In ecology & conservation the skills PhD students need for a career in academia are almost totally at odds with what nonacademic jobs are looking for. The sector is really asking people to put all their eggs in one basket if they want a research career. If they want a research career students need to entirely focus in papers and grants.

My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand And that animal is just thriving out there,doing literally none of the stuff his buddies do, and noone really understands why or how the animal is continuing to live its best life out there.

In the UK we can order 7 rapid covid tests per person every 24 hours. A lot of Americans are very angry about this for the wrong reasons.

I think we can all agree the true villian in the wobbegong drama is 'Arcane Animals' on Youtube, a channel that scrapes content without credit, and which was the origin of the mislabelled photograph. If you thought it couldn't get any more contentious they also have a pro mandarin duck video.

Do you hate running but are thinking about taking it up? Here's a few things people don't tell you:
1. It might not become enjoyable and that's ok. Two years in and I still hate it with the burning passion of 1000 firey suns. 2. Even if you hate it and don't get runners high it can still make you feel better. Whenever I feel low it's like we'll, it could be worse, at least I'm not running right now.

So I've seen a fair few 'it's wrong to send a rover to mars when species are dying' takes - and I personally think they are misguided and potentially damaging.

And I say this as someone who really doesn't like space! (1/n) First off, let's look at the cost: $2.6 billion.

That's literally a drop in the ocean in terms of government budgets. They could quite easily spend that on sending a rover to Mars AND spend the same on conservation. (2/n)

You've heard of feeding the ducks but how about feeding the herons? Nice of them to install a new pond on Clapham common

So, inspired by by this, here's a thing I think quite a few people may have not noticed in #rstats (and other programming languages). When I first saw this i was like what the heck R is broken someone pls help.

https://twitter.com/CovinoKristen/status/1362247676322934784

R does something called bankers rounding. If you have a lot of n.5 numbers in a vector and you were to do your normal rounding where 0.5 rounds up then that would increase the mean of your sample. By rounding .5 to the nearest even number R avoids this bias.

It's a good job I'm so utterly drained and exhausted because otherwise I'd just be pure rage right now.

Instead I'm just tired and sad. I can't address what has come to light, and indeed is still coming to light, in the birding world this week anywhere near adequately. Heck I can barely manage to get out my pyjamas.

It's called a model Craig.

https://twitter.com/craigcook3/status/1215151874736738304

This is so much in my wheelhouse that I'm going to have to do a modelling thread aren't I? I hope you're all excited ^_^

Bear with me I'll get on it shortly.

On my first day in Botswana I saw a baby leopard and look how cute it is I've previously only seen brief glimpses of leopards as they walked through long grass, so it was incredible to see them so close and relaxed. Mum was busy having dinner up a tree. They do this to keep the kill away from lions and hyenas

There's a lot of really inspirational people on Twitter, but I want to name a few that have inspired me this year! (a thread) #tweepspiration2018 1. @jesswade - Jess has has a storming year creating hundreds of profiles for women scientists on @Wikipedia and successfully crowdfunded to get copies of @AngelaDSaini's Inferior into schools!! I also met her and she is totally awesome.
theguardian.com/education/2018…

So folks, what package would you recommend for paralellising code in R? I thought this would be simple based on previous experience with parallelising code but I am quickly realising it is not going to be simple. Blargh.