Be ungovernable, like birds who make nests OUT OF ANTI-BIRD SPIKES. A new study describes resourceful Dutch & Belgian corvids besting evil architecture by stealing metal anti-bird strips and using them like thorny twigs, to construct their homes.

Like thorns, the spikes may protect their nests from predators.

Lead author Auke-Florian Hiemstra wrote an epic 🧵 about his research that's worth a read: https://twitter.com/AukeFlorian/status/1678703433900064773

Paper: https://www.hetnatuurhistorisch.nl/organisatie/publicaties/deinsea/deinsea-21/

#science #SciComm #birds #netherlands

UK University Strikes

🔹 Academics at UK universities are refusing to mark student work in order to protest their low pay and high workloads.

🔹 In response, most universities are deducting 50-100% of their pay.

🔹 This response implies that the average academic spends 50-100% of their time marking student work, which is false.

🔹 Indeed, if this were true, it would clearly warrant industrial action!!

https://twitter.com/DrKaitClark/status/1649158296643796992

#UCURising
@ucu
@kaitclark

Faux 1.2.1 is now out on CRAN (sorry for letting it get archived) #rstats

The biggest change is the addition of a new function rmulti() for simulating multivariate non-normal distributions using the NORTA method (normal-to-anything). I've run extensive tests, but it's still experimental, so let me know if you have any problems.

https://debruine.github.io/faux/articles/norta.html

Okay fediverse #hivemind, work your magic!  Say you were trying to convince a university to NOT go for Elsevier Pure for 'research information management' — what are viable open source solutions that interface with crossreff  and ORCID  and that allow listings and repositories of various kinds?

Especially appreciate links to active implementations at universities!