Thank you to Teresa Lee at the Young Statisticians Section to invite me to present (slides) at the session “Getting your work to work” at the RSS conference. It’s a good opportunity for me to consolidate what I have been doing regarding reproducibility so far, in my teaching, research, and the current role of UKRN local network leads.

Fresh off the press, the paper on mixture distribution for network degrees is now available online on Statistica Neerlandica! The presentations I have recently made at Sunbelt Conference and an internal research day are based on the same paper, but we have changed the title to hopefully make it more appealing to the network science community.

First-timer at the INSNA Sunbelt Conference, this time in Edinburgh. It wasn’t ideal to present in the very last session on the last day of the conference, so thank you to those who turned up, and the numbers were indeed better than expected.

The inaugural UK Conference on Teaching Statistics (UKCOTS) took place last Thursday and Friday at Manchester. I didn’t know what to expect, but learned a whole lot and got inspired on what to do for my future module on data visualisation. I think I will try to implement (a subset of) the following things:

Some Newcastle colleagues and I met some counterparts in Durham today to discuss teaching mathematics and statistics, digital materials and assessment, etc. I presented the conversion of the teaching materials that I talked about, this time in a slightly more interactive way. My focus was on making a sequence of small gains, in the spirit of Kaizen, but the main comment that caught me by surprise was that the use of bookdown might facilitate plagiarism, if those inheriting the converted materials have no idea where they originated from, which could be https://bookdown.org or an online repo.

Docker has made building web applications much easier than before. For literate programming and teaching reproducibility, this means virtual environments can be built with the specific versions of software we want, allowing us to experiment with e.g. Jupyter notebooks and R Markdown in a “clean” environment, and not allowing one to claim that “it doesn’t work on my machine”.