Ken Field, PhD

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

having so much fun with this vibe coding what used to take me two or three hours can now be done in a single day

Spoke with a PI whose postdoc is trapped abroad because of social media vetting. It appears the postdoc missed disclosing one account and it's unclear if they can come back… ever.

This is the country we live in now.

Alright that "ICE OUT" training from last night immediately came in handy (this is not a scary story).

Tonight at Teen Art Club one of the teens asked the others what their biggest fears were. One of the girls said "Is it bad if I say ICE?". I was like "No that's a totally understandable fear"

1/3

Nipah in the news: why it’s essential to follow the facts, not the fiction Doherty Institute's Dr Danielle Anderson shares the latest insights on Nipah virus reemergence in India, with two recent confirmed cases in West Bengal.

Fabulous piece by Dani Anderson from the @thedohertyinst.bsky.social about the dangers of the media inflating the risk of small, well contained Nipah virus outbreaks.

Do yourself a favour and take a read.

www.doherty.edu.au/news-events/...

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Key conclusions:

Ioannidis's paper, while important because it stimulated much discussion, is itself false. Most published findings are not false.

Director Bhattacharya weaponizes this paper without bothering to re-read it carefully enough to get even the most basic facts about it right.

8/9

Event image with title Statistics for Every Body: Inclusive Data Communication for Audiences with Visual and Auditory Impairments

There's still time to sign up for tomorrow's @rssdiversity.bsky.social online session! 📊

Topic - Statistics for Every Body: Inclusive Data Communication for Audiences with Visual and Auditory Impairments

Date - Wednesday 28 January 2026, 12.00PM - 1.30PM

Location - Online

#DataViz #RStats

Dealing with ScienCV formatting Some tips for composing and making your new NIH biosketch not look like garbage

Been hearing some horrifying chatter about dealing with the new #NIH common form and #ScienCV system, so I put together a short video with some tricks for mitigating some of those pain points.

Hope it helps? 🧪

open.substack.com/pub/emptymod...

Iran protesters tell of brutal police response as regime lashes out Warning security forces could be preparing to commit ‘massacre’ under cover of internet shutdown

Iran protesters tell of brutal police response as regime lashes out

Warning security forces could be preparing to commit ‘massacre’ under cover of internet shutdown

Herbarium Records Lead Bucknell Researcher to New Plant Species in Australian Outback The specialized organs for feeding ants are the first of their kind.

Herbarium specimens FTW.

That’s great news!

Always use the mic at a conference even if you’re loud. People who can’t hear you *can’t hear you * when you ask if you can hear them in the back. Some of us went to one too many hardcore shows in our youth without ear plugs and our hearing ain’t what it used to be 🥺
#SICB2026

How would you recommend getting started with the auto grader for #rstats ? Is the code part of the repo that you shared.

Yes the LLM question is a tough one. This past semester I treated it like any other collaboration. That is, okay for homework not for exams. For most students that worked well, but some were drawn to the dark side…

Was this in Python or R? I am already using GitHub for my R course and wondering about moving it to Classroom and Gradescope.

Here’s a handy guide to Finnish Christmas for those of you not privy to this beautiful tradition. (I originally wrote this 11yrs ago, w/ minor updates in 2025.)

***
As everyone knows, Santa Claus comes from Finland. His home is on the fell Korvatunturi (“Ear Fell”) on the Russo-Finnish border. 1/30

A graph showing the amount of energy generated by different means from 2000 to 2025 with solar energy surpassing coal and natural gas in 2023-2024.

From @science.org Breakthrough of the Year: Solar Energy

We are going to lose an entire generation of scientists if this keeps up much longer.

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Ancient DNA insights into diverse pathogens and their hosts - Nature Reviews Genetics Ancient DNA techniques are being applied to study increasingly diverse pathogens of the past. The authors review the latest insights into pathogen–host coevolution, zoonotic events and the spread of p...

'In this Review (...) we cover the mechanisms of pathogen adaptation and host–pathogen coevolution, the zoonoses that succeeded in becoming human endemic or intermittent plagues and the impact of human mobility and migration (...) on pathogen distributions.'
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We're getting a native R %notin%!! "after many years of private definitions mostly hidden in packages" 😂😂

#rstats #databs

# Start a new package usethis::create_package("~/mypackage") # Add essential infrastructure usethis::use_mit_license() usethis::use_readme_rmd() usethis::use_github_action("check-standard") usethis::use_testthat(3) usethis::use_pkgdown()

usethis package logo, a cute robot with the text "usethis" on its chest.

Day 1: usethis - Project Setup Automation 🎯

The usethis package is your best friend for automating repetitive package development tasks! 🤖

💡 Pro Tip: Set up your global options once with usethis::edit_r_profile() to add your name, email, and preferred license.

It showed up for our grants manager at our university on exactly 90 days before the end.

Does anyone know when the $500k limit was set and how that would look today in inflation-adjusted dollars?

I bet this will be the opening of the dam and >$500k direct will be increasingly common. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

And for those keeping track of these things it was a five year award, with annual allocations.

I also want to add that the staff at NIH are doing heroic work to keep things working.

I’m happy to share that our NIH NIAID R01 just became eligible for its NCE yesterday, and it was approved within 24 hours! We asked for 12 months and it was accepted quickly just like in the before times.

EU plans €51M Choose Europe call for research careers in 2027 The European Commission plans to launch a €51.25 million call in 2027 as part of the Choose Europe initiative, which is intended to make the continent a more attractive place to pursue a career in res...

'EU funding will cover the positions for two to three years, while the host institutions must provide funding for an additional two years. Each programme that receives funding must recruit a minimum of three researchers.'

“Nice” NIH study sections screw their applicants because of the way NIH calculates percentile. I often write blog comments about NIH grant review matters that exist in an uncomfortable tension between what NIH wants us to do on study section and what I see as our professional obligation to t…

"Nice" NIH study sections screw their applicants because of the way NIH calculates percentile. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/11/20/n...