Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

Heads up to Kia owners/potential buyers: Today, a group of independent security researchers revealed that they'd found a flaw in a web portal operated by the carmaker Kia that let the researchers reassign control of the internet-connected features of most modern Kia vehicles—dozens of models representing millions of cars on the road—from the smartphone of a car’s owner to the hackers’ own phone or computer. By exploiting that vulnerability and building their own custom app to send commands to target cars, they were able to scan virtually any internet-connected Kia vehicle’s license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car’s location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.

https://www.wired.com/story/kia-web-vulnerability-vehicle-hack-track/

A potentially controversial take on bioscience faculty job applications. If you have a partner who also needs a position, the right time to share that info is AFTER you have a WRITTEN job offer.

Once you have the letter, if the department doesn't find a position for you SO, you get to decide if you can live apart or if your partner can take a non-tenure position or pivot careers. Don't let the department make those decisions for you!!

#AcademicChatter

Calling all science/tech folks: Do you have thoughts about xkcd? Parker Bach & I are trying to understand the role that xkcd plays in the scientific/technical community. Will you share your thoughts? https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR64w9CfkmX9HrkRf2PpIZWBUQ1oxRERXVFFIRERIQUhJSDhDNVoxUU1CNS4u&route=shorturl And since we are doing a snowball sample, please spread the word!

The human brain suppresses its response to our own voice, which may be key to correcting speech errors. https://elifesciences.org/digests/94198/zoning-out-our-own-voice?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

Such an interesting, thoughtful response to LLMs eating the world from authoring app iA...

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon to integrate LLMs to create your content, it tracks the provenance of your text instead, letting you keep track of what's yours and what isn't.

An elegant, contrarian strategy. HT @marcoshuerta

https://ia.net/topics/writing-with-ai

Ig Nobel prize awarded to a researcher whose work shows data on longevity is 'rotten from the inside out.'

The so-called Mediterranean diet may be pension fraud.

https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

Fun fact for #RStats: as of last month, it's been 10 years since @hadleywickham's "Tidy Data" paper was published in #JStatSoft

https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v059i10

“Being a woman in tech is insane. We do not work in the same moral system model as most of the people that we interact with daily and we can’t talk about it, because when we do, we are the ones portrayed as crazy or hysterical.”

This is such an excellent piece.

https://www.sigops.org/2024/the-moral-implications-of-being-a-moderately-successful-computer-scientist-and-a-woman/

An #Oklahoma teacher, Summer Boismier, had her teaching certificate revoked because she did a classroom display of #BannedBooks and gave her students a link to the #BrooklynPublicLibrary service providing free online access to banned books.
https://www.upworthy.com/oklahoma-revoked-this-teachers-license-for-standing-up-against-book-bans-shes-not-backing-down

From Boismier: "I've never had a teaching certificate revoked before last week, let alone revoked for informing [high school students] that libraries exist online too."

#BookBans #Censorship #Libraries

From @mmasnick: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/05/second-circuit-says-libraries-disincentivize-authors-to-write-books-by-lending-them-for-free/

"Even though this outcome was always a strong possibility, the final ruling is just incredibly damaging, especially in that it suggests that all libraries are bad for authors and cause them to no longer want to write. I only wish I were joking. Towards the end of the ruling (as we’ll get to below) it says that while having freely lent out books may help the public in the “short-term” the “long-term” consequences would be that “there would be little motivation to produce new works.”"

"there would be little motivation to produce new works" without profit motive?

the ENTIRE FANWORK INTERNET WOULD DISAGREE WITH YOU, which is probably, a sizeable if not majority of fiction writing in the past two decades, it contains some of humanity's longest works!

Share an #rstats project you've started, or dreamt of, that's gone a bit stale. Lets face it individually we never have enough time. But it's still a project you'd love to finish (or start).
I’ve always wanted to create an open pkg for combining pre-pooled sequencing libraries from diff projects onto large seq lanes. Eval barcode compatibility, colour balance, maximise seq output etc. I built an initial version in a past role but always wanted to one for the community
#WeeklyRShare @danwwilson

This week's #inkscape update video is all about #extensions written in #python

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUOI4C_G8jU

Some background, some updates on work done these last few weeks and some cool new features coming in inkscape 1.4 for extension authors.

The material for my workshop “Databases for R”, held at posit::conf(2024), is available at https://pos.it/databases-24. One day of DBI, dbplyr, duckdb, duckplyr, dm — working directly on the database, or via Parquet files.

Drop me a line if you’re interested in me bringing this experience to your organization.

My new #ImpostorSyndrome hack:

Whenever I hear comments about #scicomm not being ‘real’ science, or see the discipline excluded yet again from a drop-down list of STEM fields, career guides etc etc, I remind myself that the word ‘scientist’ was literally coined for a science communicator (and woman!) - the fabulous ✨ Mary Somerville ✨ (who you really should google, if you don’t know about her).

Hopefully that helps someone else feel better today too 🫶

#scicomm #womeninstem #ImpostorSyndrome

In journal articles, does plain language boost citation impact? Do technical terms and insider jargon boost citation impact?
https://jlib.ut.ac.ir/article_98243_en.html

A new study in the field of #linguistics finds no strong evidence for either hypothesis. But I'm glad these authors took a look.

"Statistical tests showed a negative correlation between the use of difficult words in articles and the number of citations/altmetric scores, but this relationship was not statistically significant."

Pretty cool:

My 2022 paper has now been viewed over 10 K times:

Ten simple rules for how you can help make your lab a better place as a graduate student or postdoc

#AcademicChatter #academia

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010673

Been playing around with github copilot workspace and it's quite thought provoking. Basically, file an issue, and it opens a PR for you. Not sure I'd trust it for much more than code brush-ups and minor refactors, but it's been very good so far.

We've gone from
- remembering code / reading the manual
- being good at googling
- using AI / copilots / prompting
- ? discussing code changes

Interesting to see where it goes. I'm not sure where we'll end up.