> The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory[, which] dashed all hopes of magical solutions[:] progress would be made stepwise [with] persistent, unremitting care[.] So it is with software engineering today.

It’s World Homeopathy Awareness Week. The less aware of it you are, the more good it will do you.

always blows my mind when devs say they need agentic coding tools to make large-scale free software when the open-source model has existed and functioned for, like, decades at this point

AI seems to be the topic of the year — nearly every conversation I have in my role as academic lead for good research practice touches on it in some way. I’d like to lay out my developing thoughts for conversation and critique. (1/7)

I've been doing a lot of Mad Libs with my son lately, and I thought it would be fun to put one together with a data management theme. You can complete your own here: cghlewis.github.io/data_mgmt_ma...

Hope to see you at the Conference on Transparency, Technology and AI in Peer Review on June 5, 2026, which is organized in collaboration with the Center for Humans and Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology. Register at: meta-eindhoven.github.io/events/

I’ve been in a bit of a coding and marking bubble the past few days, and just catching up on the world. Is anyone else experiencing a dizzying rollercoaster of emotions about Artemis and Iran and new quarto and AI nonsense and everything everywhere all at once?

No matter how you feel about cocaine, its use is growing more widespread and it's important that educators understand how they could integrate it as a tool in their classrooms.

Collaborative editing!!! 🎉🥳🎊

"Developers who fully delegated to AI produced working code but failed conceptual quizzes afterward. They couldn't debug what the AI had written for them. They had the output without the understanding."

Dear @govpritzker.illinois.gov, this man is not the expert you think he is. If you want to talk with scientists who are actually doing the research rather than self-styled "thought leaders," start with people like @orbenamy.bsky.social and @shuhbillskee.bsky.social.

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉 An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊 Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #DataViz

Not a tech bro, but my opinions on overthrowing the scholarly publication industry do predispose me to be more positive about industry disruption. amiatechbro.com

The @ukrepro.bsky.social just published a new primer on computational reproducibility, authored by the CR special interest group, including yours truly! I hope it's useful for introducing people to the concept and convincing resource-holders to fund efforts to improve it. zenodo.org/records/1923...

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

Great advice for the #30DCC. I learned so much making a book out of the 2022 challenges (debruine.github.io/30DCC-2022/). I'm hoping to do the whole thing this year again, possibly with data from the UN SDG indicators database (unstats.un.org/sdgs/datapor...).

It's almost time for the #30DayChartChallenge again 📊 As I start to plan out which prompts I'm going to do this year, I'm trying to implement my own advice from last year! This year I'm going to focus on the CAPphrase dataset, because there's so many aspects of it I want to dig into! #DataViz

…reproducibility problems are widespread. Only one in three authors (35%) share code, and even when code is available, only every second main result (51%) is numerically reproducible.

What a deserving winner! I am always in awe of how practically effective Simine is with her reform efforts.

WTF. I think I will make it explicit policy on my OS projects that bots cannot be contributors (sole or joint). They are tools, not contributors! theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Bsky hive mind — I’ve been wanting to purchase an air fryer for years now, but have choice paralysis. Please help me decide which one to get. I seldom cook for more than 2 people. I have an instant pot that I love. I don’t own a microwave. Price isn’t a huge consideration if I’ll use it a lot.

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

As an academic community, why can't we have just one format for references? If you never hear from me again, it's because trying to reconcile journal reference sections, bibtex, doi.org, crossref and openalex formats has murdered me.

A thesis student is looking at parasocial attachment to generative AI in undergraduate and postgraduate students. The questionnaire will take about 10 minutes. Please pass the study link on to anyone who might be interested. exp.psy.gla.ac.uk/project?para...

This is a new phenomenon and business model exploiting gaps in publishing. The cartel uses fake names to produce AI-written or plagiarised papers. Reference lists contain 100s of paid entries.If papers are retracted, no real authors are punished, and citations still count, even from retracted papers

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects doi.org/10.1177/2515...

If you have about 20 minutes, I would be grateful if you could help my undergraduate student explore whether common empathy questionnaires are actually interchangable in the ways they are used in the social science literature.

The presentation of the Cass report as this gospel text is also disingenuous given the significant academic criticism it has received. Just last year, a peer-reviewed critique led by Irish researchers from the University of Galway found serious flaws with the report.

Many struggle with writing alt text for charts and other other data visualizations. Amy Cesal's "Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization" hammers home the importance of explaining the chart type, the type of data, and the reason for the chart. medium.com/nightingale/...

Pick up the nearest (e)book. Turn to page 42, post the second sentence. There is also an ‘I’ in ‘silver,’” he said. (If you know what that’s from, I expect you have the same brain worm I do lately🏒)

Is anyone here an expert on #rstats ellmer structured data? It works when I define the JSON schema of an object A containing an array of object B, but not when I read object B from JSON schema and use type_object and type_array to set up object A. Reprex: gist.github.com/debruine/d35...

It’s usually about 15C when I wake up lately (my landlord won’t let me install a smart thermostat) so the butter is very hard, but I’ve discovered (maybe you all already knew this) that using a vegetable peeler to get thin slices makes cold butter so easy to spread! #lifehacks 🧈

Our publishing system does not prioritise or value the careful curation of research data to be FAIR nearly enough. I have been data editing for AP&P for a year now, and it is sad to see no reward for the clearly careful organisation of data and materials vs that which is thrown on OSF with no care!

@posit.co this fundamentally undermines me using your products as a teaching tool. Will this be in posit cloud too? If so, instructors need to be able to switch this off in module workspaces.

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

I absolutely love myself a unique identifier, but why oh why, DOI, do you allow formats like this?! 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1611(200001/02)9:1<11::AID-PON424>3.0.CO;2-Z (Also why does the CrossRef API deal with parentheses so weird? You can't URL-encode them in queries)

The Max Planck Society has begun an exploratory round table for open science. We are drafting some recommendations to leadership. Still a long way to go! But here are my notes on the most recent draft, just so you all know how I am trying to steer things.

Metadata matters! If you submit a preprint to PsyArXiv, to ensure smooth acceptance, don't forget to fill out the metadata correctly. Below you will find a few tips, but detailed guidelines are at 👉 buff.ly/M3cRBW2

{ggview} can print plots to Viewer (Rstudio or Positron) with true scaling. Adjust plot settings and see the final proportions immediately. Save the plot once 👌 e.g.: ggplot(...) + ggview::canvas(width = 220, height = 220*2/3, units = "mm", dpi = 300) per @nrennie.bsky.social #datavis #rstats

Keeping this at hand in case I need to point to it and tap

This is a fundraising post! An anonymous donor is matching contributions to Children Helping Science up to 100K through the end of the year - if it's in your giving budget, please consider supporting open science infrastructure! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... Details below...

Metadata!!!

I’m not sure how Scientific Reports can ever mend its reputation now.

Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve seen Tori Amos (first gig 1993) Melt Banana / The Sun Ra Arkestra Pussy Riot Boygenius Young Fathers (5 times, but the 2015 Art School gig was stunning) (I saw the pixies in Paris for my 40th birthday, but I don’t want to repeat the quoted poster ;)

Not wanting to disappoint you so much that it lies is the last quality I want in a computer.

“&runctitional features” 😩

🥲

We have a new revision on our preprint "Practice what you preach: Designing student assignments that advance open and reproducible science"! We had some of the nicest (but still critical) peer-review comments I've ever received, so that was refreshing. osf.io/preprints/os...

Retraction Watch has covered the problem of the “national IQ” database. Should be noted I’m far from alone in working to remove these publications. The spreadsheet of pubs which use NIQ - linked to in the article - was started by @kohngregory.bsky.social; a project also worked on by Cathryn Townsend