Francis Windram

Honestly, for me I'm still being pushed away from Positron by the lack of inline output for qmd/Rmd. Being able to play around then build and send is pretty important for me.

Ah, esquisse was the package!

I wish I'd had R before my Master's (though 4 languages in 7 weeks definitely made up for it). For point and click basics, Jamovi ain't terrible. Though there is an R package (the name of which escapes me) which allows for really easy visual exploration of data, which would be good for teaching!

Coding does it to us all. I blame undergrads taught in SPSS for triggering this particular sadistic (stadistic?) streak though.

Or "# the only way to win is not to play". And if you type it on a solvable problem it randomly replaces 5 double quotes in your code with single quotes and vice versa.

This would very quickly become my favourite game I reckon. As a bonus it should very occasionally throw in a problem that seems easy and actually was a fiendish open question in computer science or mathematics for 50+ years.

- Lost scrolls
- The missing works of Arthur Conan Doyle
- Bullet holes in bombers that got back to base
- Bayesian...stuff
- Dream interpretation
- Random fluctuations in atmospheric noise
- The trajectory of the sun across the sky
- Homeopathy
- The kind of computer vision we've had for decades

- Scattered pages of notes
- Balls dropped from height onto pieces of paper
- High school science demonstrations
- Twitch chat messages
- Numerology
- The wikipedia game
- Syncretic religious beliefs
- Arcane and disturbing incantations
- Ants
- Foreign influence campaigns
- Community shaming

- Reinforcement learning from the '50s
- A dartboard in the break room
- An octopus with some balls
- Dice-based RNG
- Reddit comments
- The howls of the damned
- Drunken antics
- Hope and prayers
- A pen and paper
- Excel
- The memory of a small boy from Manchester
- A Commodore 64

Things that you as a data scientist can replace the term "artificial intelligence" with in stupid marketing text to stop your brain detonating

E.g. "We will use advanced methods such as <BLANK> to track sewage spills."

- Basic regression models
- Interns
- The CEO's best guess
- An actual fish
...

I feel genuinely ashamed that this wooooshed me for a full two minutes before I realised they weren't serious. I need more coffee before reading exceptionally funny posts :)

Huh, I just saw that they did actually acknowledge the fall, but in point 101, a point entirely unrelated to this fact. Solid copyediting too then.

Right I've got to get back to work, but points 106-110 are also pretty heinous. Remember to always read the source material, don't trust those looking to divide us, and push for properly and sustainably funded higher education.

This is very cynical, as it is purely the opinion of the authors that students are using the asylum system in this way, but they present it as fact. It's manipulative, dangerous anti-immigration rhetoric. Again the authors should be ashamed. If you are in policy, endeavour to do better than this.

Paper text: "103. Higher inflow and lower outflows of students over time has led to students representing a higher proportion of net migration in recent years, with student net migration at 262,000 in the year ending June 2024. 104. The number of asylum claims matched to a visa has increased relatively steadily since mid-2021. Around 30% of asylum claims are from visa holders. Of this, students account for the largest proportion, at almost half (47%) of all asylum claims from visa holders. 105. The majority of the students claiming asylum do so as they approach their visa expiry date. This indicates that some people might therefore be using the student route to make claims for humanitarian protection when circumstances in their country have not changed. "

103-105 are pretty dire. Specifically asylum is an internationally protected obligation of a state. There is little reason to claim asylum when you are already living legally in a country, that doesn't mean that you would be safe if you went back home then. Would you claim asylum if you had ILR?

Additionally, graduate visas only commenced in their current form in January 2021, so this graph could be considered misleading as this point is not highlighted. Also when a government introduces a visa, it is expected that said visa will be used? You can't then use that as an argument against them.

A stacked bar graph showing the routes that students take after graduating. The proportion of those staying on a Graduate visa does increase as a proportion of students, however graduate visas only existed in this form in 2021.

Paper text: "102. The proportion of students remaining in the visa system following the end of their studies has increased in recent years. Over half of students completing their studies in 2022, 2023 and 2024 had moved onto another visa route, compared to fewer than 20% in 2019 and 2020."

Point 102 misses a fundamental lag component of this data. Undergraduate degrees in the UK are usually 3 years long, Master's degrees are usually 1 year. Thus the 2024 data is a lagged combination of 2023 and 2021 visa entries. We will not see the effects of changes made for another few years.

Paper text: "100. The post-COVID-19, post-Brexit increase in study visas was mainly driven by those coming to study for a master’s (accounting for 65% of study visas over the last four years). The number of grants to students coming to study at master’s level increased each year between 2020 and 2022 (up 150% to 315,000). Between 2019 and 2023 there was also a large increase in dependants accompanying students (from 16,000 in 2019 to 143,000 in 2023). 101. Visas for universities ranked between 601 and 1,200 (according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2025) increased by 49% (77,000 to 115,000) between 2021 and 2023, whereas the number of visas for universities ranked in the Top 100 fell by 7%. New restrictions have reduced the number of dependant visas."

In 100. the authors unintentionally spell out the reasoning for these increased visa numbers: uncapped master's degree tuition fees (see above). They also cynically fail to acknowledge the ~85% fall in dependants between 2023 and 2024. Point 101 is a nothingburger and I won't waste your time.

Paper text: "99. This increase between mid-2020 and mid-2023 was due to a number of factors, including the lifting of COVID-19 related travel restrictions, along with changes to the immigration system following the UK’s departure from the EU, and the introduction of the Graduate route allowing eligible students to remain in the UK for two to three years. At the same time, the then Government’s International Education Strategy introduced a target for the UK to reach 600,000 international students per year by 2030."

In 99. the government fails to address the underlying drive of the International Education Strategy, which was to try to prop up a reduction in real-terms spending on higher education by the government with uncapped fees paid by international students. This is highlighted further in point 100.

The whitepaper text "98. Between 2011 and 2016, sponsored study visa grants to foreign students were relatively stable at around 200,000 per year. After 2016, the numbers steadily increased, reaching 269,000 in 2019. Following a fall in numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of visas issued increased sharply from 2021, reaching a peak of 498,000 in the year ending June 2023.". This is followed by a graph of student visas granted against year end. There is a second y axis on the right of the graph measuring dependant to main applicant ratio. The number of students dips from a fairly flat 200k in 2014 down to approximately 160k in 2020 before rising to 498k in 2023. It then falls to just under 400k by December 2024. The dependants line follows a similar curve, peaking at 143k before falling to around 20k. Crosses on the graph outline a generally similar trend in ratio, with a very sharp drop in 2024.

In 98, the government deliberately and specifically fails to mention the distinct fall in student visas issued in 2024 (down by 100,000 from the peak in 2023). Also this graph commits the sin of having two y axes in different units at different scales. Whoever created this plot should be ashamed.

Right, with the advent of the recent government whitepaper "Restoring Control Over the Immigration System" (which already has some pretty loaded language in the title), it's worthwhile looking a bit at some of the detail of the student section. It's some "interesting" statistics presentation.

I am astounded by the level of incompetence and sheer bias show here. (Also I am not linking purely as I don't want to drive more traffic towards the institute and their terrible climate takes)

Not a single interview by the BBC (for example) with a leading climate scientist. Not a single assertion of the established and tested fact of climate change and its drivers. This is dire reporting on top of the report being atrocious. Laughable "policy" being reported by laughable "journalism".

This is truly poor and cynical policy riding the coattails of right wing climate scepticism to try and shift climate discussion in the UK away from science and towards neoliberal economic principles. I am aghast not only with the report but also with the levels of journalism in reporting on it.

It is chock full of the latest buzzwords and thin on any real rigour (gotta tell people to use AI to optimise energy systems [somehow], but we won't address the carbon cost inherent in using AI). There are only 35 citations for the whole thing, of which only 2 are relevant papers.

For one thing, the author/s grasp of the basics of resisting #climate #change through natural carbon storage using plant growth is elementary and they attempt only the most basic of arguments against these. Also don't get me started on the poor level of citation (and choice of works to cite).

The report released today by the Tony Blair institute is one of the most cynical, least scientific, and most poorly-written reports I have ever seen about climate change. I'm not exactly surprised that there is no climate scientist willing to put their name on it anywhere, but I am disappointed.

The Release of Non‐Native Gamebirds Is Associated With Amplified Zoonotic Disease Risk Spillback is potentially an important mechanism by which non-natives contribute to zoonotic disease emergence. We capitalise on quasi-experimental releases of non-native pheasants (Phasianus colchicu...

Emile Michels' first PhD paper published today. Amplification of Borrelia in ticks at pheasant-release sites – an intriguing example how non-native species can increase zoonotic disease risk through spillback. @uniexecec.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

"Mean daily temperatures predict the thermal limits of malaria transmission better than hourly rate summation" new paper now out in NatComm, led by @martashocket.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1038/s414...