Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

"We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity."
Lecture at Vassar College

~Marie Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934)

Tonight a dear friend sent me this photo of my lab circa 2007. A coffee bar, shelves of books, and off-camera a 12' long table in a massive room surrounded by whiteboards.

Now? My department has moved to a sleek new building. I don't have a lab, just a 120 square foot office. Theorists don't need space; all they do is think. If they need to talk to one another, they can reserve departmental conference rooms so long as they remember to do so six weeks in advance.

Progress marches on.

Last time I brought this up on a UK-based technical mailing list, an entrepreneur—themself from a historically persecuted ethnic group—told me that, "no one cares".
Well, I can't make anyone care but if you are in the position to advise on or choose a domain name you should maybe at least know some of the history behind .IO before buying one.
https://www.beep.blog/io/

"He was doing physical therapy, spending time with family members, and playing cards with his wife, according to the university. But in the days leading up to his death, his heart began to show signs of organ rejection; in other words, his immune system recognized the pig heart as foreign and attacked it. "

https://www.wired.com/story/pig-heart-transplant-lawrence-faucette-death/

@ct_bergstrom compared to the 999999 other sites that are complete and utterly flaming pieces that contain only a few papers, terrible search and 15 layers of verify your institution before you preview?

The minimal intrinsic stochasticity of constitutively expressed eukaryotic genes is sub-Poissonian

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adh5138

"Our findings redefine the lower limit of eukaryotic gene expression noise and uncover molecular requirements for achieving ultralow noise, which is expected to be important for vital cellular functions."

#MolecularBiology #GeneExpression #SystemsBiology

From Image to Knowledge (I2K), find the recorded virtual tutorials on image analysis here:

https://www.youtube.com/@I2KConference

All The Right Friends: how does Google Scholar rank co-authors?

https://quantixed.org/2023/10/21/all-the-right-friends-how-does-google-scholar-rank-co-authors/

#publishing #GoogleScholar #metrics #Rstats

Developer note: Nearly every single one of my projects has started with these 3 thoughts:

1. That'd be cool.
2. It can't be that hard.
3. It should only take me a few hours to do.

Then I spend the next month* riding the Dunning Kruger wave - realising there's so much I don't know that I don't know! - and thinking my past self a fool for ever thinking this was possible.

...

It is nice when they occasionally pan out...

(*) year

#RStats

@mort @12thRITS Exactly this. The question is ill-posed, which is a much deeper problem that many people pontificating on data analysis and presentation don't even seem to be aware of. There is no substitute for taste and good judgement. One way to present things like climate data is to take the first derivative, so you end up with a natural zero and can see departures from it in either direction.

If the world's most powerful loss prevention wizard were to cast a totalizing anti-shoplifting spell and all the larceny on earth instantly ceased, antiquated corporate box stores in half-empty strip malls would still be dying.

like pinching a star from the night sky as dawn approaches, shoplifting is inconsequential in the face of the impending demise that these bloated corporate levitations teeter on the edge of.

The outcry over a shoplifting crisis are the death throes of their existence.

@albertcardona I'd even argue that if all your professors don't accomplish much other than reasonably good undergraduate teaching and modest research findings, they've done their jobs and you're all good. It's really hard to know what qualifies as modest vs outstanding research findings anyway. @NicoleCRust

This is insane - a 48 hour time lapse of chick embryo neurons on the move https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2023-small-world-in-motion-competition/developing-neurons-connecting-the-opposite-side-of-the-central-nervous-system #Nikon #SmallWorld

💯

It can happen to the best of us.
#academia #research #science #scifi

Finally fixed my app that plots null and alternative distributions and power for an independent t-test https://shiny.ieis.tue.nl/d_p_power/. I use this a lot in education to 1) teach that p values are uniformly distributed if there is no effect 1/5

Fantastic talk by Joe Cheng at #positconf2023 on using #shiny with #quartopub.

I've made an #rstats Quarto book demo with a wasm-embedded shiny app to demonstrate how class boundaries change with the complexity of natural splines.

Sources: https://github.com/topepo/shinylive-in-book-test

If you've like me, you've found the "how much pain are you in on a scale of 0-10" question annoying to answer because everyone's 0-10 varies so much. Well, I wanted to share the new DVPRS pain scale, which defines 0-10 by how much it's impairing your life.

https://www.health.mil/News/Articles/2022/10/13/DVPRS-pain-scale