I'm exited to announce a new resource about making slides with quarto and revealjs. This book is the combination of all the work I have done in this area, reordered and polished up There isn't a lot of new information yet, but this format allows me to add more easily slidecrafting-book.com #quarto

The Art of Data Visualization with ggplot2: A free online book by @nrennie.bsky.social that guides us through the entire process of creating plots, including why certain decisions were made, using real datasets that have been part of #TidyTuesday. Very excited to get stuck into this one. #rstats

"A lot of people have this throw away attitude that the dogs can just be disposed of and they can get another one for free on Facebook." Irresponsible dog ownership has exploded post-covid, Animal Management doing what they can while taking abuse for looking after other people's dogs.

If you're a researcher in NZ please do our very short survey on the Vision Mātauranga policy! We are keen to hear your opinions. DM for the survey link

This is absolute shameful bullshit from all parties concerned. Peter Jackson is being scammed, Colossal are total frauds (5–8 years? Give me a break), and I have no idea what Ngāi Tahu think they’re doing. There are clear and simple reasons why this is impossible. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/south-isl...

THE SMC IS HIRING! We're looking for someone to join our dedicated team working to improve the reach, relevance and accuracy of news media reporting on science and related topics in Aotearoa New Zealand. More info and apply here: www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2025/06/26/w...

🗺️ Ever wander to a new place and think, "Hmm I wonder what birds/plants/[insert favourite taxonomic group] I can find here?" 🔍 We built {infinitylists} 📋 to help nature lovers create personalised, location-based taxon lists! 🌏

Some great examples here of how researchers can partner with Māori to co-develop research projects in ways that give effect to CARE principles alongside FAIR.

My final PhD chapter is now published #openaccess in the Journal of Chemical Ecology: doi.org/10.1007/s108... Main idea: Chemical-ecological methods can complement oviposition work in host-specificity testing of classical #biocontrol agents by teasing details related to ecological host range. 1/

Two academic (lecturer) positions available at the University of Otago in Aotearoa/New Zealand! One in Conservation Biology, another in Evolutionary Ecology. Links for positions below: otago.taleo.net/careersectio... otago.taleo.net/careersectio...

Bad actors are creating packages with names that mimic hallucinated packages in code generated by coding assistants. When the code runs it installs the malware-riddled packages. Another reason why learners should not use coding assistants to generate code (there are other good uses for learners).

The rise of AI bots scraping websites, mostly for openly licenced images to feed generative AI models, is increasing infrastructure costs for sites like Wikipedia - this will become an issue for OA publishers too. Rate-limiting and enforced authentication might need to be imposed.

"If they look like this animal then they are this animal" is definitely not how the morphological species concept works. Genetically altering grey wolves to make them look a bit like dire wolves does not suddenly make them dire wolves.

Love this explainer from @data.ft.com about how generative AI works. It's useful to understand that LLMs are essentially 'autocomplete on steroids', using statistical methods to predict the next word based on the prompt and training data. This is why they make things up and can't spell strawberry.

AUT Library Research Services Team is seeking a permanant, full-time Scholarly Communications Librarian to contribute to the growth of Tuwhera and AUT's scholarly communications services while supporting the uptake and impact of open research. Auckland City. $59,000 - $78,000. Closes 14 April.

Quartabs: new #rstats package to dynamically generate tabset panels in #Quarto html documents, by @sayuks.bsky.social. Have been scratching my head over this recently, so this is potentially very handy. github.com/sayuks/quart...

"There's lots of ways you could fix the ecology of the Siberian tundra without spending millions of dollars making sad, cold, shivering asian elephants. So this looks more to me like a fundraising and hype driven enterprise than anything else."

We’re creating a guide, “Wikifying a Conference”, so any keen volunteer can help out. We hope conference organisers will think about hosting an official Wikipedian if they’re serious about increasing the visibility of their subject and their attendees. I blogged: www.rove.wiki/blog/wikifyi...

Using @gbif.org data in your masters or PhD? Apply for the 2025 GBIF Graduate Researchers Award. Looks like NZ doesn't have a closing date up yet but we are a GBIF member so our graduate students will be eligible. @manaakiwhenua.bsky.social

HRC 2025 Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare RFP now open. "Proposals must clearly identify the health or healthcare area where AI can be leveraged safely and ethically to improve health outcomes in the New Zealand health system."

"Filling the basket with knowledge: The evolution of open access in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand" by Janet Catterall, @ginnybarbour.bsky.social, and @kimtairi.bsky.social. doi.org/10.31274/jls...

Kicking off planning for ResBaz Aotearoa 2025 and one of our regular speakers just told me that contributing to ResBaz is one of the highlights of their year :)

Journal of the Royal Society of NZ is calling for papers - Special Issue on Māori Data Sovereignty: Research, Practice, and Policy. "...to document progress in Māori data sovereignty, positive contributions to both science and Te Ao Māori, and the coming challenges of the next decade."

Wow that was quick! authorsguild.org/news/ag-laun...

IRD positions itself as authority on data security despite recent discovery it provided 'hashed' personal information of 268k taxpayers to Meta, which it claimed was an 'irreversible' encryption method, but has thankfully since ended after it was demonstrated how easy it was to reverse it's hashing.

Science System Advisory Group report is out - recommends new Ministry (Science, Innovation and Technology), combining funding mechanisms into National Research Council, merging CRIs into fewer Public Research Organisations, disestablishing Callaghan Innovation, to name a few.

The Limits of Data by C. Thi Nguyen: "Data collection efforts aren’t neutral and they aren’t complete. They emphasize a particular style of knowledge formatted in a particular way...There is a cost to be paid for this scalability, this independence from context."

httr2 1.1.0 is out now: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/01.... Includes way better tools for streaming data (as used by ellmer.tidyverse.org), new url manipulation functions, and a _bunch_ of minor improvements and bug fixes #rstats

"I started building social media to give people a voice." FACTCHECK: Before Facebook there was 'Facemash', a website for ranking female Harvard students based on who was "hotter" between pairs of photos (taken without permission from the university's online directories by Zuckerberg).

TIL that barbers, not physicians, performed surgery in the middle ages. You know those barber poles with the spinning blue/red stripes? Yeah those originated as a combination of leech vessel (at the top) and what patients held onto (the pole). Thanks @aucklandmuseum.bsky.social!

Super useful tutorial on regex in #rstats!

Hot on the heels of humanities & social sciences being removed from the Marsden Fund, now MBIE will no longer provide top-up funding to successful Horizon Europe projects. Announced December 19 and ahead of the SSAG report. Govt determined to cripple these disciplines.

Beginner #rstats tip: When using the pipe from {magrittr} (%>%) you can use '.' to refer to the object at the start of the pipe (an object placeholder), but when using the native R pipe (|>) you need to use '. = _' instead.

Thanks Farah, this is super useful to know about. Was thinking about creating a dashboard a while ago but hunting down different data sources (or OIA'ing them all) put me off. Good to know its all public.

A persuasive critique of removing humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund by @julietgerrard.bsky.social, previously the Prime Ministers Chief Science Advisor and former Marsden Chair.

"What cutting social sciences and humanities from the Marsden Fund dramatically reduces is the ability of researchers to produce inconvenient evidence." Professor Tom Baker sums up the lopsided impact cutting humanities/social sci will have on the research landscape - @newsroom.co.nz.

This will speed the erosion of the Humanities at Universities and comes when the social sciences are more important than ever. "Real impact on our economy will come from areas such as physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences." #NZ #Research

New #research estimates 7–17% of sentences in computer science peer reviews written by LLMs, increases for reviews submitted close to deadline. #PeerReview sorely needs to be overhauled, but AI-generated reviews are obviously not the answer. #AcademicSky #Research #AI #Publishing

I'm writing up a brief history of the tidyverse? What do you want to know about it? #rstats

I wonder if at some point there will be the equivalent of 'organic' labelling for creative outputs to certify they were produced by humans.

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...

Want to dip your toe into #programming? This free 6 hour intro to #Rstats online curriculum is a great entry point and we get good feedback when teaching it to researchers. Don't worry about the 'for ecologists' bit, that's just the flavour of dataset. #academicsky #research #science

Some interesting issues here at the intersection of consent, privacy, digital footprints, and social media. To what extent is 'generating an income' a justification for publishing and monetising aspects of someone's childhood? How do the children feel about it when they grow up?

We are thrilled to announce that we have a new @posit.co Starter Pack, thanks to @jeremy-data.bsky.social! Find and follow Posit people here: go.bsky.app/RxAPkGi

Kia ora new followers! Heres a bit about me: I'm passionate about improving research and supporting researchers. I did a PhD in entomology at the University of Auckland, then pivoted to a research policy internship with Juliet Gerrard, before landing my current role back at the University.

A starter pack for Aotearoa New Zealand scientists: go.bsky.app/3nQ6qH2

IRD shares identifiable personal info of 268,000 NZ taxpayers with social media platforms, only discovers the breach due to news reporting on their sloppy encryption practices. Maintains practices were safe but will stop them anyway. IRD Commissioner doesn't think trust has been damaged in any way.

A very important judgement upholding the statutory obligation of NZ universities to act as 'critic and conscience' of society - they cannot fulfill that function if staff do not feel safe enough to provide expert commentary. Especially when the institution benefits reputationally from this work.

Cool initiative for folks based in Ōtautahi!

Just demo'd my #OpenAccess dashboard to the Australian Scholarly Communication Community of Practice. It shows rates of OA for all 8 NZ Universities (and Australian Group of 8) from 2010-2023: tomsaunders.me/oa-nz/ Code via GitHub linked in above. #Academia #Bibliometrics #ScholComm #Research