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Francis Windram

@franwin.co.uk
79 followers 104 following 111 posts

Postdoc, Computational ecologist interested in spiderwebs, biological traits, imaging, vector-borne disease and good solid R code. www.franwin.co.uk for more details. he/him. Views my own.

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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 04/09/2026
While AI can be really helpful for coding, I have seen a serious uptick in stupid UI fuckups in the last few years which I do strongly suspect is related. Today I found #1 an insurance form that just didn't work and didn't save quotes. #2 A "message us" button that does nothing. But best of all...
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Traces @traces.info · 02/06/2026
There seems to be evidence, at least from lucid dreams, that the experience is in real time because communication is possible with dreamers (I find this mindblowing). Some report that they hear the signals as coming from objects in the dream (a radio, say). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep
Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic …
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Sadie J. Ryan (she/her) @sjryan3.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
NEW: "Ecological and socioeconomic factors associated with globally reported tick-borne viruses", led by @samsambado.bsky.social, in which she applied BRT modelling to a global database of TBVs to pick apart the complicated pathway from transmission to reported cases! www.nature.com/articles/s43...
nature.com
Ecological and socioeconomic factors associated with globally reported tick-borne viruses - Communications Medicine
Sambado et al. examine how environmental and social conditions shape where tick-borne viruses are reported worldwide. Using machine learning, they find that both ecological and economic are important, and that wealthier nations are more likely to report these overlooked diseases.
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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Finally managed to get a new version of rTPC (v1.1.0) onto CRAN, with @franwin.co.uk driving most of the changes. There are now 49 models included. cran.r-project.org/web/packages... And parallel fitting of TPCs can be done using mirai and purrr. padpadpadpad.github.io/rTPC/article... 🧪 #rstats
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The Pandemic Institute @thepandemicinst.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
We're at the Vector-Borne Diseases conference today here in Liverpool. Let us know if you are too! #VBD26
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VectorByte @vectorbyte.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
Will you be at AMCA 26? Come find @vectorbyte.bsky.social and chat to us about our databases, workshops, data management, and let @samrund.bsky.social give you stickers, perhaps? #AMCA26
We are exhibiting at AMCA 26!
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 11/02/2026
ohvbd 1.0.0 has now been released on CRAN! This package should help those looking for VBD data by interfacing with vbdhub.org for searching, and the VectorByte trait and population dynamics databases for data download (alongside much more). vbdhub.org/blog/ohvbd-c... #rstats #vectorbyte #vbd
vbdhub.org
ohvbd 1.0.0 has been released on CRAN! - Blog
Announcing ohvbd v1.0.0 on CRAN: a unified R interface for retrieval and harmonisation of vector-borne disease data.
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Stevoisiak @stevoisiak.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
I made a filterlist for uBlock Origin to remove Generative AI features on websites. Includes blocks for * Google AI Summaries * YouTube Ask button & chat summaries * GitHub Copilot * Facebook AI chat * X's Grok buttons * Deviantart DreamUp * Booru AI images * And more github.com/Stevoisiak/S...
Google with AI buttonsGoogle without AI buttons
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 07/01/2026
An #rstats question for package developers: If my package maintains a cache to minimise data downloads, is it sensible/preferred to put an automatic cache cleaner (delete anything older than x days) in .onLoad, or to just mostly leave cache maintenance to the user (with appropriate helpers)?
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Jem Arnold @jemarnold.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
{ggview} can print plots to Viewer (Rstudio or Positron) with true scaling. Adjust plot settings and see the final proportions immediately. Save the plot once 👌 e.g.: ggplot(...) + ggview::canvas(width = 220, height = 220*2/3, units = "mm", dpi = 300) per @nrennie.bsky.social #datavis #rstats
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Daniel Padfield @padpadpadpad.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
@franwin.co.uk drove a massive rework of rTPC this year, making package maintenance much easier. rTPC now supports 49 different model formulations, vignettes are updated, & you can parallelise model fitting using new purrr & mirai, which is DOPE. #rstats 🧪 padpadpadpad.github.io/rTPC/article...
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Sara Gandy @saragandy.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
🚨 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...
sciencedirect.com
The role of large ungulate grazers on Ixodes ricinus and tick-borne pathogens in the New Forest - a case study for future rewilded landscapes
Large ungulate grazers can manage habitats via conservation grazing, a practice using livestock to control vegetation growth, which has many ecologica…
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 27/07/2025
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.
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 24/07/2025
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 ...
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 16/07/2025
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 :)
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 13/05/2025
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.
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 30/04/2025
The report released today by the Tony Blair institute is one of the most cynical, least scientific, and most poorly-written reports I have ever seen about climate change. I'm not exactly surprised that there is no climate scientist willing to put their name on it anywhere, but I am disappointed.
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Barbara Tschirren @btschirren.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
Emile Michels' first PhD paper published today. Amplification of Borrelia in ticks at pheasant-release sites – an intriguing example how non-native species can increase zoonotic disease risk through spillback. @uniexecec.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The Release of Non‐Native Gamebirds Is Associated With Amplified Zoonotic Disease Risk
Spillback is potentially an important mechanism by which non-natives contribute to zoonotic disease emergence. We capitalise on quasi-experimental releases of non-native pheasants (Phasianus colchicu...
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Sadie J. Ryan (she/her) @sjryan3.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
"Mean daily temperatures predict the thermal limits of malaria transmission better than hourly rate summation" new paper now out in NatComm, led by @martashocket.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Figure maps in magma palette, depicting mosquito range countries in South Asia, against grey non-range countries and white non-land components. Legend for color range dark to light, most to least.  Months of thermal suitability, S(T), for transmission of malaria by Anopheles stephensi in its native range in Central and South Asia predicted by models parameterized using constant and fluctuating temperatures.
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Dr. Courtney Murdock @ecodynvplab.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
New paper out! A common computational approach to predict organismal fitness and distributions in the field could vastly overpredict the potential range of thermal suitability for malaria transmission relative to performance characterized at constant temperatures: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Mean daily temperatures predict the thermal limits of malaria transmission better than hourly rate summation - Nature Communications
Malaria transmission is sensitive to temperature and models of malaria typically account for daily fluctuations in temperature through a ‘rate summation’ approach. Here, the authors conduct experiment...
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We Are RLadies+ @weare.rladies.org · 03/04/2025
#Tidyverse Tip: If you find yourself writing the same mutation (i.e., #dplyr::mutate()) for several columns, there’s a better way! dplyr::across() allows you to apply a function to multiple columns easily. For example, to scale all numeric columns: df %>% mutate(across(where(is.numeric), scale))
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Miklós Koren @koren.mk · 25/03/2025
Why I love OneDrive, part 78. My local folder is called /Users/koren/OneDrive\ -\ Central\ European\ University\ \(CEU\ GmbH\ Hungarian\ Branch\ Office\)/ Luckily, I can symlink.
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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 20/03/2025
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :( So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
Screenshot of the linked Quarto website, with input checkboxes to change different conditions for a regression model that predicts economic performance based on US political party, with a reported p-value
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 20/03/2025
This is the real and proper solution to the previous problem I posted, and today I was reminded why reading the documentation regularly is very very important, even when you think you know it. Now if you'll excuse me I have some package error handling to rework.
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Dylan Pieper @dylanpieper.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
The redquack 📦 lets REDCap and DuckDB flock together. It batches API requests by record ID using the awesome httr2 📦 . Features include resuming incomplete transfers, converting column types, tracking progress, and logging operations in the database. Headed to CRAN! 🦆 github.com/dylanpieper/...
redquack: This package extracts REDCap data and stores it in a DuckDB database with minimal memory overhead, designed for large datasets that exceed available RAM.
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 20/03/2025
If you're catching errors in #rstats and stopping using tryCatch and cli_abort (or rlang::abort), you may encounter something like this "Error in `value[[3L]]()`". This isn't helpful for finding where something went wrong, you don't know what actually threw the error. But there's an easy fix!
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 19/03/2025
I just created a silly little tool for finding stats about those following you on Bluesky! Returns who follows you, and basic stats about their own profile. A really fun way to start playing with the bsky public api! #rstats #httr2 #bsky gist.github.com/fwimp/67a20b...
gist.github.com
Bluesky Follower Information Finder
Bluesky Follower Information Finder. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 19/03/2025
Recently I've been playing with the "slider" package for sliding windows #rstats It's exceedingly useful for generating aggregated summaries over a dataset (i.e. weekly means)
R code that generates a series of dates and normally distributed random values of the same length, then generates weekly means using slide_period_vec from the slider package.
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Matthew Kay @mjskay.com · 18/03/2025
okay I think I've got it
A dual axis line chart with spline smoothing, with two time series increasing from 2013 to 2024: (1) How awesome are spline smooths (out of 10) and (2) How many charts are dual-axis charts (going up to 2.0M per year). The first time series also has a pie chart on each data point, depicting % of line charts with splines (also increasing)
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Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Trying out dplyr::consecutive_id() for a project today. #rstats It generates a unique identifier that increments every time a variable (or combination of variables) changes.
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Kryštof Chytrý @krystofchytry.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Hi there, my student is making a survey about the use of R packages in Ecology, could you please spend two mins on filling it 🥹 Very appreciated! And if you could spread it further (RT), that would be just awesome. ❤️ docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
Exploring R Package Usage in Academia
I am running a quick survey to find out which R packages academics use the most in their research and teaching. The goal is to see which tools are essential, spot any gaps, and maybe even discover som...
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 05/03/2025
Just started out work on an R Package Developer starterpack, and would love to keep expanding it and making it more diverse. Any suggestions on people to add?
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 05/03/2025
🧵 Now it's time for another R thread. So let's talk about the .data pronoun from rlang/dplyr. #R #dplyr #rlang
A code interface showing the following code: `.data[[var]]`
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 03/03/2025
A tip for anyone regularly plotting in ggplot in Rstudio: Set up a new snippet (Global Options -> Code -> Edit Snippets) with the following: ``` snippet nolegend theme(legend.position="none") ``` Click save and now you'll never forget that particular bastard ever again.
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Marc A. Milne @forthespiders.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
Sci-comm at its finest! @sderkarabetian.bsky.social and I just published a systematic study of arachnids in the Magic: The Gathering card game @mtgarena.com. We discuss classification and evolution of spiders across the multiverse. Check it out here: virginianaturalhistorysociety.com/wp-content/u...
virginianaturalhistorysociety.com
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 17/01/2025
🧵 As we're in catchup week, here's the second of my weekly threads. This time it's just some spider web information to ease us in (I really am a biologist I promise, not just an R guy)!
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 16/01/2025
I've decided to try and do one post a week for the whole of 2025, exploring a diversity of topics I think would be interesting to the generality of science bluesky. So to start off (and catch up) let's talk about R and why you should probably use it as a scientist. [1/16]
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Red Nexus Games @rednexusgames.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Our friends at Stray Fawn have given us a handful of Dungeon Clawler keys to share with the Peglin community! To enter to win, simply follow us and @strayfawnstudio.bsky.social, and retweet(?) this post - we'll select 5 winners on Dec. 5 at 8pm PST. store.steampowered.com/app/2356780/...
store.steampowered.com
Save 10% on Dungeon Clawler on Steam
Dungeon Clawler is a Roguelike Claw Machine Deckbuilder. Build your deck, grab weapons and items from the claw machine to battle enemies, discover powerful perks that create game-changing synergies an...
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Francis Windram @franwin.co.uk · 10/10/2024
It's funny thinking back over one's journey through academia. When writing my corrections today, I came to the sudden realisation that without @mdahirel.bsky.social sending over some cool data in response to a request out of the blue, my PhD (not even using that data) would be very different!
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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 02/11/2023
BBC: Why don't women use ChatGPT? Woman: I tried it and it just barfed out useless garbage BBC: Women don't use ChatGPT because it's too difficult for their pretty little heads
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Tamreen @scriptor.bsky.social · 29/09/2023
Antarctic scientists showed tiny, early signs of a new accent after spending all winter in isolated groups talking to each other. Cool to see exactly how the process of language divergence starts #langsky
scientificamerican.com
Linguists Hear an Accent Begin
Residents of an overwintering station in Antarctica provided linguists with evidence of the first small changes in speech that may signal the development of a new accent.
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Jen C Mars @jencmars.bsky.social · 08/10/2023
Surveying its domain. #Arachtober #invertebrates
A small spider with a dark reddish-brown exoskeleton covered in white and yellow hairs stands on a yellow flower petal. The spider has huge eyes and looks quite cute. A good friend.
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Robert Back @rback.bsky.social · 10/10/2023
It's obviously Arachtober. However this Araneus marmoreus was in front of the camera a month ago. But maybe it's excused due to its nicely marmored abdomen.
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