Lots of credit to Pro Publica and Dem electeds who forced DHS to answer for these crimes against kids. AND @scrippsnews.bsky.social has stayed on the Dilley beat hard.

Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I love this metaphor because of how it speaks to the contortions people (here: AI boosters) go through to ignore/pretend not to notice the race science.

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

"AI is not a magical tool built by people in San Francisco making millions of dollars a year and pushing their companies to insane valuations. Artificial intelligence is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers around the world"

www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Where are the Right Whales? 🐳 In the latest episode of the Ocean Currents podcast, #BigelowLab SRS Nick Record and meteorologist Dave Epstein discuss North Atlantic right #whales and how a changing #ocean contributes to their movements. Tune in here: https://feeds.captivate.fm/ocean-currents/

Defragmenting Drive C

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out:

www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Anti‐Predation and Size‐Dependent Gas Exchange Functions of Amazonian Architect Cicada Towers Clay towers built by cicada nymphs before metamorphosis are poorly understood. We experimentally show that towers of the Amazonian cicada Guyalna chlorogena reduce predation risk and exhibit size-dep...

In which researchers learn about cicada "towers" and how they function by putting condoms over them. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

dawnymock cartoon of Grim Reaper made of oil drums and drill

This one is in my book, Save the Earth(lings)… info in pinned skeet

"Squirrel sampling sites in the British Isles. Pie charts indicate the location of sites where squirrels were sighted or found and are color-coded as indicated in the box; numbers within circles indicate different animals tested where N > 1. Boxed circles refer to squirrels of unknown location. I, Ireland; S, Scotland; A, Isle of Arran; B, Brownsea Island; W, Isle of Wight. The figure was drawn in R (v3.2.23) with the package maps (v3.1.0) using the mapdata (v2.2-6) “worldHiresMapEnv” and the package plotrix (v3.6-2) for pie charts. "

Avanzi et al. (2016) analyzed DNA from wild roadkill red squirrels & discovered some carry Mycobacterium leprae & M. lepromatosis which cause Hansen’s disease (aka leprosy). Also the strains of M. leprae were similar to those found in Medieval England! #2026MMM #RIP www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

7 of the World’s Little-Known Fish Migrations Most readers will know of the epic salmon migrations. But have you head of these other fascinating freshwater fish migrations?

Move over salmon. Here are some lesser-known but no less spectacular fish migrations, including redhorse, sharptooth catfish & Nopili rock-climbing goby.

Plus gar with @solomonrdavid.bsky.social.

Australian governments subsidising fossil fuel use by more than $30,000 a minute, analysis finds Australia Institute data finds state and federal subsidies for coal, gas and oil products increased 10% in past year, growing at a faster pace than funding to NDIS

We subsidise the fossil fuel industry billions a year and nobody bats an eyelid.

Suggest a subsidy for renewable energy or EVs and it's "corporate welfare"🤦🏻‍♂️

Christ on a bike

Anyone else thinking what I’m running? Next year’s Met Gala theme! No? Just me? #bcvammm #2026MMM

Best Reduviinae tree based on RAxML analysis of 178 taxa using a partitioned molecular dataset of 5 gene regions (16S, 18S, 28S D2, 28S D3–D5, Wg). Bootstrap values are indicated on branches by colored triangles according to support strength. Reduviinae lineages are indicated as red branches and remaining reduviids as blue while outgroup taxa are black. The shaded red box highlights members of the hematophagous Triatominae, here shown as paraphyletic. Red arrowheads refer to the polyphyletic Cetherinae; the asterisk refers to Physoderinae nested within a reduviine clade.

The subfamily Reduviinae (Assassin bugs) is a taxonomist's nightmare. A molecular phylogeny done by Hwang & Weirauch (2018) reveled it is polyphyletic, meaning the group doesn’t share a single recent ancestor. doi.org/10.1371/jour... #2026MMM

touché

#2026MMM WILDCARD
EMOJI BATTLE RESULTS
🦴🆚💉:
🦴👚🐜/💉👚🐜/
🦴👀🐜/💉👀🐜/🦴💥💉/
💉🗡️💀/💉🗡️🦴/💉🍽️🥣/
🏆💉

a woman wearing sunglasses and a green dress is sitting in a chair and talking to another woman . ALT: a woman wearing sunglasses and a green dress is sitting in a chair and talking to another woman .

I expected better of a Bone Collector

Officials now say more than 30,000 gallons of crude oil were released into the Gulf after a hose failure at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port near Grand Isle and Port Fourchon.

Queen Demon (The Rising World Book 2) Amazon.com: Queen Demon (The Rising World Book 2) eBook : Wells, Martha: Kindle Store

There's an Amazon Kindle sale on Queen Demon (the sequel to Witch King, 2nd book in the Rising World series) today for 2.99, US and Canada www.amazon.com/Queen-Demon-... #booksky

Seafood fraud is rampant, imperiling fish populations, report finds The global fisheries and aquaculture sector produces more than 150 million metric tons of food per year, valued at nearly $200 billion. Yet it’s plagued with fraud, according to a new report. The…

Seafood fraud is rampant, imperiling fish populations, report finds news.mongabay.com/2026/03/seaf... “up to roughly 20% of aquatic products are intentionally mislabeled as the wrong species”

Nature Report, Killed by Trump, Is Released Independently

When the US govt terminated the National Nature Asst, @phillevin.bsky.social + the author team were determined not to let that stop them.

They re-organized, set up an advisory committee, found funding…and now the brand new Nature Record is open for public comment. 👏🌳👏🌲

Check it out (link below)!

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.

It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Meme. Painting of two eels in the water. They are yellow, and so is the background, so it's unclear if these are yellow eels, or eels seen through a yellow filter. They don't much care, I would guess. The eels are dark on top, and are casting shadows below them, such that they seem like eel sandwiches stuffed into the bread of darkness. They deserve names, so we shall call one of the Olivort and the other Trovilo. You can decide which is which. One is looking to the left, and one is looking back over its metaphorical shoulder to the right. Neither is looking at you, and I think that's a choice. You should maybe spend some time thinking about why, and then try to move forward and live your life as the sort of person that eels would want to look at. Meme text reads: "Weir gonna climb Right over your dam"

Let's talk about eels & dams. 'Cause dams are a problem for eels now, but they haven't always been.

Eels can live out of water for a while, & travel overland. Young eels climb up & around small waterfalls as they migrate. And so many medieval dams weren't a problem for them. 1/7
🗃️

our relatively lax laws about sewage discharge from boats (including, & *especially*, US-based cruise ships) is a *huge* factor in the decreasing food safety of Canadian-cultured Pacific oysters.

But urban development in our biggest oyster-farming area is also a huge factor.

From the murderbot community on Reddit: Not the transcription I was expecting to be doing this episode Posted by Logophage_ - 302 votes and 25 comments

You are 100% correct. He apparently ad libbed some great Swedish jokes in there too

www.reddit.com/r/murderbot/...

Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible History was unmade last year, as engineers began the massive project of ripping the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable from the ocean floor. Just don’t mention sharks.

"Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible"

History was unmade last year, as engineers began the massive project of ripping the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable from the ocean floor.

Do NOT blame #sharks!
www.wired.com/story/say-go...
🌊 🦑