coffee bars & wanderlust

research associate, communication studies. hella queer, hella feminist, hella vegetarian. Dani, 26, Germany

[legogradstudent]

Jumping on to a new project, the grad student makes exceptional progress in denying his dissertation’s existence.

[wonderwomangrad]

Realizing just how much it’s going to cost to attend that conference you got into

[legogradstudent]

Collapsing onto his childhood bed, the grad student crashes from a months-long adrenaline rush.

[socialscienceside]

03 June 2017 - #bitofaday. Lesson planning on a weekend, again. This is getting slightly unfortunate, especially since it’s a million degrees out. Also, my friend and I spontaneously decided to submit an extended abstract to a conference, which is due in two weeks. But the Call simply fits too well with the topic we’re working on to pass up, so here we go.

[socialscienceside]

yasanggok replied to your photo:                            

                   30 May 2017 - If you never hear from me again,...                

   i’m not even sure what’s happening here but this is terrifying    

Without going into too much detail, it’s a Python script that collects information about the followers of certain Twitter accounts. But the Twitter API (= application programming interface, aka the thing people generally use for social media data collection) only allows you a certain amount of queries per fifteen minutes, so when it hits capacity it waits until the next fifteen minute slot starts before continuing.

[socialscienceside]

30 May 2017 - If you never hear from me again, assume I perished waiting for the bloody Twitter API.

[socialscienceside]

A German Internet Institute: What will it be? | Science | DW | 22.05.2017

It's been years coming. The German government will now reveal who's been chosen to run a new national internet institute. The idea is to study the effects of digitalization on society and feed that back into the loop.

A very exciting thing happened today. So a few years ago, the German government decided to fund a German Internet Institute, the idea basically being to try and create a German equivalent to the MIT (which is probably much too late and hella unattainable, but you know, lol).

My boss was part of a team of about 15 professors who wrote a grant application for the project which will be funded with 50 millions EUR over the first five years, create several new professorships and lots and lots of research associate positions at the praedoc and postdoc level. They were one of five teams asked to submit a full proposal and today it was announced that they got it!! \o/ I won’t necessarily be directly involved with this (though it is also not completely off the table), but man, how exciting is this?

[socialscienceside]

21 May 2017 - Realistic desk pictures, Sunday afternoon lesson planning like a sucker edition. Gotta fill in for my boss in three classes next week, because she is enviably at a conference in California. First one is on journalistic decision making processes, which should go well, considering I know next to nothing about it, lol.

[shitmystudentswrite]

It’s okay to be straight

I have had some interaction with those that were heterosexual. And it does not bother me at all, even though I do believe in God.

[socialscienceside]

19 May 2017 - Grabbed a Soy Chai Latte for the last hour or so of work. Trying to troubleshoot a Python script. The trouble, of course, being that I do not, in fact, know how to code in Python.

Some things I am very quickly discovering about the lovely city of Münster, my second home for now: (a) it’s always raining, (b) people are absolutely hell-bent on biking everywhere regardless of that.

[overtoddity-deactivated20190107]

When in doubt, ask Stack Overflow. That website has helped me preserve my sanity through countless programming projects.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python

[socialscienceside]

Thanks, you're completely right! Stack overflow saved my butt when I was doing data analysis in R for my thesis. But I know even less about Python and my colleague wrote this script, so I while I know what it's supposed to do, I'm not that familiar with the details, so much headscratching is happening. 🙈🙊

[socialscienceside]

19 May 2017 - Grabbed a Soy Chai Latte for the last hour or so of work. Trying to troubleshoot a Python script. The trouble, of course, being that I do not, in fact, know how to code in Python.

Some things I am very quickly discovering about the lovely city of Münster, my second home for now: (a) it’s always raining, (b) people are absolutely hell-bent on biking everywhere regardless of that.

[npr]

Fidget spinners — the trendy toy of the moment — are causing a commotion. A lot of kids love them, just as many teachers hate them and some people think they’re more than just toys.

The basic fidget spinner has three prongs centered around a circle with bearings in the middle. Take one prong, give it a spin and watch as the triangle shape becomes a blur, sort of like a ceiling fan. The toys are manufactured by several different companies, and sold all over the place — airports, gas stations, train stations, toy stores.

In many places where fidget spinners are sold, they’re touted as miracle toys that help people focus as well as aid people dealing with post-traumatic stress and other disorders, but one expert says those claims aren’t backed up by science. And some teachers have complained that the toys are causing disturbances in the classroom.

Whirring, Purring Fidget Spinners Provide Entertainment, Not ADHD Help

GIF: Raquel Zaldivar/NPR

[socialscienceside]

No offense, but this article is really onesided. The reason there's no scientific evidence on whether these work is that research takes time and fidget toys just haven't been around for very long. "These have not been researched" is a very different beast than "these have been researched in numerous studies and scientific consensus is they do not work." Yet they're being presented as virtually the same thing here. Also, as others have pointed out, citing one researchers opinion as if it were absolute truth is icky on a topic we know so little about. (Which he even admits.)

Meanwhile anecdotal evidence in the form of numerous people who have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum and are saying fidget toys help them is being ignored. Yes, it would be beneficial to have these devices examined in a rigorous study (and I'm sure people are on that as we speak), but also listening to neurodivergent people's lived experiences is fundamental, ya feel? Surely they're being talked over enough as is.

Yes, there's an issue if fidget toys are being treated as, well, just toys and are disrupting in the class room. But the main issue is that they'll end up being banned and people who may actually well benefit from them won't have access to them anymore.

[humoristics]

The thing with statistics - via

[angremlin-deactivated20250312]

Numbers don’t lie but people can sure as fuck pick and choose the numbers they give you and phrase things to make them sound like they mean things they don’t

[agentumbls]

learn fucking stats or at least how they can hurt

[karethdreams]

As a wise man once said: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

[katistrophe]

@biologyweeps, relevant to your interests?

[biologyweeps]

Extremely relevant, yes, and the reason why proper statistical treatment of numbers is so damn important. 

[socialscienceside]

13 May 2017 - Weekends are for pleasure reading and drinking too much coffee.

[socialscienceside]

Student cited a publication by McCombs and Shaw as McShaw. This is either peak don't give a fuck or maybe he ships them, idk.

[socialscienceside]

11 May 2017 - glamorous academia life means grading papers on the evening train and eating packaged couscous.

[socialscienceside]

07 May 2017

Thought I should check in again at last, it’s been ages. I’ve completed my master’s with a ridiculous GPA and have two temporary research associate positions, meaning I spent every other week in a different city. This state of affairs will last until the end of this year and then I’m very hopeful that something more permanent will be made official. We presented our grant application for a huge collaborative research centre two weeks ago and it went really well, so fingers crossed we’ll get funded. For now, I’m somehow working on five articles or conference submissions simultaneously, so really, it’s all quite exciting if possibly a bit overwhelming. This was this morning editing a journal article on a very, very early cross-country train ride. Hope you’ve all been well!