Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

My book "Building reproducible analytical pipelines with #rstats" is done! Buy a drm-free epub or pdf @leanpub : https://leanpub.com/raps-with-r/

Physical https://amazon.com/dp/B0C87H6MGF (check your local market place)

Read for free forever: https://raps-with-r.dev

#RStats #datascience

@caffinepwrd @davidtoddmccarty Over here, Tories and #brexshitters and the like appear to view the world as a negative sum game, and their aim is to make sure that everybody else other than them are the losers, even if they can't win themselves.

#AI Model Fit Obsession Disorder (MFOD) : A #pathology afflicting a #datascientist or #machinelearningengineer in which they think their job is to call the function model.fit, and that's it. The disorder is characterized by a lack of curiosity about whats inside their #blackbox, a belief that only good things happen from calling the model.fit function, and disdain for understanding #ai by means other than the mean square error. #aihype #datascience #machinelearning

has anyone seen a really good analysis of the problems with git's command line UI? Would love to read it. for example:

* `git checkout` is dangerous and has too many different jobs
* for a tool that's supposed to make changes easy to undo, you actually need to learn a LOT of different ways go back to the previous state

(not looking for git tutorials or explanations of why you think git's UI is actually good, just an analysis of the problems)

Blog4: Annotate image.

Arrows, letter code, colors, and more - they all need to be explained to your audiences! Ideally in a way that they are visible too!

https://helenajamborwrites.netlify.app/posts/image_how_annot/

#scicomm #BioImages #Microscopy #dataviz #images #Image #ScienceMastodon #Science

PS Prize question, how many annotations do you see in the image?

Reminder that you should absolutely never use the website called “sci-hub dot st” to get free access to research papers instead of feeding the greed of for-profit publishers.

That’s basically communism, which is of course illegal. 👩🏻‍🏫

There are some *beautiful* lessons on building ML-based classifiers in biology in the recent Gihawi et al. paper (Major data analysis errors invalidate cancer microbiome findings)

Classifiers will always look for weird things and then report way-too-good-accuracies. At first glance no classifier in biology should be highly accurate: by now that should be a red flag.

I wonder whether there's a fun 'signal' in studies including randomness: so many tutorials, notebooks, and repos use 42 as a random seed.
I wonder whether by now we have a weird bias because of that number somewhere :)

Today I'm seeing multiple posts alerting me to serious problems with an update to Zoom's terms of use (variously stated as dated last March or April) according to which
- They have the right to feed all your Zoom calls and associated data to an AI learning system
- They own this data forever
- There is no opt-out
- If you show anything copyrighted on a Zoom call and the copyright owner goes after Zoom for copyright infringement for using this data, then you are personally on the hook for all legal damages

For example see https://the.webm.ink/not-using-zoom, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034145

Even if you are somehow ok with training AI to look like you and talk like you, I think the last point makes it no longer safe to use Zoom for any purpose. That's a big issue for online collaboration, conferencing, and online office hours with students (note high likelihood of incorporating copyrighted textbook material into those office hours).

There's a good discussion of alternatives at https://mathstodon.xyz/@MedievalMideast@hcommons.social/110838371676478198 and probably starting up at many other places as well.

Just discovered there is an extension of #Inkscape to quickly edit scientific figures (change axis ratio, font sizes, etc) 🤩

https://github.com/burghoff/Scientific-Inkscape

behind "hello world" on Linux https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/03/behind--hello-world/

"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."

'She had consented to be a part of our research project and was determined to contribute — she had told me that it wasn’t every day that a person had electrodes implanted in their brain, and what else was she doing while she waited to have seizures that the epileptologists could track?'

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/173352

#BookReview
#HistoryOfLogic #HistoryOfMathematics #HistoryOfComputing
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2023/07/26/when-is-an-algorithm-not-an-algorithm/

What if we told you that you could run Fedora... on Android? 👀
#Fedora #Android #Linux #Termux

➡️ https://fedoramagazine.org/how-to-install-and-update-fedora-linux-on-android-using-termux/

First post of my summer blog series on image communication in (bio/med) publications!

Today: Many papers, many images, many problems (and some first solutions).

Why we should make sure our figure are understandable.

https://helenajamborwrites.netlify.app/posts/image_numbers/

The more I work with #rstats, the less I know about it!
Today I learned about the function utils::stack() to convert a named list to a data frame.

R-Ladies Remote is now on Mastodon 🎉

We are the only fully online chapter of R-Ladies, the global organization promoting gender diversity in the R community. Our chapter particularly welcomes people working remotely or living in places remote from other chapters.

Our main community is on Slack, where we sometimes hold organized sessions (coffee chats, reading groups) and we also hold occasional online talks/workshops.

#RLadies #RStats

The most disappointingly simplistic thinking in tech, to me personally, is when people think just because something is being deployed IN education, in a classroom, or in a school, that means it's an unquestionable public good.

Instead of seeing the many, many complex ways that we take advantage of schools, or indeed damage schools, with our technology.

I'm always amazed by the strength of this association for people who haven't worked directly in education.