Here are some ideas about how to better portray heat - an invisible threat - in images: www.climateresilience.org/guidelines-f...

After two weeks, I'm finally done! In this post, I explain different approaches for solving linear regression in R: directly, using QR, singular value and Cholesky decompositions, and do some benchmarking for comparison with in-built approaches. thomvolker.github.io/blog/2506_re...

Last than one week until #ShowYourStripes day! Check out some of our tools from @climatecentral.org to design and share your own climate changes stories: trello.com/b/bpDKOhd5/s...

Shiny has so many good features, it was hard to fit them all in a single title! Join me on the 25th to explore how to use them to create a tailored dashboard for your stakeholders! Register here: events.zoom.us/ev/AreIOxaCV...

Wrote this snippet on reproducibility, replicability, and reusability of research code - very much just my notes made public as opposed to a full article. Would be interested to head if you define these differently - this is just my "mental model" murphyqm.github.io/work-notes/p...

𝗡𝗼, 𝗮 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗞𝟮-𝟭𝟴𝗯'𝘀 𝗮𝘁𝗺𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲. K2-18b is back in the news, now with a bold claim that biosignature molecules (DMS and/or DMDS) have been 'detected at 3σ'. Most exoplanet astronomers are extremely sceptical about these claims, let's see why (1/n). 🔭🧪🪐 #exoplanet

The Moon is not just a bunch of resources for the use of billionaires. The Moon is a celestial body with its own environment and integrity. Tearing the Moon up won't save Earth.

My sister just wrote this great piece on recent upheavals for teaching staff at the college she attended: www.socialistparty.ie/2025/01/bimm...

🗣️ Arts and Humanities Scholars: Are you ready? 🗣️ We are 👏 thrilled 👏 to announce that ORCID now supports an expanded range of work types, such as 🎼 musical compositions, 🎨 still and 🎞️ moving images, and even 📝 teaching materials!! Learn more: https://info.orcid.org/new-work-types/

The Murky History between Hasbro and Irish Convent Workhouses

A rambling post about the difficulties of teaching git, prompted by one of the talks at the recent Edinburgh Pair Programming Winter School - I don't really have solutions, so am very keen to hear about people's experience teaching git to researchers! murphyqm.github.io/posts/2025-0...

If you're a PG student, researcher, or professional who uses/ needs to use #EO satellite data for marine research, I cannot recommend this free course (or the trainers) highly enough. From ocean colour to sea surface temperature and altimetry, the training (and #python code!) you get is top notch 🌍🛰️

Cognitive load refers to how much working memory or short-term memory someone is using at a time. Minimizing the cognitive load it takes to use your site makes it more accessible for people with cognitive disabilities. Limit what you're asking users to remember to use your site.

I've now added my slides for the talk if anyone would like to see some paths I'm looking at with regards to alternatives to live coding: murphyqm.github.io/talks/code-f...

Hi friends! I've created an extensive set of resources for #creativeCoding with single-stroke fonts in #p5js — including archives and adapters for TTF, SVG Fonts, Hershey Fonts, and more: github.com/golanlevin/p... — ideal for #penplotter work! (cc: @emsl.bsky.social @bantamtools.bsky.social

A little post about my dislike of live coding (as a learner) and other options for teaching Python - murphyqm.github.io/posts/2024-1...

"Learn Accessibility" is a course that takes you through the essentials for building accessible websites and web apps. Created for both beginners and advanced users, this course can be taken beginning to end, or used as a reference for specific topics. web.dev/learn/access...

Calling all #Shiny #Python people - is there a straightforward and easy way to ensure the URL updates as you swap between navpage tabs, to improve accessibility and to ensure the back button works? Have found solutions for RShiny, or use of starlette that doesn't seem to nicely use the top navbar...

Kasey Bonifacio's 13 Days of Accessibility is a great way to dig into the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are international standards used to measure accessibility. Kasey's resource makes WCAG more digestible. a11ycalendar.kaseybon.com

Chartability is a resource to help make data visualizations and charts more accessible. It's organized into principles with testable criteria aimed at making sure people with disabilities are able to access data. chartability.fizz.studio

What’s frustrating is that there are accessibility-specific user stories out there, provided by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). 🥲 www.w3.org/WAI/people-u...

Last thing: probably the most underused UI tool in vis? Search! 🔍 In research with @mifeng.bsky.social & @laneh.bsky.social, we found that search changes the data people engage with (evanpeck.github.io/files/papers...), & helps folks looking for personally relevant data. Why is this important?...

Just listened to an episode of the Real Python podcast about marimo (marimo.io), a reactive Python notebook framework that seems to fix a lot of my long-standing issues with Jupyter notebooks, incl. git annoyances, and cell order dependence. Just having a poke at it, but seems very cool!

Exciting to see a new, community-run, and Diamond Open Access journal launching for geochemists (Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry). Free to read and free to publish! They have assembled a great team of editors too! (www.agcj.org)

With every passing day I better understand the mothers in Victorian novels who stay in their bedrooms with the curtains closed and complain vaguely about their “nerves.”

Recently realised that lots of people are floundering with conda envs and how to effectively use their environment.yml file, so I wrote this brief/rough blog post that hopefully will help clear up some confusion and give you *one* way to do things! murphyqm.github.io/posts/2024-1...

"Andre shares his experience using the web including his love of headings and consistent design to help him navigate, and his dislike of accessibility overlays and poorly implemented page updates using live regions." #accessibility #disability #life tetralogical.com/blog/2024/11...

Four ways of looking at the Sun -- wonderful new close-up images of a giant sunspot from ESA's Sun-hugging Solar Orbiter spacecraft. In order: visible light, magnetic fields, velocity, and extreme ultraviolet. 🧪🔭 www.mpg.de/23749011/zoo...

📊 vs. 🥧 I made a tiny teaching tool to help me interactively demo + share differences between 📊 and 🥧 Play: I find that tinkering with data + visuals in class reinforces understanding far more than slides or readings Save + share: Copy the url to link the current data 👉 barvpie.netlify.app

Women are under-represented at senior levels in #academia globally, & across all #science 🧪 disciplines, as shown by these "scissor-shaped curves" ✂️ So how can we ever achieve #gender #equality? We discuss various strategies in this #Cell Commentary #WomeninSTEM www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... 🧵 1/

Quarto 1.6 is out! 🎉 Download it here: quarto.org/docs/download/ Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. Blog post: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

I'm happy to share it's now a whole lot easier to theme your #Shiny for #Python apps! brand.yml is a new project: one YAML file holds your brand's colors, theme, logos and fonts and can be used to theme Shiny apps and #QuartoPub sites, slides, and more! shiny.posit.co/blog/posts/s...

This is such a great checklist, especially if you're overwhelmed at what needs doing to improve accessibility on your website!

NASA's visualization team created a preview of every phase of the Moon in 2025, hour by hour. The best part: Watching how the Moon's appearance changes due to its inclination, oval orbit, and libration (wobble). 🔭🧪 svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5415

Beware of companies promising to make sites completely accessible, compliant, and immune from lawsuits with just a few lines of code. This just isn't possible. Disabled users have long said these tools don't actually help them, and can often make things worse.

The very beginnings of a resource on using Quarto in combination with Python and R libraries to improve web accessibility and allow basic interactivity without a server: murphyqm.github.io/better-basic... Lots of work still needed (the example dashboards are very much drafts and awful on mobile)!

For people just getting introduced to accessibility concepts, the number of resources can be overwhelming for people who don't know where to start. These 10 tips from Lireo Designs can be a good way to introduce your team to the basics. www.lireo.com/10-ways-to-i...

People often ask what accessibility considerations to keep in mind when creating data visualizations. For guidance and advice, check out Sarah L. Fossheim's list of 10 things to do (or not do) when designing accessible data visualizations. fossheim.io/writing/post...

I love some JavaScript! Especially to make Shiny apps even more awesome 🤩. But I know how daunting it can feel when you’re just getting started with #rshiny. That’s why I wrote a JavaScript for Shiny Beginner’s Guide—so you can jump in with confidence: hypebright.nl/en/shiny-en/...

Thought I would share this slide I found from a lightning talk a year ago, excuse the slightly awkward crop to remove personal info from the bottom. The idea was to provoke thought around colour maps!

I would love love love to connect to more Research Software Engineers! This is quite #rstats heavy currently, but is open to all of any level! go.bsky.app/4kfWypW

Trying something new: A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?" It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social 🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...

England's NHS waiting lists are bad - but Northern Ireland's are even worse. More than 126,000 people have been waiting more than 2 years for an outpatient appt - 1,000 x more than in England. Charts for @judewebber.bsky.social's brilliant story about the crisis: www.ft.com/content/5daa...

Make sure you're configuring your environments properly #HPC people!

New article by me & Lucas at Our World in Data! The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have killed more than 25 million people; it caused grief & suffering among their loved ones, impacted people's health worldwide & disrupted work & lifestyles. We look back on the pandemic with 17 charts:

the met eireann building is my favourite building in ireland. it’s gorgeous. oh descended space ship! oh 1970’s ziggurat! temple to the rain and wind! satellites pointed skyward! what storm is coming, what hail, what sunny day!

“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” This was probably my most viral tweet. I've seen it pop up in a lot of quote aggregators, sometimes attributed to a wonderful but definitely not-me filmmaker.

More science crochet I made for my classroom. This simplified depiction and DEFINITELY does not reflect recent research about Earth’s interior! #crochet #geology #SciArt

Roots of parametric polynomials. Made with #python, #matplotlib, #numpy and #sympy.