Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

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.

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