Pratik Gupte

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Want to build an interactive dashboard so others can explore epidemic scenarios? For COVID, @ngdavies.bsky.social spearheaded a great drag-and-drop approach, which made use of the JavaScript-based nature of RShiny... 1/

Some good advice in here but one critical piece I always give is this:

Get a hobby. Preferably a mildly social one. One that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE. NOTHING.

You need friends. Not colleagues. FRIENDS. Friends who will love you no matter your research prospects...

The next election is not lost, although I think right now it’s more likely than not that they will lose. But it’s a certainty that at some point they will lose and cede power to one or more of the right wing parties. Given their current platforms that is terrifying.

Seriously time to start thinking about an exit.

Just noticed the Conservatives’ British ICE proposal also involves using mass deployment of facial ID – still an unproven and unreliable technology that particularly struggles with non-white faces – to enable deportations.

Which would inevitably mean false positives leading to detention of citizens

The government want more coercive powers for the state against protests, and the main opposition party wants more coercive powers for the state against migrants.

Our political-media culture continues in a loop where the response to every perceived problem is yet more coercive powers for the state.

Figure 5. Time series showing cumulative number of cases averted at each time caused by the intervention calculated using our method (single-world) and a standard method. Shaded regions denote 90% confidence intervals. Note that there is more variation in the middle of the epidemic, so it may seem as though the number of cases averted is large during those times. (Online version in colour.)

Are we doing simulations wrong? This paper convinced me we are. doi.org/10.1098/rstb... Usually we run 2 sets of "worlds" w and w-out intervention. Gives large uncertainties that include negative (harm) effects of interventions that are actually always positive (beneficial)!

Just a simple lack of respect really.

If they don’t pull someone in & fire them by the end of today over this then they might as well give up now. Mass deportation plans are how Reform describe them so this is clearly a sweaty failure panicking at his people finding out what his special friends are actually like

Jared Kushner's Firm Is Said to Be Part of $50 Billion Buyout of Electronic Arts Mr. Kushner's private equity firm, Affinity Partners, is said to be in talks with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and Silver Lake to buy out the video game giant.

We are watching a coordinated right-wing takeover of popular media and it won’t stop here. archive.today/bXzZd

Fantastic piece from @schmidtdse.bsky.social post-doc @lucialayr.bsky.social on handling the emotional side of doing a PhD in climate or ecological modeling blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2025/...

wait they're going to roll out this digital ID by *the end of this Parliament*????

*laughs in eVisa*

Creating an ID system in the UK right now, amid anti-immigrant hysteria as part of a pledge specifically to target immigrants, is simply not the same as the complex legal and social history of ie German ID cards.

Not a Brit, but this basically boils down to trust in the state. When UID got rolled out in India, folks opposed - and still oppose - it there too for the same reason. I've lived in EU countries with ID cards, but frankly just do not trust that information should be centralised any more.

Really the issue isn't can they, but can they or future governments be trusted to not abuse it, and specifically to not abuse the fact that it is digital only.

I already have an e-visa for settled status, which I absolutely expect this or the next (prolly Reform) govt to abuse somehow.

Oh, and the NHS surcharge -- about £1,000 per family member and year (!) -- is quite frankly infuriating, we are young, we hardly use the NHS.

Just be honest and call it a visa fee.

What Do We Have To Lose If Keir Starmer won’t even make a moral case against deporting our friends and neighbours, then what is the point of him? Plus: some natural borders; and the non-existence of grey, and other letters.

"You don’t fight the politics of violence by quibbling with the details. You stamp it into a million pieces! You draw a f*cking line!"

If Keir Starmer won’t even make a moral case against deporting our friends and neighbours, then what is the point of him?

“Immigration control is good for race relations” is the oldest argument in British immigration policy, it’s been made ever since the 1950s by both Labour and Conservative governments to justify whatever controls they introduce.

plumber2 0.1.0 plumber2, a complete rewrite of plumber, has landed on CRAN, providing a modern, future proof solution for creating web servers in R. Read all about the new features here.

I am super hyped to finally share the first release of plumber2 with all of you. This has been the center of my attention for a big part of 2025 and I hope you'll find it a worthy update to the venerable plumber package.

The blog post will tell you more

#rstats

How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - annie's blog “Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!)  and I like working with ...

"How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner" by Annie Mueller 😅 😂 😭

anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-...

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

Probably won't be an easy to measure liability. Attributing a transmission chain to a visa free US visitor vs any other visitor/resident/citizen would be quite challenging imo. Countries will probably recommend travel vaccines for the US though.

What Reform are promising is abhorrent, as is the fact that we’re at a point that a mainstream political party in the UK could even consider it as a policy position, as is the fact that Labour are seemingly only arguing against the fact that the sums don’t add up

Also why the battle against the new right isn't and shouldn't be about policy detail. For them it is an existential battle. We are the enemy. Whether you can legally do something or not really isn't relevant to survival.

This is straight up 1930s era fascism.

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart.
Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point.
Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

Reform are filth. They represent hatred, extremism, ignorance and irresponsibility. They'd make us a wretched vicious hateful little island. If people don't stand up to this, they won't stand up to anything.

Oh that's just lovely. Every day something new.

Nehru without the nation building.