reproducibility as a part of science reform.

What can you gain from the workshop?

- Cross-disciplinary perspective on the challenges faced and approaches to overcome them, and solidarity that comes from openly discussing challenges;

- Resources for teaching/to influence teaching of stats in an attendees’ own institution;

- Opportunity to benchmark your teaching programs versus those nationwide;

- Opportunity to gain “outside the box” (cross-discipline) perspective on why and how to teach study design and analysis;

- Knowledge of approaches and software people are using across UK to do/teach data analysis.

The workshop will occur *12 June*, 2024, at the University of Manchester. We anticipate the fee will be less than £20 (and will most likely be free)

Below, we provide links to (1) view the workshop's itinerary and (2) to sign up to indicate your general interest (we are gauging interest at the moment for organisational purposes; registration will follow).

Link for itinerary:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fj_VN3_bJ9H1kXpXqFjVqPR6Kbg5ErVFq7iKldlltu0/edit?usp=sharing

Link to indicate interest:
https://forms.office.com/e/yfTsyPe49e

============================

Organising committee:

- Crispin Jordan (University of Edinburgh)
- Nicola Romanò (University of Edinburgh)
- Kasia Banas (University of Edinburgh)
- Vanessa Armstrong (Newcastle University)
- William Kay (Cardiff University)

@ElenLeFoll This could be interesting as well https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.1113

Our new #preprint "Data Hazards as an ethical toolkit for neuroscience" is out!

Read it on OSF!
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/yn2j9

This is some fantastic work that has been spearheaded by a great PhD student, Susana!
She care a lot about this project and has used her PhD as a case study for applying the proposed toolkit (which will become part of her PhD project!)

Writing this was fun, and it really made us think about #ethics of #data and how we should consider these issues at all stages of a project, from planning, through to after the end of the project.

We would be thrilled to hear what you think about this!

@lunareclipse You could try tabula-py https://pypi.org/project/tabula-py/

@mvugt I've been doing that over the past couple of years (using Toggl Track) and it's indeed super super useful. Also, it gives you quantifiable evidence for prioritising certain activities and/or say no to others.