Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

Should grants use a lottery approach? 🎟️

"Research shows that, barring a minority of outstanding projects, grant winners and losers are not decided by a precise and objective identification of worthy and unworthy projects. Instead, the luck of the draw — who reviews what proposal and the opinions they hold — generally determines these outcomes."

"It is excessively wasteful in terms of researchers’ time."

https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/21/research-funding-broken-lottery-approach-could-fix-it/

#sciencereform #macademia #metascience @academicchatter

Interesting webinar by Gabriella Rustici & Guillaume Desachy where they will share their experience about the @rstats journey AstraZeneca is currently on.

R at AstraZeneca: ​​upskilling our workforce through education, experience, and exposure

https://www.addevent.com/event/Kq14516694

Following up from the newly implemented #ungrading pedagogy (see https://lgatto.github.io/ungrading/), I have gathered an initial student feedback during this term's year committee, where student delegates and teaching staff meet to discuss how things have been so far.

Here's what concerns my 3rd bachelor course:

(1/3)

I love all of you and I want nothing but the best for each of you, particularly those on infosec.exchange. I understand that Mastodon isn't Twitter, that DMs are end-to-end encrypted, that we are spread across different instances and it can be hard to find your friends, and that an instance can go away at any time, and that translating posts doesn't work correctly, and there is no native giphy support, and that some instances are overwhelmed and super slow, and that you don't think the federated model can scale to a billion users, or that it doesn't support full text search of every post and account, or that we can't comply with the GDPR, or that we don't support quote tweet style functionality, or that we shouldn't collect IP addresses, and many other things.

The fediverse is a work in progress. I've been here for going on 6 years. In that time, it's come a long, long way. That said, Mastodon is not going to appeal to everyone. The decisions I make are not going to appeal to everyone. No one is forcing you to be here. No one is forcing you to disclose your personal secrets into a network of federated servers running by volunteers and hobbyists. NB: this is not Twitter. It has some similar functionality, but it is not Twitter. Parts of it are better, IMO, and parts are not. The security community is generally among the most skilled and competent IT people the world has to offer. Mastodon is open source. Do you see where I'm going?

I set this instance up a long time ago for reasons I don't even remember. I have poured my soul into this thing because I believe in the importance of this community. I have effectively peaked in my career as a CISO and I and my family live well. I am not running this instance for fame, money, a better job, or anything other than wanting to foster a community of people that can learn from each other and make the world a better place. That's it.

As I've said in several recent interviews, I felt particularly obligated to ensure the security community had a good handing spot in the fediverse as everyone was running for the doors in Twitter. We've grown from 180 active users to about 30000 in the span of 3 weeks. I do not expect everyone to stay. Some will set up their own instances. Some will move to one of the other excellent security focused instances. Some will give up and move to on to some other social media. And that is OK. While I am super excited to see the buzz here, I don't have subscriber targets, engagement targets, retention targets, or anything else. The only metric I hold myself to is whether I think this is serving a useful purpose to the community.

I appreciate all of you, regardless of where you land. Infosec.exchange has been here for a long time and will continue to be here for you.

Just migrated to mastodon from Twitter and looking for researchers to follow here to get started. I found some nice lists separated by field but haven't found any for natural language processing. Does anyone know of one?

Also, if you build Shiny apps, you might want to consider submitting a proposal to be a speaker at ShinyConf2023 (@ShinyConf)

More details here: shinyconf.appsilon.com/become-a-speaker

#rstats

Love, love, love to see the old "remote work is ineffective" argument being made after having just lived through two years of remote work. 🤪

How about you just say the truth? "I don't trust you and can't monitor you unless you're in the office."

#️⃣ This video helped me add a column to Mastodon that contains various hashtags I want to follow.

⚙️ First you have to go to your preferences and enable advanced web interface.

@edutooter #EduTooter #edtech #mastodon #edchat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP679vFcu6Q

@nicolaromano apologies if this is already on your radar, but as someone outside the field I appreciated the clarity and detail in this paper https://elifesciences.org/articles/66747

Probably one of the most simple & interesting (for its utterly basic qualities) #cellularAutomata I've ever written...

Probabilistic (1% mutation chance per frame)
Lower mutation threshold (non-probabilistic)

#generative #workshop #werkwoche2022

@arnaudlerouzic @datamaps @MichaelIngrisch @rstats Why? Because syntax preference is a highly personal thing. "Intuitive" and "human-readable" are subjective. Many people enjoy the dplyr approach to data wrangling, and it's made #rstats more accessible to a lot of people who don't come from a traditional coding background. I really like dplyr. I also really like data.table (but IMO it has a steeper learning curve for people without coding experience. I probably wouldn't teach it in a newsroom.)

@arnaudlerouzic @datamaps @smach @rstats

So what would you recommend then to teach beginners data visualization in R? I have yet to see the convincing one-liner base-R plot that is equivalent to what a freshly converted excel-user can produce with ggplot

@smach @datamaps is there really a big downside to load tidyverse instead of individual packages? If I'm writing a standalone script/analysis to do one thing then I just load the whole tidyverse so that I don't have to go back and load another library later. (Of course if I'm building a package, I wouldn't do that!)

Do you run or actively contribute to a reproducibility or open science initiative?

Join our virtual brainstorming event on "How to build, grow and sustain a reproducibility or open science initiative" (Nov. 22-23) to share your experiences. We'll discuss challenges and opportunities, explore solutions, and compile lessons learned to share with the research community.

All are welcome, including early career researchers from around the world.

Info & registration: https://www.bihealth.org/en/notices/how-to-build-grow-and-sustain-reproducibility-or-open-science-initiatives-a-virtual-brainstorming-event

One thing I love about Mastodon is the #Inclusive environment. So, to those who do not post alt text with their pics, I ask you to please learn how. Please include #blind people like me in your posts. If you're not sure how to write alt text, I can teach you how. And to those of you who *are* including alt text, thank you from the bottom of my heart!