I started a new dataviz project recently, integrating the Principal Diagnosis for Hospital Separations data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). My dataviz collects their yearly "datacubes" (Excel spreadsheets), currently covering the period from mid-2010 to mid-2024. 🧵

I was recently doing some basic word doc template stuff, needed to add a heading to the doc 12 times between two other repeated headings, tried copilot, it plopped the heading in completely incorrect places whilst telling me it did the job. A consistent theme of AI, fails at the most simple tasks

Do beer drinkers pay more tax than gas companies? Yes, they do! Beer excise > PRRT Beer drinkers' income tax > gas company income tax Thread below, full details here: australiainstitute.org.au/report/tax-b...

Really proud of this amazing work by PhD student Dr Jack Wheelahan - his first paper from his work looking at improved in-clinic diagnostics for Zoos. Jack used Bayesian Latent Class Modelling to identify the best molecular testing method for Chlamydia in koalas doi.org/10.1016/j.pr...

If you are teaching any kind of statistics, probability or modeling classes, you'll love this website. Contains dozens of interactive simulations of random processes, with sliders, different visualizat options, and full numeric log ouput: www.randomservices.org/random/apps/...

I'm especially happy I managed to sneak an 1802 satirical cartoon from my son's GCSE history course into an editorial on Avian Influenza communications bvajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Oooh look at Canberra press gallery salivating over another pitiful 'horse race' filled with 'winners & losers' & 'personalities' to focus on rather than talking about that piffling stuff like climate, welfare, cost of living, social policy. It's all just a sad little game.🙄

If we are going to ban symbols and phrases because of 'social cohesion' then we really should start banning some moustaches too.

Something about white blokes with short hair and moustaches gives off a real 👌 vibe...

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

This is one of the most upsetting and infuriating medical/scientific pieces I have ever read. #PedSky #MedSky #ToxSky #PharmSky 🧪

"Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning?" by Ben Taub is our pick from the February 2, 2026 issue of The New Yorker. https://newyorkerest.com/issue/2026/02/02?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=weekly_pick

🃏🔀 Let me shuffle that deck of cards for you! printf "%s\n" {2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K,A}{♠,♥,♦,♣} | shuf | xargs -n 9 K♣ 5♣ 6♠ 4♠ 3♦ J♦ 7♦ 8♣ 9♠ 2♠ 9♥ J♥ 9♣ 10♠ J♣ Q♥ 7♠ Q♠ 6♥ A♠ 8♠ 10♥ K♥ 10♦ 4♣ A♣ A♥ 5♦ 5♥ 6♣ J♠ Q♣ A♦ 3♣ 4♥ 3♠ 4♦ 3♥ K♠ 7♥ 6♦ 8♦ 7♣ K♦ 8♥ 9♦ 2♥ 5♠ 10♣ Q♦ 2♦ 2♣

New blog post with some thoughts on @nanoporetech.com and their recent announcement that the P2 Solo will be discontinued: rrwick.github.io/2026/01/21/p...

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

A more user friendly press release version of the koala retrovirus paper www.izw-berlin.de/en/press-rel...

Adelaide writers festival, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Symphony — in every case of censorship, boards have shown themselves. They will destroy the reputation of the institutions they lead, to be on good terms with people in their cocktail set.

Ricky Gervais has a new special out and I watched 10 minutes and it’s exactly the same tired lazy shit as usual

Me in my 20s: people have a lot of motives and there's nuance to everything Me in my 40s: oh a lot of people are just evil actually

Australian Influenza update: It became clear during November that a unusual second wave of influenza is underway in Australia, driven by the new "clade K" (H3N2 clade 2a.3a.1, subclade K). Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia are currently the hardest-hit. #Influenza #Australia 🧵

Annual watch of the greatest Christmas movie of all time. Never to be defeated. Normally December 1st so we're a few days late this year!

An incredible resource and an inspiring story behind it 💪 @emmabeansworth.bsky.social your tenacity and commitment is amazing

Okay, it's the start of the academic year and there have been further funny (and some frustrating) mix ups ... just a gentle reminder that there are two of us - try to make sure you have the right one ...

If you missed my talk but still want some tips for writing good code for scientists, my slides are here: daxkellie.quarto.pub/a-guide-to-w... All the links and references are there too in case you want to see more! 😀🧪🌏 #ESA2025 #rstats #quartopub

A lot of human medical things funded, no animal health studies funded - please human health researchers stick to the millions in NHMRC and MRRF available to you that the rest of us can't apply for!

DECRA success rate is the lowest in 14 years, since 2012 (1st year the scheme ran). What a pathetic system we have for supporting new ideas, new people… DE26: 13.1% 25: 17.9 24: 19.6 23: 15.0 22: 19.7 21: 17.1 20: 16.0 19: 17.2 18: 16.3 17: 16.7 16: 16.4 15: 14.3 14: 13.6 13: 15.6 12: 12.8

ARC says they’ll announce DECRA and LIEF outcomes tomorrow (Tuesday 25th Nov). In recent times these announcements have been around 11am Canberra time. With 2 schemes on the same day, I assume they’ll announce one of them later in the day (probably DECRA first).

Very excited to be in Adelaide to attend #ABACBS2025 . Australia is a powerhouse of microbial genomics, and indeed of bioinformatics, so am very much looking forward to meeting everyone, old friends and new, and speaking tomorrow!

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

How many submarines that we're never going to get does this equal? Thoughts with all research staff doing amazing work that are undervalued by a government with no competition and no ambition

It soothes my bitter heart to know that no matter how much money Elon Musk has, he will never, ever be funny t.co/QhuKU9HCxA

every company in 2025

Finally got my hands on a rare find: Sonja Buckley’s autobiography. She was instrumental in the development of tissue culture techniques for virus isolation & study, which required CONSIDERABLE skill pre-gloves, BSCs, & mechanical pipettes - & was the first person to isolate Lassa virus.

The organising committee are delighted to invite you to submit an abstract for the ASM VIC Meeting, taking place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from 15–18 June 2026. www.theasmmeeting.org.au/abstract-sub...

New pre-print: Plasmid dependent phage effectively eliminate AMR bacteria and block plasmid transmission in the chicken gut microbiome Fun collaboration with Tao He lab (JAAS) and @brockhurstlab.bsky.social lab (Manchester) #phagesky#microsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

the fact that a company doesnt wanna drop the dopest of video game in which you're a FREED SLAVE killing KKK WHITE SUPREMACISTS because theyre worried about the FUCKING BACKLASH tells you all you need to know about the current state of america

Unbelievable, Bakta reached its 1,000th citation! A huge shout out and thank you to all Bakta users, bug reporters, those sharing ideas and suggesting features... ...just the entire incredibly supporting binfie community! Without you, Bakta wouldn't be the same. Thank you!

Dear community, Bakta needs your help! To further improve the functional annotation of "hypothetical" CDS, me and @gbouras13.bsky.social, we are looking for the worst Bakta-annotated bacterial genomes ;-) (1/2)

Longer descriptive thread: In the US, you can see that women born before 1979 have had >2 children per woman by the time they reached age 45. Also, women born before 1984 have had >2 children per woman by the time they reached age 40.

AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”

Imagine the conservative outrage if asylum seekers were given a million dollars each? Why are we ok keeping our fellow humans in these camps and paying profit driven entities 8x that to enforce our evil?

System is broken if you can cheat someone out of 600k, still own the million dollar property, and only be fined 11k.

I’ve set up a mailing list to send out an email when I have an article come out, instead of than hoping that an algorithm will serve it to you. 
Subscribe here for free: camwilson.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Highlight of my career writing a couple of these for the icon herself www.instagram.com/reel/DOdwrqz...

X-Mapper 🦠🧬🧪 - a sequence aligner developed for microbes, now on Bioconda! 🚀 • 11–24× fewer suboptimal alignments (same for human genome) • 3–579× lower inconsistency • improves on ~30% of reads aligned to non-target species github.com/mathjeff/map... bioconda.github.io/recipes/x-ma... #microsky

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

Pleased to say that our preprint benchmarking Nanopore data for MLST, cgMLST, cgSNP & AMR typing from bacterial isolates is out! TL;DR you can get almost perfect results from 50x depth using live SUP basecalling with a GPU in under 20 hours #microsky#IDsky 🦠🧬🖥️ /1 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super disappointed to read a new paper on HPAI this week which contained 50% hallucinated references. These references were used to support wildly inaccurate conclusions. Other than write to editors and hope something will be done, not much else one can do.

It's been a whirlwind 20 months, but I'm finally here. For those of you who haven't met me, I'm a microbial ecologist based out of the University of Melbourne. I apply microbial ecology principles to try and improve conservation outcomes for native Australian species.