Science is essential—it helps us understand change and guide decisions. But how we do science is expanding: more collaborative, more connected, more inclusive. When it starts with communities, it leads to solutions that last. My Earth Day op-ed is out www.seattletimes.com/opinion/eart...
WA recently legally defined e-motos so it could regulate them separately from e-bikes: www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/03/16/2...
U.S. government science safely sent a woman, a black man, a single dad, and a Canadian to the moon and back. 🤯 Upon returning to earth, they were like, "Can you tell the boats we can hear them but they can't hear us? We're gonna try a restart. Yep, we think we are pushing the right buttons." 🤣
The beauty of a failure is it can be a solution to another problem.
With AI, you lose the most precious part of discovery: gaining deep understandings of failures. Incorporating them. Drawing upon them later.
12/n
Four NOAA #fisheries #stockassessment jobs opened today www.fisheries.noaa.gov/careers-more...
Always! 😆 I will be in CA until Sunday. Feel free to swing by NWFSC and stash them away somewhere on your ride into work. 😁
Or, when you are furloughed during peak fall gardening season, you sign your hopefully-future-will-almost-certainly-get-it paycheck.
At least once a week I am grateful I got out of academia before the widespread use of generative AI...
Correct. I was immediately suspicious (it has "that look") and put it through an AI image check. Sure enough...
I love how the report demands all this extra labor out of people, but then they apparently didn't have the time and resources to put together a report without generating AI slop.
🤣🤣🤣☠️☠️☠️😭😭😭
Not to mention the cover page...
As a public service, I thought I'd offer a little constructive criticism of the most popular styles of bike racks, since it appears that the entities that manufacture and install these racks are clueless about the needs of actual bike riders.
NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics?
1) Write NSF
2) Write your Congressperson
3) CC us at grfp@grant-witness.us so we can compile + follow up
Details and template at grant-witness.us/grfp-letter
This link seems helpful in providing guidance for upcoming NOAA #Fisheries #stockassessment jobs: www.fisheries.noaa.gov/careers-more...
📣Job alert!📣 Working as a federal scientist is complicated right now, but we are actually hiring. One *permanent* stock assessment position on my team at NOAA NWFSC will open for 7 days in early-mid Feb. Will be a shared ad across several science centers. Get those usajobs resumes polished...
Personally, I am so excited to get a new team member with new ideas and experiences. It also feels so unfair that brilliant scientists were fired from other teams just under a year ago for no reason other than bad timing.
📣Job alert!📣 Working as a federal scientist is complicated right now, but we are actually hiring. One *permanent* stock assessment position on my team at NOAA NWFSC will open for 7 days in early-mid Feb. Will be a shared ad across several science centers. Get those usajobs resumes polished...
Research Scientist position at the Cornell Biological Field Station: exciting opportunity for an aquatic ecologist/fisheries scientist to work with a 50+ year time series of fish and limnology data on Oneida Lake $90-95K/yr
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31352
Writing grants as a federal employee:
This money must be obligated in the next nine months. But also, wherever it goes, no way can they pay for your travel once work actually begins. That's unethical.
Advice I now give to grad students and postdocs in the sciences: Don’t just try to meet and impress senior scientists. They’ll retire soon. Get to know your fellow students - make friends where possible, be colleagues at least. These are the people you’ll be sharing the field with for decades.
Yep!
Yes, I agree. We also edited the tex file so that it gets tagged when you compile it.
And also: if we couldn't figure out the slick solutions in the amount of time we have spent on this, I would argue those solutions are not in fact very easy.
Any alt text you write for figures is completely missing from the tex file that quarto produces. It only pays attention to that argument for html output. Was not the case for rmarkdown. Maybe there are slick solutions, but we are just post processing the tex file which is fussy.
Yeah, quarto seems to ignore alt text arguments for pdfs. 🫤 We (with really no help from me) have a couple R functions that are not quite fully functional but do some post-processing of the tex file quarto generates:
github.com/nmfs-ost/asa...
Maybe there is a slicker way. 🤷
Hmm, possibly? We are hoping to get automated solutions, as our documents are very long with a lot of figures. One of the biggest issues is quarto seems to entirely ignore alt text arguments when compiling to pdf, so that you have to format and add alt text to the tex file yourself.
Also. FYI. If you care about accessibility and work with an organization that refuses to transition from PDFs to html (i.e., the government), quarto is a MASSIVE step back from rmarkdown and I would strongly advise against it. #rstats