iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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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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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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 28/02/2025

Juicy loophole?

Screenshot of the Services Agreement between Ministry of Education and Compass Group for school lunch programme showing quoted section: "Pay all Suppliers Personnel involved in delivery of the Services and Deliverables, no less than the then current 'Living Wage' as published htpps://www/livingware.org; with the web address highlighted to show it isn't a valid web address.

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Tom Saunders @tomsaunders.me · 23/01/2025

Good to see the value of collections being recognised in the report, and the acknowledgement that their funding should be non-contestable, but whether or not this translates into any significant changes for critical collections remains to be seen.

Screenshot of the Science System Advisory Group report showing section 98 which reads: "It should be noted that although simple data collection does not fit the usual definition of
research, it is that base data which is the essential fuel for subsequent scientific analysis and
modelling. For example, the curation of arthropod collections includes taxonomic research
essential for our biosecurity, and sea-level measurements require sophisticated
mathematical analyses to remove the effects of tidal change. And it is important to recognise
that data collected in this manner is also useful to researchers and industries outside
Government: the IDI data is important for many of the social sciences; land use data is
essential for many industries; and weather data is essential for farmers, etc"

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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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