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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This is what pull requests used to look like.
(The last sentence is particularly remarkable!)
Nicola Romanò
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YES! Thank you...
Say it again, and again, and again. They are not "illegal immigrants".
- seeking asylum is legal and has been since 1951.
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/news/politics/silencing-the-drumbeat-again-seeking-asylum-is-legal/
Nicola Romanò
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More evidence (this time from the public sector in Scotland) that the four day week not only improves workers' wellbeing, it also improves productivity. Moreover, this is a proper four day week - rescued hours but no loss of pay - making it a powerful example, both for the Scottish government's management of its civil service & more widely.
The momentum is building for the four day week & its social benefits....
Nicola Romanò
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Must-read from @taylorlorenz
So-called "age verification" laws are spreading.
They will not protect kids.
They are grossly insecure.
They will be tools of censorship, surveillance, and oppression.
They amount to requiring a license to speak -- and to read.
We have to stop this.
https://www.usermag.co/p/we-must-fight-age-verification-with
Nicola Romanò
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Windows 10 support ends in 2 months, potentially making a lot of computers obsolete and dangerous to use. https://endof10.org/ is a great resource to avoid that by installing Linux - aided by experts and with simple to follow guides.
@almenal99 oh yes... not to mention the following 10 meetings to decide what to do! This year the formative workshops will be done without internet access, so hopefully students will realise in time that they are not able to do simple tasks.
The bright side of the story is that the other half who did pass the exam, did quite well!
Nicola Romanò
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We just published a new Python package for the single-cell analysis of morphological profiles! If you do microscopy of cells and wish there were better solutions than averaging cell populations, now is the time! Built on the scverse, we bring analysis of imaging data into the single-cell era. Check it out now 👇
Paper: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.08324
Documentation: https://scmorph.readthedocs.io/
@almenal99 well, last year half of the class in one of our courses failed their exam because it was done on computers with no internet access... I hope the message will come across strong this year that you can't learn programming by having AI write code for you...
Nicola Romanò
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After a 13-year immunization campaign, Nepal is declared to have eradicated rubella. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/08/1165672
@michaelgemar @jcoglan @joe Funny thing about that podcast thing is that after the initial moment of "oh that's a cool trick" you very soon realise that reading the actual text would be faster, less annoying (because you don't have to listen to pointless puns) and give you oh so much more useful information...
I'm also looking for examples of (deceptively) simple programming tasks that genAI doesn't quite get right. Something on the lines of:
Write a function that does <simple task>.
Where in most cases you'd get an output that is either wrong or it kind-of works but not quite.
Hello! I am interested in hearing from anyone who has (un)successfully made use of genAI in any shape or form specifically when teaching programming. I'm thinking specifically university at undergraduate level but happy to hear about any teaching related activities at any level.
Specifically what did you do? What were the challenges and opportunities? Could you have done the same without genAI?
Nicola Romanò
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Remember when the common wisdom was to not pirate commercial software because downloading random executables was likely to infect you with malware that would steal your data or worse?
Now we pay for legitimate, signed copies of software from vendors who load their applications with AI "features" that exfiltrate your data to remote servers and no way to disable that.
I feel old. When I started out, we got our malware for free and were doing something wrong when we did.
Maybe this is payback for all those C64 games I pirated when I was 16.
@katemorley "No one can remember how many pounds in a stone"... unless it's a baby, then it's pounds, all right.
I once had this lovely elderly couple asking me how heavy my dog was. I said 10.5 kg, they looked at me for a second and the wife replied "sorry, we don't do kilos...". 😂
@JamesWidman @mcc Black Mirror's "Common People" comes to mind... 🫤
Nicola Romanò
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Many people say they couldn't understand why the Italians and the Germans didn't stand up to their respective fascist leaders in the 1930s.
Modern America, IMO, is showing us EXACTLY how it happened then, and how it's happening again.
I don't even want to CONSIDER/PONDER how all this is going to end
Interesting piece on use of version control to "combat" use of genAI
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01814-5
Of course, this is in a class with 12 students and I suspect it's not easily scalable...
#genAI #academia #teaching #essay #versioncontrol #writing #academicmisconduct
Nicola Romanò
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great blogpost about an incendiary report on research #fraud in PNAS
https://reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a-do-or-die-moment-for-the-scientific-enterprise/
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
