blog

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading