Dan Scott @dbs@scholar.social

On the bright side, I can now uninstall the 450MB Creative Cloud and 2.5GB (!!!!) Acrobat DC.

Looks like I'll be purchasing a license to PDF X-Change Editor Plus ($54 USD) to make this thing work. That's the software my supervisor had to use to get his signature on it.

This process is *garbage*.

So now I've signed up for an Acrobat Pro DC trial account and downloaded the whole damned Creative Cloud to try and fix the fillable fields so that I can check off the required boxes and add my own digital signature.

And it doesn't work. Won't let me edit the document because there are already digital signatures on it (makes sense but now I have to ask the committee to start over?)

I mean, can't this be a simple web app using university authentication?

So as a grad student my committee and I all need to sign a progress report every 12 months. The problem is that it is a PDF form, and while the free-as-in-beer Acrobat Reader theoretically works if all of the boxes are checked off and all the text is filled out before everyone digitally signs off in sequence, inevitably someone signs it by editing the PDF to include an image and that breaks all the fillable fields. 1/2

Wow. One of our uni's research centres maintains a website hosted on Wix that takes 25 seconds to load a single page, and which gets a Lighthouse audit performance score of 5/100.

I understand they prefer the freedom of 3rd party hosting vs. the uni's web constraints, but WTH?

University IT: Zoom meetings can and should be scheduled with a password to avoid Zoombombing

University president's office, two days later: schedules an all-hands Zoom meeting sans password

Trying to convince a colleague who has been blocked for weeks by not having access to SPSS (due to social distancing measures) to try out Python + Pandas or R.

I'm pointing to https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/ as a set of reasonable lessons for someone new to programming.

Hoping they will give it a shot!

I started my doctoral program in 2018-2019.

No, family, my convocation ceremony has not been cancelled due to COVID-19. Could you at least give me four years before you start asking me about convocation?

Jeez!

Love trying to access a paper behind a paywall, only to get a Cloudfront 504 error.

What was that value that proprietary publishers add, again?

Having gone through the process of learning pandas (I'm a long-time Pythonista) enough to merge, clean, and recode some survey results, I would feel more comfortable loading the data into PostgreSQL and munging the hell out of it there with CTEs, GROUP BYs, and aggregate functions, etc.

But... having a perfectly replicable, automated process from start to finish is nothing to sneeze at.

For the last two weeks our research team has been trying to agree on one number: how many people completed our survey.

I think I've finally convinced them that the number I've given, implemented in Python pandas, is the most correct.

This does not bode well for the real data analysis to follow :/

So just descriptive stats for now. I haven't even started plotting data yet, but I'm looking forward to that.

So much better than fumbling around in a spreadsheet!

I am really liking Python's pandas for cleaning up and analyzing these survey results. I was facing two sets of results for the same survey with responses that were coded differently in each set (due to translation reordering).

So I'm working with the text value of the responses and using https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.replace.html#pandas.DataFrame.replace to get everything into a single language, then doing a first pass of analysis with https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.describe.html#pandas.DataFrame.describe . So far so good! And REPLICABLE!

For context, I discussing this with a research team and was surprised they wanted to keep the partial data. Given the preamble, keeping the data seems unethical.

They have since changed their mind. \o/

Consent preamble on a survey that you're taking said "You can choose to withdraw at any time by closing your browser or navigating away."

After you complete about half of the survey, you decide that you don't want to finish it and close the browser.

What do you expect the researchers to do with the partial data you submitted?

I helped design a bilingual survey, but didn't implement it. The PI entered it all into Qualtrics, twice: once for each language.

Now that we have the results, the codes don't match up between languages (of course), so I have to do a ton of cleanup before I can start analysing the data.

But first I have to stop staring at https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-tools/translate-survey/ wondering why the PI didn't just use that?

See p.8 of https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.63n2.119 for my current example. (It's paywalled--stupid ALA--but Google Scholar will find a perfect copy for you at academia.edu)

If I zoom in on-screen, I can barely make out the blurry label text.

Worse, even when printed at 600dpi--theoretically the whole reason for the weird layout--fig. 3 is unreadable.

I hate when I have to struggle to read graph labels in PDF articles on even a 27" QHD screen.

There has to be a better way. Like HTML?

Or at least not arbitrarily scaling the graphic down to 5/8s of the page width. Use the full "8.5"" page-width; it's not like an extra page or two in article length is costing you anything.

Today from when you join the review of draft #1 of a collaboratively-edited 30 page whitepaper on how to implement X in an information retrieval system, where X is a cool thing big corporations have been doing for a few years, and ask the question "So has any research been done on whether X actually benefits users? Is there a lit review?", and you get (presumably embarrassed) silence as a response.

Guess who gets to pull together that lit review?