iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Bobby Kogan @bbkogan.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Here’s a graph from the Economist showing GDP data from official government sources versus private estimates. Free countries, like the US, don’t manipulate econ data. Less free countries do. Trump is seeking to break that for short-term PR. (Yes I know GDP is BEA and not BLS.)

free countries have gdp data line up well. partly free countries are only mediocre. not free countries are bad.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Consider the possibility that work life balance is not just a preferred lifestyle but necessary to allow people to raise the next generation of the human race. The alternative is a dropping birth rate and/or a stay at home parent in every household. stocks.apple.com/AKQokfrDGRO2...

stocks.apple.com

Think Work-Life Balance Is Overrated? You’re Hired! — The Wall Street Journal

Employers are getting brutally honest with applicants, warning them of long hours and few boundaries; ‘Companies are in control again.’

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

At this moment two weeks ago, I was picking my son up from a great week of sleepaway camp in the mountains. The situation for parents of the missing campers in Texas is just unspeakably heartbreaking.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Yes!!! I’ve had a lot of good professional experiences but if I had to choose one best thing it would be the attitude of the R community that I was lucky enough to become a part of 20 years ago ❤️ The world will be a better place if we can spread this to other things!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Also, the idea of an “admin party” is really great.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

I subscribed to @theatlantic.com in the last year, and it has been an unsuspected joy. What a wonderful publication. Not just news and politics, but all manner of things like this article. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

theatlantic.com

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.

Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 03/06/2025

dplyr.tidyverse.org, tidyr.tidyverse.org, and ggplot2.tidyverse.org now have an experimental "ask AI" button powered by kapa.ai. It uses the contents of all 3 sites to (hopefully!) better answer your tidyverse questions. This is very much an experiment so please let me know what you think! #rstats

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Yes! One of the things I most appreciated about Roy Cooper when he was governor of NC is that I almost never had to think about him. He seemed focused on being competent at his job and steered us on a good path while being delightfully boring about it!!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

There’s really an impressive amount in this particular newsletter

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Jeremy Allen @jeremy-data.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

I wouldn't snooze on this opportunity #databs

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

My attempts to grow even nominal amounts of vegetables have given me great respect for farmers. Some years one thing does great and the rest suffer some tragedy incompatible with production. Next year totally different 🤯 It’s more an exercise in cultivating humility than vegetables.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Does anyone have examples of collaborating with non-coders (scientists in my case) on #Quarto documents? Tips to share? I can imagine the visual editor working well for them, it’s the Github part that seems like a big ask.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

Looks similarly bad for Chapel Hill NC

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Over the weekend, I showed Claude Code my data-oriented web app and asked how it would build the same thing from scratch. It decided to mock up the data even though the data files were there, because it couldn’t get around CORS (honestly something I didn’t know existed until recently).

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

What are the key characteristics to qualify as a real time database?

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

I’m hiring for a Senior Data Scientist / Data Developer role at EvE Bio, a non-profit! It requires substantial #rstats experience, including #Shiny. It’s a hybrid role located in Durham, NC. If you are interested and qualified, please apply or reach out to me w Qs. jobs.lever.co/convergentre...

jobs.lever.co

Convergent Research - Senior Data Scientist / Data Developer

Durham NC’s EvE Bio is seeking a Senior Data Scientist/Developer to join our data science team as its second member. The ideal candidate will have substantial experience with R and Shiny programming, ...

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Bind Research @bindresearch.org · 11/02/2025

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Bind Research, the UK’s first not-for-profit Focused Research Organisation, with long-term support from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Research Ventures Catalyst Programme, industry, and charities.

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Niko McCarty @nikomccarty.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

We just published a deep look into E11 Bio, the research nonprofit creating tools to build a 3D map of every neuron and synapse in a brain. Jump in to learn how their technology could map an entire mouse brain in 5 years for $100 million—a 100x improvement over existing methods.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

If only Observable plot had a functional facet_wrap equivalent 😞

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Phenomenal article by Lina Khan reminding us why breaking up monopolies isn’t about fairness, it’s about competitiveness! www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | DeepSeek Serves as a Warning About Big Tech (Gift Article)

The arrival of DeepSeek shows us the competitive weaknesses of America’s tech giants.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

This thread is reassuring since I recently decided for our public data release to go with zipped csvs. I felt a little guilty for not using parquet but decided it could only be a barrier to some people (scientists) who wouldn’t know how to open it.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

There are some marked state effects here. I’m curious why NC is so high even here in the central Piedmont region where we seem to be quite fortunate from a weather disaster standpoint. Maybe a state govt factor at play?

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

David Gasquez @davidgasquez.com · 17/12/2024

Keeping and maintaining code and pipelines that provide open datasets for free, is not free. Excited to see initiatives like this gaining support of their communities!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Whenever I see people doing complicated things in Excel I am both impressed and horrified.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

I am very excited to try this out. More assistance writing tests is one of things I’d most like AI to provide!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

The interesting question would be how this compares to reality — like, how often is college likely to be worth it. Loan or not, there’s an opportunity cost to the money and time spent. I remember a thought provoking podcast on this - I’m pretty sure it was this one: youtu.be/dmP8YMV4ps0?...

youtu.be

Is College Worth It?

YouTube video by New York Times Podcasts

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

It’s great to see how this kind of tool can empower a subject matter expert who knows some R and Shiny but only codes intermittently to make something that solves a problem for their team — without getting stuck on lots of details they would struggle to sort out.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

First experience with #Shiny assistant today was good! A scientist I work with who also has some R skills got a basic app working, then Shiny assistant did the tricky part of making it possible for the user to advance through a series of plots, something I would have struggled to figure out myself.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I used DuckDB-wasm to make a serverless data app in conjunction with observable JS and Quarto to pull it all together. It allows anyone to explore our publicly available dataset with no server costs for us (data.evebio.org)

data.evebio.org

Eve Bio: Pharmome Data

Browse/download data for 1,400 FDA drugs' actions on an ever-growing collection of gene products. Data Release 1 now live.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

This is a very exciting concept. I use the command line intermittently so I’m always in beginner mode. Now if we can have the same type of helper for CSS…

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

So, #DuckDB works with the #rstats #tidyverse via duckplyr. #DuckDB also works with #dbt. I’m daring to hope that somehow this means I could use dbt but write my models with duckplyr instead of SQL directly. 🤞🏻🤞🏻

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

A case where 3D data visualization is actually effective!

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Jenny Bryan @jennybryan.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Ah, "How to name files", a topic that is near and dear to my 💜 My most recent (and semi-polished) iteration on this stuff was a 5-minute lightning talk for NormConf 2022. Here's the video & the slides: youtu.be/ES1LTlnpLMk?... speakerdeck.com/jennybc/how-...

youtu.be

How to name files - Jennifer Bryan

YouTube video by NormConf

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Reposted by Elaine Houskeeper

Sam Rodriques @sgrodriques.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

This is big: in collaboration with E11 Bio and @andrewcpayne.bsky.social, we are announcing today a new way to map brain circuits at scale. With improvements in AI and microscopy I think whole brain mouse and maybe human brain mapping will be feasible in ~5-10 years. 1/

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Data labels / alternate names would be a game changer!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

I will test this out! The alternatives I’m considering (Cloud SQL, BigQuery) seem like overkill for our fairly small scale needs.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

This set of apps both read and write (append) data, which sounds like it wouldn’t be possible. I am interested in the answer to the question about how to have apps reading DuckDB without blocking data updates though!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Aha, this is the kind of thing I was expecting might be the case. This is a dealbreaker for my situation. Thanks for pointing it out!

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Here’s my plan: I have a handful of simple #Shiny apps for data collection. I’m going to use #DuckDB with GCS hosted files as the backend. 95% appending. Largest table will get to 10M+ rows but most are much much smaller. ~10 users. The goal is easy setup and maintenance. What pitfalls am I missing?

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Why do you think the rewrite is so much harder than what the tiny startup team does from scratch? Is it the people/skills? Or just the need to rewrite while also supporting a live product? Or having to support all existing features? Or fighting organizational momentum?

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

If I’m ever in a budget meeting giggling uncontrollably, it will be because I’m thinking of this

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

I thought you would say that : )

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

I’m curious regarding your writing habit - is there a particular tool or environment you use that works well for you? I have struggled with this because I love pen and paper but I hate losing the benefits of searchability, etc.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Also true of slides when they are the initial medium for putting ideas together (which seems to have become the case almost always). Slides can be great to craft a presentation of something that has _already been well thought out_.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

In a world of Slack and other tools that reduce communication friction so much that little thought is required, we do less of even the most basic writing to express our ideas in business contexts. I really think it’s hurt the quality of decision making.

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

“Go ahead, build and deploy an app with Excel as the backend and then let’s talk.”

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Elaine Houskeeper @ehouskee.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

I considered making my app with Shinylive/R and would still like to compare that to the Observable JS path. The development would certainly have been easier, the deployment part just seemed like more of an unknown, in terms of load time and how it would behave on a variety of machines/browsers.

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