@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

lindamciver

@lindamciver@aus.social

Educator, Writer, Troublemaker, Computer Scientist. Not necessarily in that order. Warning: "May attack the education system if left unsupervised (supervision might not be sufficient)" (quote credit: Solara) She/Her, living and working on unceded Wurundjeri/Bunurong land. ED of the Australian Data Science Education Institute, author of Raising Heretics. Podcaster at Make Me Data Literate.

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Catvalente, to random
@Catvalente@wandering.shop avatar

New essay on Substack's recent dubious choices concerning moderation and hopefully some open discussion on what the hell to do about it now:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/on-recent-developments-at-substack

lindamciver,
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

@Catvalente “It is exhausting just trying to exist with any level of moral consistency online nowadays. And the people who keep being handed the keys to several kingdoms don’t ever bother to worry about it. They just let us tear ourselves apart trying to do the right thing while they feast. It’s all a game to them. It’s not remotely a game to us. So there’s no equivalence.” god, yes.

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard are an evolutionary dead end. They are not “on the cusp of a breakthrough”. They are fabulous marketing tools. Wonderfully sparkly smoke and mirror machines.

https://adsei.org/2023/09/21/there-is-no-existential-threat-chatgpt-is-an-evolutionary-dead-end/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Folks, I'm running a little survey to evaluate people's attitudes to taking covid precautions, and how that relates to catching covid. As an online survey, it's not exactly gold standard research! But it should still give some interesting insights. Please fill it out (it should be pretty quick!), and please share!
https://forms.gle/1f2owXNrijYFsrHZA

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

This, tech industry. This is why we can't have nice things. https://adsei.org/2023/10/26/an-indictment-of-the-tech-industry/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Look, I'm a writer. I know there are too many superlatives in this piece. But there are not enough superlatives in the world for what @neilhimself and Fourplay did last night.

https://lindamciver.wordpress.com/2024/01/19/transcendent-and-creepy-all-at-once/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

What kind of science do you wish people understood? What science do people need to understand in order to make the world a better place?

Obviously Epidemiology & the spread of infectious diseases, ecology, and climate science are right up there.

I'd add food science - by which I mean how food cooks, how/when bacteria grow in food, what happens to different foods when you refrigerate or freeze them, or expose them to oxygen, and nutritrion,

as well as health - what does your body need to be healthy, how do you know when you're getting sick, what do we know and not know about how the body works.

I'd add the psychology of marketing, of sleep, and of learning.

Also the physics of motion - stopping distance, friction, water, etc.

And the nature of science itself.

What would you have in that list?

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

It always makes me sad to hear the praise and love people get after they die. “You’re amazing. Your work is so important. We love you. You matter to me.” We need to say these things more while people are alive.

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Got home late last night. Greeted by Emerald’s famous “What time do you call THIS??” stare

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Using Data to track your own health (or: how to startle your surgeon by turning up with graphs)

https://adsei.org/2023/06/22/using-data-to-track-your-health/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

um...

" A more recent study shows that toxoplasma infection prevalence was a consistent, positive predictor of entrepreneurial activity."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31980266/

lindamciver, to TodayILearned
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

The most important word there is not data, or coding, or even science. It's Students. The emphasis in this word cloud is not on technical skills, it's on people. And that's what Data Science is about, when you get down to the crux of it. It's about people. About purpose. About meaning.

https://adsei.org/2023/12/18/what-really-matters/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Imagine if there was a disease that became endemic. A virus that was unavoidable, that everyone gets, over and over. And imagine if that virus, if it didn’t prove fatal, stole just a little every time. A bit of energy here. A bit of immune function there. A bit of cognitive function somewhere else. Imagine what the impact of that might be on society, on workplaces, on people. Then look around you. What do you see? Do you see a new level of struggle? Of systems, and people, cracking under the strain?

https://adsei.org/2023/10/09/what-if/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

There is a difference between not being able to guarantee flights, and selling seats on flights that you can guarantee will not fly.

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

We could easily spend years talking about all the possible problems with data, but that's not helpful when you have a dataset in front of you here and now. So what are some questions you can ask about quantitative data to figure out whether you can trust it?

https://adsei.org/2024/01/22/whats-wrong-with-this-data/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

In March 2024 I shared a survey online to see how covid cautious people are, and whether there's a correlation between levels of caution and number of covid infections. The resulting dataset is rich, complex, and deeply flawed (like all surveys and most real datasets!). There's scope for purely statistical investigations, and deep discussions about the ways in which such a survey is flawed.

I'm now releasing the full dataset (and it's live, so more results may come in) for student projects and any other investigations. Like all material on this site, it is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License, and I would love it if you shared your projects, thoughts, and results back with us, so that we can share them with interested teachers and students.

https://adsei.org/covid-experience-dataset/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

me: you were smirking
16yo: I am not responsible for what my face does in its free time

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

When you penalise wrong answers, you build in a sense of shame and failure to being wrong that most people never get over. It leads to cheating, to covering up of mistakes, and to avoiding doing things where being wrong is a possibility.

https://adsei.org/2024/05/03/learning-to-be-wrong/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

This conversation with Grant Ennis was enlightening and enraging. I'm thinking about activism and making change SO differently now. Check it out!

"So like while we would never believe that if we saw a stone rolling down a mountain, that if we all just stared at it and willed it back up the hill, it would do that, we do tend to believe that if we all individually do our part for the environment or ask people to just individually act that because people want that to be so and want that to work, that it just will, we believe that if we give people more information than then somehow just spontaneously they will change their behaviour, which really is quite fanciful."

https://adsei.org/podcast/grant-ennis/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

"data governance is not a topic that gets a lot of love. people yeah switch off when they hear it, but it really makes a huge amount of difference to what you're able to do with data (and not just avoiding big regulator fines)" new episode of MMDL with Fiona Tweedie!

https://adsei.org/podcast/fiona-tweedie-on-data-governance/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Sometimes when a drug I am on causes side effects and I am prescribed another one to tackle the side effects, I start to suspect I will wind up swallowing a horse...

she swallowed the spider to catch the fly,...

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Laura Summers and I are writing a Teachers' Guide to AI, but we need help from teachers. Please share to all the teachers you know!
https://adsei.org/2024/05/17/teacher-guide-to-ai-please-help/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

I love this. This is a word cloud made from the quotes I noted down from episodes of Make Me Data Literate Podcast. Apart from the colours and the shape, I didn't tweak it at all, and what's the word at the centre of it all? People. It's so perfect. Data for its own sake is meaningless, but used to help us solve problems and make the world a better place? It's all about people! I love that there's nothing technical about this word cloud. It's all about impact!

There are some fabulous episodes coming up, but meanwhile there's a back catalog consisting of amazing folks like Ellen Broad, Polly Hemming, Owen Churches, Alan Duffy, Linden Ashcroft, Richard Denniss, 🧐 Laura Summers, Greg Jericho, Larene Le Gassick, Antony Green, Margaret Hellard, Juliette O'Brien OAM, Kate Carruthers, Paola Oliva-Altamirano, Jarrod Hughes, Ketan Joshi, and more! oh my goodness! It's been an extraordinary ride with incredible people who have been incredibly generous with their time and expertise. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts, or at https://adsei.org/podcast/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

cat’s in the bag

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

Our family has been navigating the world of gender affirming care for some years now, and I am increasingly frustrated with how many of the health care decisions made for (not by!) trans folks are made for political reasons, rather than medical or health focused reasons. I'm going to write about that, but I'm just the parent of trans folks. I'm not trans. So first, I want to platform some trans voices, because I think we could build a vastly more inclusive world if more of us understood what it's like to be trans.

https://lindamciver.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/gender-affirming-care-part-1-wrens-story/

lindamciver, to random
@lindamciver@aus.social avatar

this is absolutely on point

https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/the-relentless-pressure-on-women-to-be-perfect-and-silent-to-deserve-their-success/

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