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Tom Saunders

@tomsaunders.me
410 followers 115 following 101 posts

💡 Digital research skills training • Open research • Research policy 💼 Centre for eResearch, University of Auckland. 💻 tomsaunders.me Posting in a personal capacity.

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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Posit @posit.co · 15/04/2026
Quarto 2 is coming, and it’s a total rewrite in Rust. 🦀 The headline feature? Native collaborative editing. Don't choose between Google Docs ease and Git rigor! You get real-time, conflict-free collab directly in your .qmd files. #RStats #Python Coming soon! ✨ opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...
opensource.posit.co
What's next: Quarto 2
We've started working on [`quarto-dev/q2`](https://github.com/quarto-dev/q2/), a full rewrite of Quarto in Rust.
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Science Media Centre NZ @smcnz.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Researchers - has your work been covered well in the news? Nominate the journalist for a Golden Tardigrade! Entries close on Sunday: www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2026/03/09/s...
sciencemediacentre.co.nz
Send us your top science stories
Nominations for the 3rd annual Science Journalism Awards are open until the end of this week. The awards celebrate excellent reporting on science-related topics across all forms of media by shining a…
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Nic Rawlence @nicrawlencenz.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
How to lose friends and support for your cause 101. @itiscolossal.bsky.social CEO Ben Lamm saying "the worst part of conservation is conservationists...". 🤦‍♂️ @forestandbird.bsky.social @birdsnewzealand.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
‘They didn’t de-extinct anything’: can Colossal’s genetically engineered animals ever be the real thing?
The bioscience startup has attracted billions in investment – and a flurry of criticism, but founder tells the Guardian plans to bring back the woolly mammoth will not be derailed
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Science Media Centre NZ @smcnz.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Want to work with a dynamic team helping connect scientists with the media? Applications close at 5pm tomorrow (12 Feb). www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2026/01/27/w...
sciencemediacentre.co.nz
We're hiring: Kaimanaaki Pāpāho | Media Advisor role
The Science Media Centre (SMC) is looking for a media advisor to join our dedicated team working to improve the reach, relevance and accuracy of news media reporting on science and related topics in…
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 01/02/2026
Wikipedia Education found that 178 out of ~3,000 articles created since 2022 via their outreach were written by AI (not bad per se), but almost all statements in these articles did not actually align with the cited source. Lots of effort to spot and undo - big implications for academic writing.
wikiedu.org
Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
Like many organizations, Wiki Education has grappled with generative AI, its impacts, opportunities, and threats, for several years. As an organization that runs large-scale programs to bring new e…
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 13/11/2025
This guide to making reports in #Quarto with #typst by @rfortherestofus.com is super in-depth and useful. Great for anyone wanting to publish dynamic and polished documents that make use of #rstats and #Python code to analyse data.
rfortherestofus.com
How to Make High-Quality PDFs with Quarto and Typst
Learn to create high-quality PDFs using Quarto and Typst with this in-depth tutorial, including custom templates, branding, and advanced techniques.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 29/10/2025
"We’ve got $55 million, roughly, per year to spend on basic science. And if you open up the news, what you hear about is Chris Luxon spending 320 times that on a single road."
newsroom.co.nz
Winner of top science prize blames ‘batshit’ Budget for brain drain
Dr Samuel Mehr says the Government values science, but their ‘idiotic’ approach to funding it will cost them their brightest.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 14/10/2025
"The trouble with the government’s idea for a simple, more efficient science fund is that it’s trying to be a Ferrari on tin can funding."
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
I'm exited to announce a new resource about making slides with quarto and revealjs. This book is the combination of all the work I have done in this area, reordered and polished up There isn't a lot of new information yet, but this format allows me to add more easily slidecrafting-book.com #quarto
Screenshot of first page of slidecrafting-book.com website
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 11/09/2025
The Art of Data Visualization with ggplot2: A free online book by @nrennie.bsky.social that guides us through the entire process of creating plots, including why certain decisions were made, using real datasets that have been part of #TidyTuesday. Very excited to get stuck into this one. #rstats
nrennie.rbind.io
The Art of Data Visualization with ggplot2
The TidyTuesday Cookbook
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 02/09/2025
"A lot of people have this throw away attitude that the dogs can just be disposed of and they can get another one for free on Facebook." Irresponsible dog ownership has exploded post-covid, Animal Management doing what they can while taking abuse for looking after other people's dogs.
rnz.co.nz
On the road with animal control
Auckland's animal control staff are busier than ever, impounding more than 10,000 dogs over the past year.
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Dr Tara McAllister @taramcallister.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
If you're a researcher in NZ please do our very short survey on the Vision Mātauranga policy! We are keen to hear your opinions. DM for the survey link
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
This is absolute shameful bullshit from all parties concerned. Peter Jackson is being scammed, Colossal are total frauds (5–8 years? Give me a break), and I have no idea what Ngāi Tahu think they’re doing. There are clear and simple reasons why this is impossible. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/south-isl...
nzherald.co.nz
South Island Jurassic Park? Peter Jackson backs project to bring back moa
Groundbreaking de-extinction project already under way, with a short timeframe revealed.
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Science Media Centre NZ @smcnz.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
THE SMC IS HIRING! We're looking for someone to join our dedicated team working to improve the reach, relevance and accuracy of news media reporting on science and related topics in Aotearoa New Zealand. More info and apply here: www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2025/06/26/w...
sciencemediacentre.co.nz
Work with us! Kaimanaaki Pāpāho | Media Advisor – Science Media Centre
The Science Media Centre is looking for a media advisor to join our dedicated team working to improve the reach, relevance and accuracy of news media reporting on science and related topics in…
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Fonti Kar @fontikar.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
🗺️ Ever wander to a new place and think, "Hmm I wonder what birds/plants/[insert favourite taxonomic group] I can find here?" 🔍 We built {infinitylists} 📋 to help nature lovers create personalised, location-based taxon lists! 🌏
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 03/06/2025
Some great examples here of how researchers can partner with Māori to co-develop research projects in ways that give effect to CARE principles alongside FAIR.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 28/05/2025
My final PhD chapter is now published #openaccess in the Journal of Chemical Ecology: doi.org/10.1007/s108... Main idea: Chemical-ecological methods can complement oviposition work in host-specificity testing of classical #biocontrol agents by teasing details related to ecological host range. 1/
A close-up image of a small black parasitoid wasp backed onto a stink bug egg, which is the same size as the wasp. She is laying an egg into the stink bug egg through a tube on her abdomen.
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Anna Frances Probert @afprobert.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Two academic (lecturer) positions available at the University of Otago in Aotearoa/New Zealand! One in Conservation Biology, another in Evolutionary Ecology. Links for positions below: otago.taleo.net/careersectio... otago.taleo.net/careersectio...
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 14/04/2025
Bad actors are creating packages with names that mimic hallucinated packages in code generated by coding assistants. When the code runs it installs the malware-riddled packages. Another reason why learners should not use coding assistants to generate code (there are other good uses for learners).
theregister.com
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything
: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 09/04/2025
The rise of AI bots scraping websites, mostly for openly licenced images to feed generative AI models, is increasing infrastructure costs for sites like Wikipedia - this will become an issue for OA publishers too. Rate-limiting and enforced authentication might need to be imposed.
pcmag.com
Wikipedia Faces Flood of AI Bots That Are Eating Bandwidth, Raising Costs
'Our content is free, our infrastructure is not,' the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia says, warning that AI scrapers are wasting the site's bandwidth.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 09/04/2025
"If they look like this animal then they are this animal" is definitely not how the morphological species concept works. Genetically altering grey wolves to make them look a bit like dire wolves does not suddenly make them dire wolves.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 07/04/2025
Love this explainer from @data.ft.com about how generative AI works. It's useful to understand that LLMs are essentially 'autocomplete on steroids', using statistical methods to predict the next word based on the prompt and training data. This is why they make things up and can't spell strawberry.
ig.ft.com
Generative AI exists because of the transformer
The technology has resulted in a host of cutting-edge AI applications — but its real power lies beyond text generation
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 31/03/2025
AUT Library Research Services Team is seeking a permanant, full-time Scholarly Communications Librarian to contribute to the growth of Tuwhera and AUT's scholarly communications services while supporting the uptake and impact of open research. Auckland City. $59,000 - $78,000. Closes 14 April.
careers.aut.ac.nz
Scholarly Communications Librarian - AUT
Find current job vacancies at AUT. Browse academic, professional and temp roles or search for a job vacancy by position type.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 20/03/2025
Quartabs: new #rstats package to dynamically generate tabset panels in #Quarto html documents, by @sayuks.bsky.social. Have been scratching my head over this recently, so this is potentially very handy. github.com/sayuks/quart...
github.com
GitHub - sayuks/quartabs: Dynamically generate tabset panels in Quarto HTML documents
Dynamically generate tabset panels in Quarto HTML documents - sayuks/quartabs
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 17/03/2025
"There's lots of ways you could fix the ecology of the Siberian tundra without spending millions of dollars making sad, cold, shivering asian elephants. So this looks more to me like a fundraising and hype driven enterprise than anything else."
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
We’re creating a guide, “Wikifying a Conference”, so any keen volunteer can help out. We hope conference organisers will think about hosting an official Wikipedian if they’re serious about increasing the visibility of their subject and their attendees. I blogged: www.rove.wiki/blog/wikifyi...
rove.wiki
Wikifying a conference — Rove
Any conference or festival can host a Wikimedian in Residence, who can photograph attendees and improve Wikidata and Wikipedia on them and their specialty.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 27/02/2025
Using @gbif.org data in your masters or PhD? Apply for the 2025 GBIF Graduate Researchers Award. Looks like NZ doesn't have a closing date up yet but we are a GBIF member so our graduate students will be eligible. @manaakiwhenua.bsky.social
gbif.org
Call for nominations opens for 2025 GBIF Graduate Researchers Award
Deadline for GBIF member countries to nominate graduate students whose innovative research relies on biodiversity data: **27 June 2025**
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 26/02/2025
HRC 2025 Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare RFP now open. "Proposals must clearly identify the health or healthcare area where AI can be leveraged safely and ethically to improve health outcomes in the New Zealand health system."
gateway.hrc.govt.nz
HRC Gateway - Funding - Priorities funding - 2025 Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 21/02/2025
"Filling the basket with knowledge: The evolution of open access in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand" by Janet Catterall, @ginnybarbour.bsky.social, and @kimtairi.bsky.social. doi.org/10.31274/jls...
doi.org
Filling the basket with knowledge: The evolution of open access in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
Extensive literature exists concerning the advancement of the open access movement in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, yet there remains a notable gap in understanding the evolution ...
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 16/02/2025
Kicking off planning for ResBaz Aotearoa 2025 and one of our regular speakers just told me that contributing to ResBaz is one of the highlights of their year :)
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 11/02/2025
Journal of the Royal Society of NZ is calling for papers - Special Issue on Māori Data Sovereignty: Research, Practice, and Policy. "...to document progress in Māori data sovereignty, positive contributions to both science and Te Ao Māori, and the coming challenges of the next decade."
royalsociety.org.nz
JRSNZ Call for Papers: Special Issue on Māori Data Sovereignty: Research, Practice, and Policy
E te tī! E te tā! He karanga tēnei ki a koutou e ngā pūkenga o te mana raraunga. The Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand (JRSNZ) is calling for Expressions of Interest (EOI) for a Special Iss...
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 30/01/2025
Wow that was quick! authorsguild.org/news/ag-laun...
authorsguild.org
Authors Guild Launches "Human Authored" Certification to Preserve Authenticity in Literature - The Authors Guild
AI-generated books are flooding online marketplaces and increasingly look like, and sometimes even read like, human-authored books. The reader may have no way of knowing if a book they come across is ...
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 29/01/2025
IRD positions itself as authority on data security despite recent discovery it provided 'hashed' personal information of 268k taxpayers to Meta, which it claimed was an 'irreversible' encryption method, but has thankfully since ended after it was demonstrated how easy it was to reverse it's hashing.
rnz.co.nz
Y2Q: What you need to know
Explainer: It's quickly emerging as the world's next 'Y2K moment', with potential to open up devices from door locks to data.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 23/01/2025
Science System Advisory Group report is out - recommends new Ministry (Science, Innovation and Technology), combining funding mechanisms into National Research Council, merging CRIs into fewer Public Research Organisations, disestablishing Callaghan Innovation, to name a few.
mbie.govt.nz
Science System Advisory Group | Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has convened a group of experts to provide advice on strengthening the science, innovation and technology system, including the challenges and aspirations of the sector, and opportunities for growth.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 20/01/2025
The Limits of Data by C. Thi Nguyen: "Data collection efforts aren’t neutral and they aren’t complete. They emphasize a particular style of knowledge formatted in a particular way...There is a cost to be paid for this scalability, this independence from context."
issues.org
The Limits of Data
Policymakers want to make decisions based on clear data, but important factors are lost when we rely solely on data. A philosopher writes:
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Reposted by Tom Saunders
Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 20/01/2025
httr2 1.1.0 is out now: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/01.... Includes way better tools for streaming data (as used by ellmer.tidyverse.org), new url manipulation functions, and a _bunch_ of minor improvements and bug fixes #rstats
tidyverse.org
httr2 1.1.0 - Tidyverse
httr2 1.1.0 introduces powerful new streaming capabilities with `req_perform_connection()`, as well as comprehensive URL manipulation tools, improved AWS support, and a bunch of bug fixes.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 09/01/2025
"I started building social media to give people a voice." FACTCHECK: Before Facebook there was 'Facemash', a website for ranking female Harvard students based on who was "hotter" between pairs of photos (taken without permission from the university's online directories by Zuckerberg).
about.fb.com
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes | Meta
We're ending our third party fact checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 23/12/2024
TIL that barbers, not physicians, performed surgery in the middle ages. You know those barber poles with the spinning blue/red stripes? Yeah those originated as a combination of leech vessel (at the top) and what patients held onto (the pole). Thanks @aucklandmuseum.bsky.social!
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 20/12/2024
Super useful tutorial on regex in #rstats!
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 19/12/2024
Hot on the heels of humanities & social sciences being removed from the Marsden Fund, now MBIE will no longer provide top-up funding to successful Horizon Europe projects. Announced December 19 and ahead of the SSAG report. Govt determined to cripple these disciplines.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 15/12/2024
Beginner #rstats tip: When using the pipe from {magrittr} (%>%) you can use '.' to refer to the object at the start of the pipe (an object placeholder), but when using the native R pipe (|>) you need to use '. = _' instead.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 08/12/2024
Thanks Farah, this is super useful to know about. Was thinking about creating a dashboard a while ago but hunting down different data sources (or OIA'ing them all) put me off. Good to know its all public.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 06/12/2024
A persuasive critique of removing humanities and social sciences from the Marsden Fund by @julietgerrard.bsky.social, previously the Prime Ministers Chief Science Advisor and former Marsden Chair.
thespinoff.co.nz
Juliet Gerrard: Funding the whole pie
It's a tiny portion of our overall funding, yet social sciences and humanities research makes a massive impact. Without it, the pie starts to crumble.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 05/12/2024
"What cutting social sciences and humanities from the Marsden Fund dramatically reduces is the ability of researchers to produce inconvenient evidence." Professor Tom Baker sums up the lopsided impact cutting humanities/social sci will have on the research landscape - @newsroom.co.nz.
newsroom.co.nz
Marsden Fund cuts a win for 'convenient' evidence
From the University of Auckland – Opinion: Cutting social sciences and humanities from NZ’s ‘blue skies’ research funding means dark times for independent thought.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 04/12/2024
This will speed the erosion of the Humanities at Universities and comes when the social sciences are more important than ever. "Real impact on our economy will come from areas such as physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences." #NZ #Research
rnz.co.nz
Government's Marsden Fund cuts: All humanities, social sciences research funding slashed
Cutting all research funding for the fields is a massive step backwards, critics say.
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 04/12/2024
New #research estimates 7–17% of sentences in computer science peer reviews written by LLMs, increases for reviews submitted close to deadline. #PeerReview sorely needs to be overhauled, but AI-generated reviews are obviously not the answer. #AcademicSky #Research #AI #Publishing
nature.com
ChatGPT is transforming peer review — how can we use it responsibly?
At major computer-science publication venues, up to 17% of the peer reviews are now written by artificial intelligence. We need guidelines before things get out of hand.
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Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 25/11/2024
I'm writing up a brief history of the tidyverse? What do you want to know about it? #rstats
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 26/11/2024
I wonder if at some point there will be the equivalent of 'organic' labelling for creative outputs to certify they were produced by humans.
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Quarto @quarto.org · 25/11/2024
Quarto 1.6 is out! 🎉 Download it here: quarto.org/docs/download/ Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. Blog post: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...
quarto.org
Quarto 1.6 – Quarto
Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. There are also a couple of breaking changes that will af...
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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 24/11/2024
Want to dip your toe into #programming? This free 6 hour intro to #Rstats online curriculum is a great entry point and we get good feedback when teaching it to researchers. Don't worry about the 'for ecologists' bit, that's just the flavour of dataset. #academicsky #research #science
datacarpentry.github.io
Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists: Summary and Setup
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