Blogs

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Hacky Hour - Tuesday March 19

The Member Engagement Committee runs Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance on SORTEE’s Slack.

In this month’s Hacky Hour, 9 participants shared their code mistakes, starting up the SORTEE library of code mistakes! The goal is twofold: the normalization of coding errors and building a resource of (common) code mistakes that you can use during code review.

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Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Kickoff Meeting - Tuesday February 20

The Member Engagement Committee is breathing new life into the peer code review club: we will run Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance.

With 13 participants, we kicked off the first Code Club of 2024, learning how code review can make coding a more collaborative process in the scientific research cycle.

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Modern Palaeoanthropology advances towards greater openness and accessibility

In 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian and solicitor, along with Arthur Smith Woodward, the Curator of Geology at the Natural History Museum of London, proclaimed the discovery of the ‘missing link’ bridging the gap between apes and humans. They claimed to have found a fragment of a skull resembling that of a human in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England. Additionally, they uncovered mandible fragments that were posited to belong to the same individual. Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments, and collectively, they theorized that the discovery provided evidence of a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago. They unveiled their findings at a Geological Society meeting in 1912 (1), which were generally accepted by the scientific community. The fossil was named “Piltdown man,” creating a new species: Eoanthropus dawsoni. Unfortunately, the story does not end here.

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Setting the record straight: how data and code transparency caught an error and how I fixed it

“We were unable to reproduce your results, and I think the reason is that there is a bug in how you are calculating your correlation coefficients.”

That was part of an email I got this summer that absolutely crushed me. It doesn’t take much empathy to feel that knot in your stomach and existential dread from imposter syndrome, especially if you are currently a graduate student, post-doc, or another early-career researcher. What happens when you or someone else catches an error post-publication is not something most scientists know, certainly none of my peers or advisors did, but I got to experience the process from a supportive group of colleagues, advisors, and journal editors. I’m not writing this piece to commiserate on the fears, anxieties, and setbacks we have as scientists, nor am I going to belabor the details of the analysis or the justifications/explanations of how I missed the error; I’m writing this because the larger picture of the scientific process, when aided by data transparency, works to make our collective knowledge better.

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PeerJ Award Winners at SORTEE 2023

The third annual SORTEE conference was held virtually in October 2023, continuously over 24 hours to cover all time zones. There were 266 registered participants from 36 countries. The conference programme included plenary talks, 5 workshops, 5 hackathons and 8 unconference sessions. During the closing sessions two winners were announced for the SORTEE “Student Award” and “Researcher Award”. These awards have been renamed and redesigned to increase transparency, equity and inclusions. In the new award process, nominations were initially assessed for eligibility, then eligible candidates were entered as finalists into a lottery to select the winner for each award. The lottery was run using a random ‘spin the wheel’ program, requiring one re-spin to ensure fulfilment of SORTEE Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy. The winner of the ‘Student Award’ was: Euan Young affiliated with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The winner of the ‘Researcher Award’ was Birgit Szabo affiliated with the University of Bern in Switzerland.

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Complexities of reuse and synthesis in the open data landscape

Open data offers immense opportunities for ecologists and evolutionary biologists. The more good quality data are available, the more questions can be answered—and at broader spatial and temporal scales and at greater taxonomic generality. However, making use of open data is far from straightforward.

At this year’s SORTEE conference, Rose Trappes and Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar co-organized a productive unconference to tackle this complex topic. For that, they invited three experienced panellists: Matt Grainger, Antica Culina and Benno Simmons, and held a discussion about the opportunities and challenges of data reuse and data synthesis in the fast-moving world of open data. We heard from researchers experienced in reusing and synthesising data, as well as those active in creating open data resources for ecologists and evolutionary biologists.

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