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  House Science Committee members Zoe Lofgren and Whitesides write to White House OSTP director Michael Kratsios on the black hole of where NSF money is going: "We have no reason to be surprised that you chose to continue this pattern of obfuscation and disrespect of the Committee’s oversight..." https://democrats-science.house.gov/news/press-releases/lofgren-whitesides-demand-transparency-on-ostp-initiative-funded-with-nsf-money #NSF #Science #USpol

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@rOpenSci/117048861709155020 I got so much joy seeing how @rOpenSci played a part in these fantastic student projects using NYC's Open Data #RStats #NYC

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  I don't know why but working on a laptop on a long subway ride, with 30 seconds of hotspot wifi every few minutes at the stations, is probably my most productive mode.

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thecarpentries/117121809734049117 I'm awed at and incredibly grateful for what @drkariljordan and Erin have done at the Carpentries, stewarding and growing this lynchpin of the open science training ecosystem.

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  NSF grants will fall to *half* of what they were before the Trump Admin this year, the lowest number since the early 1980s. Why? (1) The White House is withholding $1 Billion for private projects, and (2) The NSF is using every accounting trick to make it look like they are spending without making new grants. New reporting from Dan Garisto at Nature, using Grant Witness data. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6 #NSF #Science #USpol

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  RE: https://ecoevo.social/@noamross/117017079246581729 EDIT: One more day! Get your comment in by the end of Monday, Aug 24! --- Three more days to comment on NSF's attempt to smuggle in OMB's already-rejected policies of terminating any grant without cause, gutting civil rights obligations and restricting international collaborations. Submit your comment today! Then call your representatives. https://fight2win.standupforscience.net/campaign/ProtectNSF_Comment/ #NSF #Scienc...

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  Grant Witness has a new website at https://grantwitness.org along with a newsletter and fedi handle: @grantwitness.org Grant Witness tracks data on federal funding to defend American science and the rule of law. Visit or follow keep up with with federal agency actions and grantmaking, read our investigations, or explore and download on granular grant-tracking data. #NIH #NSF #CDC #SAMHSA #EPA #Science #USpol

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  NEW: Last week's terminations at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) total at least 150 grants worth $230M. That is over half of the agency's portfolio. It's the latest assault on healthcare, health equity, and the rule of law. Researchers had been left hanging as AHRQ failed to renew budgets for months, sometimes over a year. This continues the war on DEI. The word "equity" is the best predictor of termination. https://grant-witnes...

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  Thousands of biomedical projects are stuck in limbo as NIH drags out renewals months after annual budgets expire. Since 2025, the rate of projects renewed more than 60 days late has TRIPLED. These gaps leave scientists unable to plan research, keep students and technicians employed, or maintain long-term studies. https://grant-witness.us/posts/2026-06-23_overdue-funding/ #NIH #Science #USPol

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  What's the preferred way these days to include a font in an R package (as part of a ggplot theme)? Examples? Can we use variable fonts? @hrbrmstr @thomasp85 #RStats

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  Making use of this one-liner today as we're getting a bunch of intermittent Internet outages in the neighborhood while ! ping -c 1 www.google.com &> /dev/null; do sleep 1; done; say "Internet is back"

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  RE: https://fosstodon.org/@CenterforOpenScience/116840115226051857 I've been consistently impressed by the moral clarity and steadfastness of the @CenterforOpenScience team in the past 18 months, as the administration has sought to co-opt the policies they advocate as cudgels for politicization of science. Thank you!

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  NEW: The National Science Foundation has been doing everything it can to meet its legal requirements to spend funds while throttling awards going to U.S. Science. While both are slow, spending is twice as fast as new awards. It's not because awards are bigger: they are *smaller* by an average of $100,000. Rather, NSF is directing more funds to support old projects, and forward-fund budgets, than actually making new awards to invest in science. https://grant-witness.us/posts/2026-06-3...

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  Very excited to be working with Angie Reed + the Tribal Exchange Network (https://www.tribalexchangenetwork.org/) on the revival of {redoc}, an #rstats package enabling collaboration on reproducible reports via tracked changed in WYSIWYG documents. Thanks to the @RConsortium for selecting us, and congrats to the other grant winners! https://r-consortium.org/posts/r-consortium-awards-first-round-of-2025-isc-grants/ --- FOLLOW UP: We need a new name! https://github.com/redoc-dev/redoc/discussi...

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  Annika Horne is making a great series of short films about the great disruption of scientific research. Here's one about the administration kicking NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies out of their building https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWf1yOq2fk&list=PLK41C0Vfc8JWbsoQr0Glvarl_y6oEkEn2 #NASA

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  A team of researchers surveyed scientists from the Grant Witness database whose #NIH grants were terminated last year and found: Half of terminations in the name of "equity" were of BIPOC researcher's grants. 60% of terminations in the name of the administration's anti "gender ideology" (itself a blatant ideological crusade) were of grants to sexual and gender minority scientists. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/TLRHAMERICAS/article/PI...

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  What's the current state of remote parquet-querying tools (duckdb, arrow, maybe polars) and WebR? That is, if I want a WebR/Shinylive app to query a remote parquet file and only transfer the query results? Or is the way to go, say, loading duckdb's WASM build and have a shiny call it via eval_js? Any examples? @hrbrmstr @jeroenooms @gws @kirill #RStats #WebR #DuckDB

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  #RStats challenge: How to make a pie-beeswarm like this one from the Minnesota Star Tribune showing the relative sizes of ICE/CBP and local police forces? https://www.startribune.com/how-ice-numbers-compare-to-twin-cities-largest-police-forces/601562617 (Challenge 2: Try not to argue about pie charts in the replies 😉)

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  OMB has clearly decided to ignore Congressional intent and implement their own preferred budget at #NSF. It's outrageous, unconstitutional, and is gutting our scientific capacity. Their excuses are such thin bullshit - There have been *two* SBE grants awarded this year, both for how to make humans work better with AI. Thanks to Dan Garisto for the deep dive here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01287-0 Detailed data from Grant Witness here https://grant-witness.us/funding...

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  RE: https://fosstodon.org/@Posit/116404450648261613 I had missed that {renv} now installs packages in parallel! Many thanks to @kevinushey #RStats

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  We're hiring a Research #Data Scientist in my group at EcoHealth Alliance! Join a team working on disease movement through travel + trade and outbreak forecasting. Build Bayesian and interpretable ML models using reproducible #RStats MS/PhD or equiv, $70-80K, Moving/visa support to NYC, or remote (US EST hours). Due 1/15 https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/career/research-data-scientist-2023 @jobsecoevo @rstats #Epidemiology #EpiVerse #DiseaseEcology #DataDon #Job #PostDoc

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  I find the {reviser} 📦 by Mark Burri + Philipp Wegmueller (now @rOpenSci reviewed!) interesting: It shows how economists deal with a problem that epidemiologists grapple with a lot: revisions of past time series https://ropensci.org/blog/2026/04/13/reviser/ @seabbs #RStats

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  Excited that @rOpenSci's April co-working and office hours will be held jointly with the Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease Network! Join us and CSID network hosts Irene Ramos and Adamu Saleh Saidu on Apr 7 at 16:00 UTC to get to know a peer community!: https://ropensci.org/events/coworking-2026-04/

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@rOpenSci/116369011699593006 I'm very excited about this collaboration between @rOpenSci's R-Universe and @bioconductor: modernizing build systems for #rstats while expanding and testing new models for governance and development. Thanks to @jeroenooms for his leadership, the BioC team's collaboration, and @RConsortium's support!

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  We've released a major update to our #NIH tracking at Grant Witness. We now publish a complete, multi-source history of events to track the complex administrative and legal journey of each grant. https://grant-witness.us/posts/2026-03-39_nihv3/

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  Hey @millerdl, do you have that animated GIF of the spatial uncertainty of dolphin distribution in the Gulf of Mexico handy somewhere? @ericJpedersen @gavinsimpson

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  @hrbrmstr I was just writing you to see how you were doing and then saw your post!

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  NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics? 1) Write NSF 2) Write your Congressperson 3) CC us at grfp@grant-witness.us so we can compile for a collective follow-up with the House Science commitee and NSF leadership Details and template at https://grant-witness.us/grfp-letter Update: A new round of these RWRs appear to have been sent out today (Feb 4). Keep those letters coming! #NSF #GRFP

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  Yesterday the Trump administration suspended nearly 300 #NSF grants to UCLA, claiming the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students." The NSF grants total $179M, half of which was still outstanding: CAREER grants, a major math institute, and basic science research and training of all types. More at https://grant-witness.us/posts/UCLA-new-terminations/, thanks to Grant Witness member Mally Shan, with grant-level...

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  Honored to be working to defend science against authoritarianism alongside so many inspiring colleagues profiled here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02811-4