![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[sticky entry]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png){kind=small}
Welcome!
In my day job, I'm a scientist. I started as a psychologist, went sideways into statistics/medical research, and now work with weather data to synthesise it in ways useful in the Western Australian agricultural industries. One of my low energy, don't-have-enough time-for-it hobbies is reading academic journal articles -- primarily in the areas I'm most familiar with, but like anything else on the internet, there are lots of fascinating rabbit holes to explore
I spend a lot of time working in R, which means I spend a lot of time looking up things that I theoretically know how to use, but in practice don't use often enough to remember the syntax.
This blog brings those two together. It gives me an outlet for writing/rambling about the articles I'm reading, and a place to store all the bits of R knowledge I want to be able to access. Personal stuff is on my other blog, which i'm not linking here, because I want to be able to access this one from work.
![[sticky entry]](//www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png)
Sticky: R Topics Master Post
Jan. 28th, 2019 01:51 pmThis is a placeholder post. The plan is that I'll group the various posts I make by topic, and organise them here, for ease of reference. But first, I have to make some posts!
Today's reading
Jan. 29th, 2026 04:30 pmI'm reading a book review about The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. A book that I got so angry with that I chose to discontinue reading, because That Is Not How We Do Science.
The review, by Candice L. Odgers, can be found here. The most important quote from my perspective is the one below, wherein Odgers effectively accuses Haidt of making the common first year statistics course blunder of confounding correlation with causation.
The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.
Today's reading
Jan. 28th, 2026 09:23 amThe Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI - Cory Doctorow, tumblr post, December 05, 2025.
This post is the text of a lecture about criticising AI, and is a ~40 minute summary of a book coming out some time this year. I'm personally skimming for commentary that relates to children and genAI, because that is my current research focus, but I'm also reading for getting a feel for the kinds of hidden things that people say about AI so that I can recognise them when I'm doing interviews and need to follow up. Basically: upskilling.
The definition of a centaur (person supported by automation) and a reverse-centaur (automation requiring a human moving part) was useful to me as contextualising the rest of the talk. Particularly the idea that many AI tools are being developed specifically to be reverse-centaurs.
Depending on your viewpoint, this is either a dry and cynical take on USian style capitalism, or a wide eyed and aware realistic understanding. I lean to the latter. I wish I didn't, but the realities of the USA stock market are terrifyingly dystopian.
We need to protect artists from AI predation, not just create a new way for artists to be mad about their impoverishment.
It’s the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, “disruptive” things: Big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year.
Overall: there are some great high level summaries of So! Much! about AI and the issues with the way that it is being criticised and the ways in which this is being leveraged for over reach.
Problematic language use
Jan. 8th, 2026 11:30 amIn one of the papers I'm reading today, I have come across the term 'problematic technology use (PTU)' and a reference to a measurement scale for PTU in pre-school children. I took a short detour down the rabbit hole of 'what counts as PTU' and let me say, I am not impressed.
What this smacks of is the same smug assumptions of authority knows best that go with the term 'non-compliant' when medicine regimens are discussed, as if people making their own cost/benefit analysis of effects vs side-effects and choosing 'no' is wilful and childish behaviour. There are absolutely echoes of middle class 'good parenting' and assumptions about what children 'should' be using technology for.
I'm choosing to back away from this topic, because it isn't relevant Right Now. But oh, am I frustrated by assumptions that come down to 'you should do it my way'.
What this smacks of is the same smug assumptions of authority knows best that go with the term 'non-compliant' when medicine regimens are discussed, as if people making their own cost/benefit analysis of effects vs side-effects and choosing 'no' is wilful and childish behaviour. There are absolutely echoes of middle class 'good parenting' and assumptions about what children 'should' be using technology for.
I'm choosing to back away from this topic, because it isn't relevant Right Now. But oh, am I frustrated by assumptions that come down to 'you should do it my way'.
Today's reading
Jan. 7th, 2026 09:57 amMartinez, Miriam, Catherine Stier, and Lori Falcon. 2016. “Judging a Book by Its Cover: An Investigation of Peritextual Features in Caldecott Award Books.” Children’s Literature in Education 47 (3): 225–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9272-8.
Why am I reading this?: Because I will be analysing middle grade fiction, and I'm thinking about what will be in and out of scope of my analysis.
Conclusion: I need to be aware of the peritextual elements of the books I'm reading. While I might not end up analysing them, I do want to capture anything that I can point as as related to my research question. Further, it is a great example of writing about this kind of analysis, being clearly set out and easy to follow.
General thoughts / notes:
- Focus is all aspects other than the text, called `peritext`.
- Claim of this paper is that these are fundamental to the understanding of picture books. Argument is well presented and convincing; it also somewhat matches up to my experience of reading picture books to pre-school kids, in that they do want to talk about what is on the cover / other visual aspects, and they do use those features as a jumping off point for understanding the story. Less so for any of the peritext features that are in small print, such as copyright notices.
- previous work cited has looked mostly at endpapers; this study expands to look at multiple peritextual elements
- Content analysis of Caldecott Winners and Honor books, 1938-2013; justification "wanted to examine high quality children's literature spanning several decades". There is an acknowledgement that this might bias the sample, in that the quality of the peritextual elements may be part of why these books are selected. Sub-selection by genre was done.
- very clear about what aspects of peritext were considered and why; and how these were coded. I would put the level of detail at 'reproducible'.
- peritextual elements that are more common hold more information -- thus dust jackets and title pages give lots of story information; this is common across the time period. There are small changes in the amount of story information in endpapers and on copyright pages.
- lots of peritextual information about character and setting (place, era, season, time of day); less about plot, key elements or genre.
Why am I reading this?: Because I will be analysing middle grade fiction, and I'm thinking about what will be in and out of scope of my analysis.
Conclusion: I need to be aware of the peritextual elements of the books I'm reading. While I might not end up analysing them, I do want to capture anything that I can point as as related to my research question. Further, it is a great example of writing about this kind of analysis, being clearly set out and easy to follow.
General thoughts / notes:
- Focus is all aspects other than the text, called `peritext`.
- Claim of this paper is that these are fundamental to the understanding of picture books. Argument is well presented and convincing; it also somewhat matches up to my experience of reading picture books to pre-school kids, in that they do want to talk about what is on the cover / other visual aspects, and they do use those features as a jumping off point for understanding the story. Less so for any of the peritext features that are in small print, such as copyright notices.
- previous work cited has looked mostly at endpapers; this study expands to look at multiple peritextual elements
- Content analysis of Caldecott Winners and Honor books, 1938-2013; justification "wanted to examine high quality children's literature spanning several decades". There is an acknowledgement that this might bias the sample, in that the quality of the peritextual elements may be part of why these books are selected. Sub-selection by genre was done.
- very clear about what aspects of peritext were considered and why; and how these were coded. I would put the level of detail at 'reproducible'.
- peritextual elements that are more common hold more information -- thus dust jackets and title pages give lots of story information; this is common across the time period. There are small changes in the amount of story information in endpapers and on copyright pages.
- lots of peritextual information about character and setting (place, era, season, time of day); less about plot, key elements or genre.
Is this thing still on?
Sep. 2nd, 2025 08:42 pmHi! It's been a while, and I never did get the hang of tidying up and posting my reading notes here\*. Since the last post I've changed career track (possibly more than once - in 2019 I was possibly doing crop protection and/or climate work, I've done disease modelling, and now I've gone back to uni) and am on track to be a humanities rather than a STEM person. I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up, but I am doing a \*LOT\* of reading of the literature at this point in time, and having somewhere to post summaries has the potential to be very useful for future me.
I'm making no promises as to what that might look like though. Maybe it will be the reference (with a link?) and then some commentary about what I found interesting? Maybe it will be tiny discussion topics. Because my research is looking like being about kids, artificial intelligences, media, kids books, and parenting (yes, they all tie together!) there is a wide range of Stuff I might talk about, and the interesting bits change from day to day.
\* the notes exist. A lot of notes exist. I'm not retrospectively going to go looking at them though.
I'm making no promises as to what that might look like though. Maybe it will be the reference (with a link?) and then some commentary about what I found interesting? Maybe it will be tiny discussion topics. Because my research is looking like being about kids, artificial intelligences, media, kids books, and parenting (yes, they all tie together!) there is a wide range of Stuff I might talk about, and the interesting bits change from day to day.
\* the notes exist. A lot of notes exist. I'm not retrospectively going to go looking at them though.
Quite a long time back now, I added 'consequences of extended bed rest' to my topics of interest list. At the time, I did a very superficial review of the literature, and found a lot of studies on healthy young men, which I didn't think were going to be much use to my set of chronically ill friends who were interested in the potential risks to them of spending much of their lives in bed (or equivalent).
Today, I've done a wander through google scholar, and eventually lucked in to the search term "restricted physical activity"; bed rest which has netted me 579 references when I allow citations, and 562 when I don't (I wish there were a way to say 'show me the ones I've lost' but I have no idea how; I've stuck with no citations for now). I'll note that this is a much better number than my original search ('extended bed rest'), which yielded 1.2 million responses.
Obviously I'm not going to read all of those - for those moment, I'm whittling it down to papers in English that I can get the full text of, that talk about bed rest in settings other than prolonged hospital care/ICU settings. I didn't actually look at all 562 references -- at about the 350 mark, there stopped being any relevant papers on a page, so I stopped looking after multiple such pages.
I'm omitting papers for the following reasons: ( list )
I'm leaving in most others where I'm a bit ho-hum about whether they are going to be relevant. This includes some that are about rehabilitation or 'mobility protocol' where the reference is to people who are decidedly unwell; those talking about 'strict bed rest'; or where the title made no sense but didn't meet any of the omit criteria. I suspect these are going to fail out in the reading process, but just in case...This has netted me a total of 51 papers to think about. The next phase is to link these all in to my zotero library, and then start the 'yes, no, maybe' sort to see which ones I'm going to read. At least four of the papers I downloaded are on interesting subjects I'd like to follow up on, but the papers won't turn up in this topic!
