🚨 New paper 🚨

How does livestock grazing impact tick-borne disease hazard? Our new study in the New Forest National Park used a paired experiment to find out.

Important for #rewilding and #conservation grazing schemes!

#Ticks #LymeDisease @ukhsa.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".