Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 4h

And not in pre-season 😂

#NFL

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 4h

I'm watching this #NYGiants game and can’t believe my eyes

34-17???

#Giants #NYG #PHIvsNYG #NFL

1 2

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 18h

I'm guessing results would be better with a less generic prompt, though: asking the LLM what it knows about dataviz best practices first to ‘prime’ the model, telling it to ask you questions it needs answered before doing the task, giving it a little info on what you think are best practices. . .

1 1

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 1d

#Ageism
Fun fact: The guy who invented the World Wide Web is 70. Old enough to be a grandpa.
Un-fun fact: Stereotypes like this about older people being technically clueless do real harm to older workers in fields like IT.

2

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 1d

The {gtsummary} #RStats 📦 “summarizes data sets, regression models, and more, using sensible defaults with highly customizable capabilities. . . . [It] creates beautifully formatted, ready-to-share summary and result tables in a single line of R code!”
www.danieldsjoberg.com/gtsummary/

Presentation-Ready Data Summary and Analytic Result Tables

Creates presentation-ready tables summarizing data sets, regression models, and more. The code to create the tables is concise and highly customizable. Data frames can be summarized with any function,...

www.danieldsjoberg.com

3 17

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 1d

“An introduction to working with data for biologists including: data structure, data manipulation, visualization, basic programming, and databases. Designed to be used as a flipped university course and also for self-guided students.” #RStats #SQL
datacarpentry.github.io/semester-bio...

Data Carpentry for Biologists ·

datacarpentry.github.io

1 5

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 2d

I don't need free shipping since I'm getting the e-book, but I ordered today anyway.

1 1

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 2d

This is a professor at Rutgers who teaches a class on the history of anti-fascism. He also teaches about human rights. He has received multiple death threats and been doxed. He is relocating to Europe for his safety. This is where we are in the US now. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

14 440 940

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 4d

Walk down to the river this afternoon

Narrow river with autumn foliage on one side reflecting in the river, green foliage on the other side

2 11

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 4d

Daboll shouldn't have this job.
#NFL

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 4d

Daniel Jones is up 35 points and about to go 4-1. Jaxson Dart is down 12 points to the 0-4 Saints. But tell me again how Jones was the Giants' problem. 🤡🤡
How does Brian Daboll still have a job?
#Giants #NYGiants #NYG #NFL

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 5d

Daily number of Bluesky posts with the #RStats hashtag (case insensitive) Sept. 1 - Oct 3, excluding the CRAN Package Updates bot.
Coded with the {bskyr} and {ggplot2} R packages.

[Posted via R script and weekly cron job. Tx for your patience if something went awry] #RStatsStats

Bar chart of daily #RStats posts. Amounts range from around 25 in September 2024 to peaking over 100 some days. Latest totals were 52 yesterday and 44 the day before.

5

Reposted by Sharon Machlis

Chris Kenny, PhD @chriskenny.bsky.social · 6d

redistio now uses @kylewalker.bsky.social's mapgl for interactive redistricting map editing!

redistio is an #rstats package that uses Shiny to draw redistricting maps locally.

Unlike other district editors, this provides access to our simulation algorithms, interactively!

Short demo:

2 6 13

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 6d

As a former privacy and security reporter, I believe everyone should understand how a mobile phone can compromise their privacy (with advertisers as well as the government). US #privacy laws are completely inadequate. Meanwhile, there are a few things you can do ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 7d

ICE is buying a location tracking tool that harvests data from hundreds of millions of phones a day. Protect your location data by updating a few settings on your phone 🧵 (1/4): www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-...

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day

Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.

www.404media.co

3

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 7d

Thanks!! gtools::mixedsort() is new to me
#RStats

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 7d

Thanks so much! I look forward to trying it out this weekend!!

1

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 8d

I wish past me had known this when trying to sort election precincts! Instead of turning them all into ordered factors, which I don't like doing because the order doesn't "matter" except for human-readable display, it's not like precinct 1 is smaller than precinct 9.

1

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 8d

I was ready to split these with my own regex, sort the numeric and any letters (not all precincts have letters), and then rejoin them, which seemed possible but not what I wanted to spend time on. It's very handy to have a function that anticipates these types of real-world situations.

2

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 8d

x <- c("8", "10", "1", "40", "9A", "21A", "21B")
stringr::str_sort(x, numeric = TRUE)
[1] "1" "8" "9A" "10" "21A" "21B" "40"

1 2

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 8d

Not if you're doing election results where there are precincts like "21A", which is what I'm working on. Those throw NA for as.numeric().

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 8d

Just learned: It's so easy to sort strings that are numbers in proper numerical order with the {stringr} #Rstats 📦's `str_sort()` function and numeric = TRUE!!
x <- c("8", "10", "1", "40")
str_sort(x, numeric = TRUE)
[1] "1" "8" "10" "40"

6 11 73

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 8d

Thanks! I can always keep my other code for that if you don't have the time, meanwhile I'm going to use tinytable for my heatmap table.

1

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 9d

Heatmap table works great, so does filtering, but I've been working with Claude Sonnet 4.5 & Opus for awhile tonight, and together we haven't had much luck getting the colored bars the right size with the text overlay. I guess I should stick to DT for that one. Thank you so much for the work though!

1 2

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 9d

🤩 Wow!! THANKS!! I'll take a look tonight/tomorrow and let you know!!!

1

Sharon Machlis @smachlis.bsky.social · 10d

And this is all the 2021 election visualizations I did for that race.
www.district2framingham.com/posts/2021-1...
I'm trying to make code more modular and scalable after attending @andrew.heiss.phd & @gosterhout.bsky.social 's Election Night Reporting Using R & Quarto #PositConf2025 presentation

Sisitsky Elected Framingham Mayor – Framingham District 2

News and events in and around District 2 in Framingham, MA, including Nobscot and Saxonville

www.district2framingham.com

1 1 2