onfocus

"Even if academic Twitter ends up largely moving to Mastodon, the big question is whether the general public will move there, too, allowing scientists to communicate with more than just each other. “When I tweet, I’m talking to my neighbor and the person in the grocery store and the teenager who is thinking about studying science in college,” Fiesler says. “That’s the beauty of scientists on social media.”"

"As we previously reported, in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide. Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up. These are but a few of the studies that show the exact opposite of what progun politicians are saying. The science must not be ignored."

"One argument used to justify continued gun ownership is that mass shootings are often the result of shooters with severe mental illness. No doubt that mental health is a factor. But the rates of mental illness in the United States are similar to those in other countries where mass shootings rarely occur. It’s access to guns that is the problem."

"The “both sides” model of journalism is being exploited by bad actors intent on spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. “If the weight of the evidence allows you to make a judgment, but instead you go with ‘he said, she said,’ you're behaving recklessly even as you tell yourself you're doing the cautious thing,” as press critic Jay Rosen notes."

"Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns. Even then, a scientist might fix their own data, but as soon as someone else opens the same spreadsheet in Excel without thinking, errors will be introduced all over again."