As I write this, the moderation on major social media platforms has been degraded, and the tools available to the user to curate their feeds are quite poor. So how could we improve our science social media feeds?

How can we teach “R for cell biologists” rather than teaching R to cell biologists? I’ve noticed that many R training courses will teach R – regardless of who is taking the course – and leave it to the participants to figure out how they can use R in their own discipline.

Another year, another edition of “the papers I selected for a module that I teach”. Previous selections are grouped here or here. The list serves as a snapshot of interesting papers published in the previous 12 months or so. I hope it is useful to others who are looking for lists of papers to read, for student selections or for anything else.

It’s getting towards the end of the year so it is time to assemble a list of my favourite albums released in 2024. I have sporadically posted lists like this in the past. These twenty albums were the ones I liked the most (and the ones that I thought other people might like to hear). The Lemon Twigs – A Dream Is All We Know Genre: Power pop | [link] My favourite record of this year.

With the fervour of someone with an n = 1 positive experience, I thought I’d write about what I learned from a recent writing retreat. My University organises one-day events to encourage writing. They’re on-campus, in the neutral territory of the Library, so perhaps calling them “writing retreats” is a little far-fetched. Nonetheless, the idea is to provide a time and space for people to achieve some writing.

One of the joys of posting a preprint is seeing that people are viewing, downloading and (hopefully) reading your paper. On bioRxiv you can check out the statistics for your paper in the metrics tab. We posted a preprint recently and it clocked up over 1,000 views in the first day or so. This made me wonder: is that a lot of views or not? How does it compare to other preprints in our category?

I jumped ship from Twitter following the Musk takeover in 2022. Seeking an alternative, I joined Mastodon and didn’t look back. Since then, I’ve enjoyed many wonderful interactions and conversations; and I feel a bit sad at what Twitter turned into.

One of the best features of Strava is the battle to be King (or Queen) of the Mountain. Originally, in cycling, segments were typically climbs or difficult sections of road, and the simple idea, is who can complete the segment in the quickest time. Hence they would be KOM/QOM, King or Queen of the Mountain. Segments quickly expanded to pretty much any section of a course and to include running segments, to separate them from cycling.

I wrote previously about how to archive a Slack workspace. Well, now Slack announced a new policy, effective from August 26th, 2024. Under the new policy, messages and files older than one year in workspaces on the free tier will be deleted . This is in addition to the 90 day limit for viewing content in the workspace. This causes a problem with the solution I outlined previously.

Previously, I took advantage of a dataset that linked preprints to their published counterparts to look at the fraction of papers in a journal that are preprinted. This linkage can be used to answer other interesting questions. Such as: when do authors preprint their papers relative to submission? And does this differ by journal? There’s a bit of preamble. If you just want to know the answer, click here.