Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

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.

Our latest: Deep dynamical modelling of developmental trajectories with temporal transcriptomics

- Optimised metabolic labelling for time resolved scRNAseq
- Deep learning (VAE) for RNA velocity
- Predicting expression dynamics with a neural SDE system

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.06.547989v1

204 Mastodon posts with the #PositConf2024 hashtag so far in my app! Search through them all here, on a Web page that includes NONE of today's advice on how to make Quarto docs or apps look nice 😅
https://apps.machlis.com/shiny/positconf/

Someone is vastly underestimating academics’ appetency to not pay for things.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/08/anaconda_puts_the_squeeze_on/

Announcing Zotero 7, the biggest update in Zotero’s 18-year history

https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-7/

Drawing: Possible causes of your problems. I've been appalled at the scenes we've witnessed over the last few days. It's utterly unacceptable that people should have to live in fear because of the colour of their skin.
[Polite comments only, please.]

I wrote a thing about switching from Windows to Linux for music production. Not a step-by-step guide, but a bunch of (hopefully) helpful info and links for those who might be considering the switch. Will probably also be useful for those new to the whole computer music thing who are interested in Linux as a starting point.

#LinuxAudio #MusicProduction

https://www.fstateaudio.com/?page_id=1763

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

Did you forget to write some slides? do you want something quick and easy? try using my new quarto revealjs plugin: loud

All text on slides are automatically centered and zoomed in to fill the screen

https://github.com/EmilHvitfeldt/quarto-revealjs-loud

"Our framework suggests that after accounting for heterogeneity, the probability that the tested hypothesis is true for the average population, design, and analysis path can be much lower than implied by nominal error rates of statistically significant individual studies." #MetaSci #Methodology 🧪

Heterogeneity in effect size e...

@LianaBrooks excellent points! May I add:

Privilege comes in many shapes and sizes, it’s not all-or-nothing, so you can have various types of privilege without having every possible advantage in life. You can have struggles & suffer injustice and still have privilege in some form. You can have privilege in one area and lack of privilege in another.