Thomas Feliciani

🎉 Great news! Our team member Thomas Feliciani @thofel.bsky.social is one of the winners of the University of Coimbra’s 7th Seed Projects for Interdisciplinary Research.
Congratulations to Thomas and to all the awardees! 👏👏
@ucoimbra.bsky.social #CiBB #CNC-UC #SantanderPortugalFoundation

Reliability, bias and randomisation in peer review: a simulation - MetaROR

Our latest article uses simulations to "explore ways in which decision reliability, bias, extent of decision randomisation and other factors interact".

Reviewers consider it timely and "methodologically sound" while challenging some of the assumptions and offering suggestions.

👇 Read it here

Interesting new paper in PNAS:

Kramer, B. L., & Lee, C. (2025). The rise of diversity terminology in biomedical research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(34), e2401805122. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Btw, kudos to the authors for having found and amended the errors.

Meta-research: Nature Human Behavior issues a correction for a 2023 article on "corrections" -- i.e., papers that correct misinformation.

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Funny meta-correction -> Chan & Albarracin (2025) at doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Original article -> Chan & Albarracin (2023) at doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Yes, I was thinking of doing a search procedurally! First time I hear of the "Intrinsically Motivated Goal
Exploration Processes" algorithm, and indeed it looks exactly like the kind of approach I need. Thank you for sending this my way!

This image uses a rainbow (Turbo) color palette to show the average value of raster cells across the first 500 iterations of a continuous-state MNCA, run on a Perlin noise field. Blue cells have a low average, meaning they have been mostly dead. Red cells have a high average and were thus mostly live. All colors in-between (green to orange) show cells that changed state during the simulation, revealing where activity occurred. The image reveals that the little activity that was observed occurred in the high-valued "islands" of the Perlin field, and was specifically concentrated around small, roundish clusters of stationary live cells.

This is another use of the rainbow color palette to show activity (via average values) for the first 30 iterations of a discrete-state MNCA -- of which I forgot the rules/parameters.

A discrete-state MNCA, shown at a particular iteration, with rules/paramteres similar to those reported by @Slackermanz in their guide at https://slackermanz.com/. Live raster cells (white) appear clustered in tighly-packed, bean-shaped blobs. Blobs look like biological cells that propagate slowing eating up all available empty space (dark gray).

Been playing with Multiple Neighborhood Cellular Automata (#MNCA).
MNCA run surprisingly smoothly in R thanks to the efficient "terra::focal()" function, useful for running sequences of convolutions.
Next challenge: finding interesting areas within the infinite-dimensional paramater space of MNCA.

A crop of yellow tulips.

A crop of pink tulips.

So it’s that time of the year again.
#tulips everywhere :)

A set of three choropleth maps of France, show (upper left) Crimes against persons, (upper right) Crimes against property (bottom) Literacy. In each one, the departments of France are shaded so darker = worse.

Blury etched image of Adriano Balbi

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
💀Mar 14, 1884 Adriano Balbi died in Padua, Italy 🇮🇹

1829: The first comparative choropleth thematic maps, showing crimes against persons and crimes against property (with Andre-Michel Guerry)

Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

Nothing to see here, just Nature advocating LLM peer review.

“Feed your dictated notes into an offline large language model (LLM) to clarify and organize your feedback. A simple prompt such as “Write a critical reviewer letter based on the following notes. Maintain a professional tone throughout”

Today’s been a long week

Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE

Awesome that this dataset exists!

Bennett, J.S., Mutch, E., Tollefson, A. et al. Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE. Scientific Data 12, 247 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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#map

This is a higher-res, still frame from the video.

This picture simultaneously shows all points from all generated time points. Points are colored by their z values.

I'm "strangely attracted" to these. Video and pictures show (René) Thomas' attractor emerging from the sampling of the XY plane. For these visualizations, I set b=0.19 and initialized the orbits at z=1.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%...
#Rstats #ggplot2 #viridis #generativeArt #mathArt

Orbits: pure mathematical chaos creating organic art.
Made with #python #matplotlib #numpy.

Not sure how you do it, but here's how I did them. I sampled the x-y space at regular intervals, and then iterated the functions a bunch of times for each pair (x,y). Then I plotted all generated points, coloring them by t.
And for the video I varied the two parameters in a loop.

Orbits in the style of @sconradi.bsky.social

I love these so much. About a year ago I ran into your #mathArt and reimplemented your orbits viz in #rstats. Then forgot about them until yesterday, when I run into your work again.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for the inspiration!

Editorial Note: We Need to Recognise That Peer Review is Central to the 'Social Contract' of Academic Citizenship by Flaminio Squazzoni

This. 👍👍

Squazzoni, F. (2025). Editorial Note: We Need to Recognise That Peer Review is Central to the 'Social Contract' of Academic Citizenship. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 28 (1) 6
doi.org/10.18564/jas...

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#peerreview #jasss

‘Never seen anything like this’: Trump’s team halts NIH meetings and travel In an unprecedented move, research-grant reviews have been suspended indefinitely at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

Wtf. doi.org/10.1038/d415...
#nih

Frosty shrubs and pines.

A close up photo of the bright red vegetation growing on the ground, and bushes.

Wintery vegetation on a lake side. The dense fog makes it eerie.

Today we got perfect weather. Perfect for a pensive afternoon, that is.

Can novelty scores on papers shift the power dynamics in scientific publishing? By providing measures of novelty, DeSci Publish hopes to shift the bargaining power between journals and authors.

Any metric can and will be gamed. So we really need to think through the implications here.

At first sight this is terrible: it kills replication & robustness in the cradle, pushing towards "new" stuff.

Chasing the unexpected got the Gino and Ariely cases.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

#EconSky

Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshi...

As I mentioned three weeks ago, Jevin West and I are developing a sort of followup course to Calling Bullshit.

We've got the basic scrollytelling tech worked out and now need to choose a design.

We're not designers and would like to simply buy an HTML5 template if only for the colors and fonts.

GitHub - thomasfeliciani/2024_cover_images: Walk-through for generating the images used on the book cover and chapter pages of my PhD dissertation. Walk-through for generating the images used on the book cover and chapter pages of my PhD dissertation. - thomasfeliciani/2024_cover_images

I found a great excuse to make a bunch of fun ggplots. As if I needed one.

github.com/thomasfelici...

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#rstats #generative #ggplot #rayshader

A photo of the underpass wall where I found the warning sign, surrounded by graffiti. The sign reads: Il est interdit, sur les quais des voies électrifiées - de lever des objets de grandes dimensions; - de toucher les fils, même tombés à terre. Tout contact avec les fils peut être mortel !

A warning sign from a train station in Wallonia:
“Tout contact avec les fils peut être mortel!”
Hey, daughters can be dangerous, too!

A screenshot of the online article by Zhou et al. (2024) titled: “Gender homophily: In-group citation preferences and the gender disadvantage”.

Gender homophily in research teams, communities fosters gender citation bias.

A cool new paper in Research Policy [1] also covered by Nature News [2].

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[1] Zhou et al. 2024 — doi.org/10.1016/j.re...

[2] Oza 2023 — doi.org/10.1038/d415...

This is the photo of sticker glued to a train door. The sticker has a warning sign depicting a falling person followed by a message in Italian, English, French, and German. It reads: “IT'S STRICTLY FORBIDDEN To get on and off while the train is still moving. To get on and off the train outside the platforms. To lean against the doors”.

Found on Italian trains.
This sticker forbids getting “on and off while the train is still moving”. They probably meant “on OR off”. And I get funny ideas.

Train operators vs logical operators.

We’ve spent the last decade talking a lot about replications, but to what extent has this talk translated to a tangible change in how often replications are published in psychology journals? osf.io/preprints/ps... /w Katherine Lee, Sarah Schiavone, @mijke.bsky.social @simine.com (1/9)

Still not sure of the numbers of the Italian community on this platform, but here it is:

I've just published a book in Italian on mechanisms and models of social networks

www.mulino.it/isbn/9788815...

My dept. used to have methods groups, 'R Club', & hackathons. These were student led & vibrant. Those days are gone. Now, it's like pulling teeth to get students and faculty to even go to brown bags & once-a-term colloquia. I'm worried not just for open science but for our science across the board.