This is what terrorism is

Last night, a man walked into the foyer of the Manchester Arena as the crowds were leaving an Ariana Grande concert. Surrounded by the happy faces of children, he detonated a bomb, killing and injuring as many as possible. Others have also died or been maimed, and all deserve the very deepest sympathy and respect — but girls and young women were undoubtedly the main target. It was an Ariana Grande concert. And even if the killer didn’t know who the members of an Ariana Grande concert audience were likely to be, he will have seen them all around him before he chose to end their lives.

Thoughts must be with the victims and with those for whom they were and are the whole world — and in those family homes where (as a friend wrote this morning) ‘a make-up- and clothes-strewn room is silent.’ And thoughts must also turn to the prevention of further atrocities. The act was possible because of particular security assumptions that now should perhaps be revisited. But it was also possible because of certain fantasies that must no longer be indulged. The killer’s intention should have been inconceivable; it was not.

This is what terrorism is. Never accept a point of view from which it might be justified.

RStudio, Jupyter, Emacs, Vim: nothing that works properly is easy to use and nothing that is easy to use works properly

EDIT: Some of the problems described below are mitigated or resolved by not saving to a network drive. That doesn’t help with all the problems, though. RStudio no longer hangs for minutes at a time and I can now use version control, but the cursor still becomes uncontrollable in long Markdown documents. Also the university’s PCs are set up in such a way that students have to save to a network drive, which means that this is a (partial) fix for me as a researcher but not for me as a teacher.

So I am preparing to teach quantitative analysis of social media data using R, the open source language for statistical programming. I usually do anything code-related in Emacs, because I already know how to use Emacs and you can do everything code-related in Emacs and I don’t want to install and learn the quirks of loads of different IDEs. But that argument won’t make sense from the point of view of my students, firstly because they won’t need to do everything code-related, they’ll just need to create R notebooks, and secondly because they don’t already know how to use Emacs, and learning how to use Emacs is hard because Emacs is weird.

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Writing up empirical research for publication

I read a lot of academic articles in journals across several disciplines, and most of them are pretty good. I also peer review a lot of manuscripts for journals across several disciplines. Most of those are not so good. Here’s a quick explanation of the difference. If you don’t have much experience of writing up primary empirical research for publication and you’re trying to figure out what’s required, this might help you.

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