"AI is just like..." is a common refrain that absolves people from doing hard work. Read this all the way to the end and then try again. The difference in learning between Serrano's students and classmates is a 1000000000000-fold. Beyond the learning is the humanity www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

A poll for principal investigators and group leaders: If a journal compensated reviewers for evaluating a submitted manuscript, would you prefer to 1️⃣ Be paid directly 2️⃣ Use the money as a credit for future publications 📊 Show results

Submit to the JB Biofilms Collection! Research Articles & Minireviews on biofilm formation/dispersal, Abx tolerance, polymicrobial interactions, signalling, imaging & more. Submission deadline: 30 September 2026. journals.asm.org/journal/jb/b... @asm.org #JBacteriol #ASMjournals

Someone recently gushed to me about an undergrad they wrote a letter of recommendation for to med school. He then said he used AI to write the letter. I lost a lot of respect for him and was left dumfounded. Someone else recently asked me how is AI dehumanizing. This.

I don't even know what to do with this. Both my worst scores and best scores ever. All for the same proposal. 🤣

Currently responding to reviewers' critiques that I'm sure were written by generative AI. We complain that reviewers don't seem to read what we give them, but these are so much worse. So hard to take the comments seriously. I don't like what this is doing to me.

Reminder that R is not RStudio. Just read a paper that performed their analysis "using RStudio (v.4.1.2, v.4.3.0)". Those are R versions (and why two different versions?), not RStudio versions. RStudio versions look like "2026.04.0". Regardless, the R version is more important than the RStudio

So @biorender.bsky.social wants to tap into the prism market? Can't wait for all the figure legends to have the biorender attribution text and the same soulless appearance. I think I'd rather re-learn how to make plots in Excel than use either.

In case you were wondering...

New episode of #MattersMicrobial! This time, Dr. Joe Zackular joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss the wily bacterium Clostridiodes difficile (also known as C. diff) which can cause serious disease in humans. Informative session! Please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord! youtu.be/9oSR01l-EkY?...

April 1st seems to have become World AI Day, eh? Let that sink in the next time that you use AI for something: we suspect that what you say and show as your own is a lie.

My next newsletter "What is the most common form of 'chartjunk' in the scientific literature? " is coming out tomorrow morning. Subscribe to get it and stay in the loop on everything I'm up to in helping scientists make the most effective data visualization! shop.riffomonas.org/posts/

Looking for someone to give a talk to your group on the problems with AI for culture, society, or education? I'm a STEM professor at the U of Michigan and would be happy to give that talk.

I always always tried to get students to see this. In fact, they are so much more.

When I scan through open peer reviews I'm surprised by how rarely people comment on the design of visuals. I've been working to develop a constructive approach to critique and have been trying them out on the Tube. Here's the latest www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWpt...

The fundamental premise behind AI-enabled cheating is that coursework is merely busy work, because your'e just doing it for professors. We would never say that showing up for football practice is merely busy work because you're just doing it for your coaches.

Each Monday I post a video critiquing a figure from recently published paper and on Wednesday (9AM Eastern) I do a livestream either recreating the figure or refactoring it. This week's figure has a problem that is too common in science youtu.be/DNop0UjdfFg

Because I'm ranting... Please figure out how to replace "_" with " " in your taxa names. Then figure out how to italicize them. Not sure how difficult this is to do in Prism, but it's pretty straightforward with stringr/ggplot2/ggtext in R. How do plots like this appear in journals with 20 JIFs?

I'm seeing more and more of this: broken y-axes. Regardless of what you think about them (I'm "anti"), examples like this one don't need them! You could easily put ticks every 5000 units without a break

New paper up on bioRxiv! This is my third and hopefully final paper on rarefaction. It's still better than the other available methods. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The annual freak out is on over the university no longer paying for GraphPad Prism...

Healthy organizations have competitive elections.

The last time you reviewed a paper for a journal, did you comment on the design of any of the figures?

Just FYI: people are anti-vaxxers for their kids. It's also for their pets and livestock. They've gone so far off the rails. People ask us about mRNA vaccines for sheep an other animals worried something weird might happen to the meat. I wish! We can't get enough vaccines approved for meat animals

We've all heard seminar speakers say (myself included), "I know this is too small for you to read, but..." This usually happens because people are repurposing panels from their papers without adjusting for the medium (1/20)

I'm editing and putting the finishing touches on a grant proposal. The though of having AI write the whole thing or even a part of it is pretty unthinkable. When you write you see what you truly know. It forces you to think and troubleshoot your logic. (1/3)

My google skills are failing... Back in 2011, NCBI (started to?) close the SRA. The SRA is still with us. Anyone know of any articles from around then about how they saw the light? For those that this is news to... genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I know things are hard right now. But, if you are going to review proposals submitted to a special PA, please at least read the PA before reviewing proposals submitted to the PA. I mean, if it says no biological questions allowed, don't ding me for not proposing to answer biological questions.

I'm offering a new workshop that's part instruction, part group coaching. This program will focus on the design principles we should consider when generating visuals. There won't be any coding so don't let that hold you back shop.riffomonas.org/products/tra...

Sharing the most significant work from my group, led by the @evolvingstem.bsky.social team. Come for the discoveries of how Pseudomonas adapts in biofilms, stay for the story of how they were discovered by thousands of young scientists in grades 9-12. 🧪🧫🧬🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you've been putting off learning how to make plots in R with ggplot2, then have I got what you need! I'll be teaching a zoom-based workshop on just that subject. This will be a one day all ggplot2 workshop on May 9th shop.riffomonas.org/products/int...

If the folks at @umich.edu need help with web design I'm sure the designers of harvard.edu would be happy to help

Just to be clear... there are two editorials. I appreciate the love for the other one on supporting science, but I don't want this one on diversifying science to get lost

My editorial simultaneously published in all of @asm.org's journals addresses the ongoing effort by the administration to halt efforts to diversify science. It should be obvious from ASM Journals' efforts over the years, but we aren't fans journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

The @asm.org Journals Committee has published a response to the recent disruptions in science in the US... A call for the United States to continue investing in science | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Hey folks! Over the past few weeks I've been posting videos recreating several of W.E.B. DuBois's "data portraits" from the 1900 Paris Exhibition in #Rstats using only {tidyverse} and {showtext}. I have 4 up now and there will be 4 more over the next 2 weeks www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

"Make America Great Again. Make America Healthy Again. These were promises made by candidate Trump in his campaign to be president of the United States of America. What in this campaign platform should have prepared us for a war on discovery?"

Happy to share that a manuscript describing my {phylotypr} R package has been released on Microbiology Resource Announcements. {phylotypr} is an R-based implementation of the naive Bayesian classifier, aka the RDP classifier: journals.asm.org/doi/epdf/10....

My first thing on this platform (what are the things called?).

What's your favorite plot that you've seen recently? What's the most 🔥💩 plot that you've seen recently? I'm getting headaches looking through 42 part figures that are full of over bolded prism plots, 58 by 287 heat maps with attached dendrograms, or balls of yarn attempting to show interactions