Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

It's time to vote for Inkscape's 1.3 About Screen Contest!

We're proud to present an amazing gallery of entries: 🖼️

54 entries by 43 #Inkscape artists!
Thanks to all who entered!

Community vote open from
Mar. 20 (0:00 UTC) to Mar. 26, 2023 (23:59:59 UTC). 🗳️

https://inkscape.org/gallery/=about-screen-contest/contest-for-13/

#ArtWithOpenSource #InkscapeAboutScreen

At the local primary school, the children sing a Mother’s day song with the lyric

“My mum’s ever so clever. She may not have a degree,
But she can help with my homework and that’s what matters to me.”

After many complaints the school have agreed to change the lyric (hooray!). To:

“… even though she’s got a degree,”

Which simultaneously makes having a degree sound bad and also shaming Mum’s without degrees.

#EverydaySexism
1/2

Further damage to the dysfunctional academic career system in Germany: The government has just presented its reform of the fixed term contract law (#WissZeitVG).
After years of #IchbinHanna protests, the max. length of fixed contracts for postdocs has been reduced to 3 years. The cynical argument: Careers become more predictable, because 3 years after your PhD, it's either professorship, third party funding, or exit.
The lack of a broader tenure track system makes this a devastating development.

Oh, man. This comic — from 1993 — could NOT be more relevant today. As usual, Bill Watterson hits it out of the park.

#Banks #Banking #Bailout #AntiCapitalism

Random first trial post: today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement.

Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them.

Ready to give Fedora Linux 38 a test? The beta release is here!
#Fedora #Linux #OpenSource

Learn more: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-38-beta/

I hoped this bingo card would have become outdated because people would have started to know that these are myths. Sadly, this isn't the case.

""The honors thesis must be a *single author* document written by the student."

Rules like this represent an antiquated approach to #science and harm the undergraduate researchers involved by teaching them that science is done by isolated individuals & that it's appropriate to not credit all contributors to a project.

Of course students should lead the work & writing of their honors thesis, but there's a difference between leading & doing it alone. We should teach science as it is practiced.

SMBC nailing it:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/resonsible

There is people out there thinking that computational biologists spend less time on scientific projects (not true) and therefore deserve less credit or even no authorship in papers, compared to wet lab people.

They clearly have never seen all the years and work that takes to gain the knowledge to do it. Just like they clearly do not value such a knowledge on lab work, since they only care about how many hours someone spend doing something.

Big thanks to all who contributed to these initial guidelines, including the helpful reviewers and editors!

If your on linux and you dont already know this command, check it out:

> curl wttr.in

#linux

‘According to the Retraction Watch database, the 200 authors with the most retractions account for over a quarter of all 19,000 retractions. Many of the most prolific fraudsters are senior scientists at big universities or hospitals.’

https://web.archive.org/web/20230222193709/https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/02/22/there-is-a-worrying-amount-of-fraud-in-medical-research
#fraud #science #academia

Check out our new commentary piece in @NatureEcoEvo - Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development rdcu.be/c6uMN software is critical for synthesizing & modeling big data in ecology and evolution … but current incentive structures are lacking

Ok, so there is much discussion about the alt text on pictures. My mom is legally blind. As she has gotten older her sight is almost gone. She LIVES on the computer and to say she gets excited when special attention is paid for the blind is a great understatement. Please use alt text and describe the pictures you post. Describe it as if you had your eyes closed and the only link to the outside world is what a kind soul took an extra 5 minutes to type. Come on, do it, make someone’s day.#AltText

If you see a bank account for donations to help cyclone victims, take the time to verify the account from an official published source.

For example: the recipient organisation's website.

Best not to just send money to an account repeated by social media users.

How are different scientific fields related, from a bibliometric point of view? Who writes longer papers? Uses more references? More recent references? In which fields does author position matter? Data for 20 years, all of Web of Science here:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00246

Underlying, de-identified data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7573523