Thomas Feliciani
LightNews LightNews
banner
thofel.bsky.social
Thomas Feliciani
@thofel.bsky.social
86 followers 120 following 23 posts
He/him.

Computational social science 🎛️ | Meta-research 🔎🔎 | Social simulation 👾 | Opinion dynamics 📣 💭 | Generative art 🧩 | Maps 🗺️

More here:
orcid.org/0000-0003-4977-0877
scholar.google.com/citations?user=YuAjBUEAAAAJ
fediscience.org/@thofel
Posts Replies Media Videos
thofel.bsky.social
Interesting new paper in PNAS:

Kramer, B. L., & Lee, C. (2025). The rise of diversity terminology in biomedical research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(34), e2401805122. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
doi.org
August 20, 2025 at 1:37 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Meta-research: Nature Human Behavior issues a correction for a 2023 article on "corrections" -- i.e., papers that correct misinformation.

___

Funny meta-correction -> Chan & Albarracin (2025) at doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Original article -> Chan & Albarracin (2023) at doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Author Correction: A meta-analysis of correction effects in science-relevant misinformation - Nature Human Behaviour
Nature Human Behaviour - Author Correction: A meta-analysis of correction effects in science-relevant misinformation
doi.org
August 9, 2025 at 7:12 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Been playing with Multiple Neighborhood Cellular Automata (#MNCA).
MNCA run surprisingly smoothly in R thanks to the efficient "terra::focal()" function, useful for running sequences of convolutions.
Next challenge: finding interesting areas within the infinite-dimensional paramater space of MNCA.
This image uses a rainbow (Turbo) color palette to show the average value of raster cells across the first 500 iterations of a continuous-state MNCA, run on a Perlin noise field. Blue cells have a low average, meaning they have been mostly dead. Red cells have a high average and were thus mostly live. All colors in-between (green to orange) show cells that changed state during the simulation, revealing where activity occurred. The image reveals that the little activity that was observed occurred in the high-valued "islands" of the Perlin field, and was specifically concentrated around small, roundish clusters of stationary live cells. This is another use of the rainbow color palette to show activity (via average values) for the first 30 iterations of a discrete-state MNCA -- of which I forgot the rules/parameters. A discrete-state MNCA, shown at a particular iteration, with rules/paramteres similar to those reported by @Slackermanz in their guide at https://slackermanz.com/. Live raster cells (white) appear clustered in tighly-packed, bean-shaped blobs. Blobs look like biological cells that propagate slowing eating up all available empty space (dark gray).
August 3, 2025 at 8:48 PM
thofel.bsky.social
So it’s that time of the year again.
#tulips everywhere :)
A crop of yellow tulips. A crop of pink tulips.
April 20, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
datavisfriendly.bsky.social
#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
💀Mar 14, 1884 Adriano Balbi died in Padua, Italy 🇮🇹

1829: The first comparative choropleth thematic maps, showing crimes against persons and crimes against property (with Andre-Michel Guerry)
A set of three choropleth maps of France, show (upper left) Crimes against persons, (upper right) Crimes against property (bottom) Literacy. In each one, the departments of France are shaded so darker = worse. Blury etched image of Adriano Balbi
March 15, 2025 at 1:15 AM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
carlbergstrom.com
Nothing to see here, just Nature advocating LLM peer review.

“Feed your dictated notes into an offline large language model (LLM) to clarify and organize your feedback. A simple prompt such as “Write a critical reviewer letter based on the following notes. Maintain a professional tone throughout”
Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review
Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.
www.nature.com
March 5, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
sanjaysrivastava.com
Today’s been a long week
March 1, 2025 at 12:04 AM
thofel.bsky.social
Awesome that this dataset exists!

Bennett, J.S., Mutch, E., Tollefson, A. et al. Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE. Scientific Data 12, 247 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

--
#map
Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE
doi.org
February 12, 2025 at 8:16 PM
thofel.bsky.social
I'm "strangely attracted" to these. Video and pictures show (René) Thomas' attractor emerging from the sampling of the XY plane. For these visualizations, I set b=0.19 and initialized the orbits at z=1.

__
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%...
#Rstats #ggplot2 #viridis #generativeArt #mathArt
February 8, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
sconradi.bsky.social
Orbits: pure mathematical chaos creating organic art.
Made with #python #matplotlib #numpy.
February 2, 2025 at 7:25 PM
thofel.bsky.social
This. 👍👍

Squazzoni, F. (2025). Editorial Note: We Need to Recognise That Peer Review is Central to the 'Social Contract' of Academic Citizenship. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 28 (1) 6
doi.org/10.18564/jas...

--
#peerreview #jasss
Editorial Note: We Need to Recognise That Peer Review is Central to the 'Social Contract' of Academic Citizenship
by Flaminio Squazzoni
doi.org
February 1, 2025 at 9:28 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Wtf. doi.org/10.1038/d415...
#nih
‘Never seen anything like this’: Trump’s team halts NIH meetings and travel
In an unprecedented move, research-grant reviews have been suspended indefinitely at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
doi.org
January 24, 2025 at 10:14 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Today we got perfect weather. Perfect for a pensive afternoon, that is.
Frosty shrubs and pines. A close up photo of the bright red vegetation growing on the ground, and bushes. Wintery vegetation on a lake side. The dense fog makes it eerie.
January 19, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
paolocrosetto.bsky.social
Any metric can and will be gamed. So we really need to think through the implications here.

At first sight this is terrible: it kills replication & robustness in the cradle, pushing towards "new" stuff.

Chasing the unexpected got the Gino and Ariely cases.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

#EconSky
Can novelty scores on papers shift the power dynamics in scientific publishing?
By providing measures of novelty, DeSci Publish hopes to shift the bargaining power between journals and authors.
www.nature.com
December 22, 2024 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
carlbergstrom.com
As I mentioned three weeks ago, Jevin West and I are developing a sort of followup course to Calling Bullshit.

We've got the basic scrollytelling tech worked out and now need to choose a design.

We're not designers and would like to simply buy an HTML5 template if only for the colors and fonts.
Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World
The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshi...
callingbullshit.org
December 14, 2024 at 8:06 AM
thofel.bsky.social
I found a great excuse to make a bunch of fun ggplots. As if I needed one.

github.com/thomasfelici...

--
#rstats #generative #ggplot #rayshader
GitHub - thomasfeliciani/2024_cover_images: Walk-through for generating the images used on the book cover and chapter pages of my PhD dissertation.
Walk-through for generating the images used on the book cover and chapter pages of my PhD dissertation. - thomasfeliciani/2024_cover_images
github.com
December 9, 2024 at 9:06 PM
thofel.bsky.social
A warning sign from a train station in Wallonia:
“Tout contact avec les fils peut être mortel!”
Hey, daughters can be dangerous, too!
A photo of the underpass wall where I found the warning sign, surrounded by graffiti. The sign reads: Il est interdit, sur les quais des voies électrifiées - de lever des objets de grandes dimensions; - de toucher les fils, même tombés à terre. Tout contact avec les fils peut être mortel !
November 23, 2024 at 5:09 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Gender homophily in research teams, communities fosters gender citation bias.

A cool new paper in Research Policy [1] also covered by Nature News [2].

—
[1] Zhou et al. 2024 — doi.org/10.1016/j.re...

[2] Oza 2023 — doi.org/10.1038/d415...
A screenshot of the online article by Zhou et al. (2024) titled: “Gender homophily: In-group citation preferences and the gender disadvantage”.
December 23, 2023 at 5:56 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Found on Italian trains.
This sticker forbids getting “on and off while the train is still moving”. They probably meant “on OR off”. And I get funny ideas.

Train operators vs logical operators.
This is the photo of sticker glued to a train door. The sticker has a warning sign depicting a falling person followed by a message in Italian, English, French, and German. It reads: “IT'S STRICTLY FORBIDDEN To get on and off while the train is still moving. To get on and off the train outside the platforms. To lean against the doors”.
December 22, 2023 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
bethclarke.bsky.social
We’ve spent the last decade talking a lot about replications, but to what extent has this talk translated to a tangible change in how often replications are published in psychology journals? osf.io/preprints/ps... /w Katherine Lee, Sarah Schiavone, @mijke.bsky.social @simine.com (1/9)
OSF
osf.io
December 16, 2023 at 4:44 AM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
federicobianchi.bsky.social
Still not sure of the numbers of the Italian community on this platform, but here it is:

I've just published a book in Italian on mechanisms and models of social networks

www.mulino.it/isbn/9788815...
December 15, 2023 at 10:46 AM
Reposted by Thomas Feliciani
robchavez.bsky.social
My dept. used to have methods groups, 'R Club', & hackathons. These were student led & vibrant. Those days are gone. Now, it's like pulling teeth to get students and faculty to even go to brown bags & once-a-term colloquia. I'm worried not just for open science but for our science across the board.
umpamdk.bsky.social Pam Davis-Kean, PhD @umpamdk.bsky.social · Dec 11
Disappointed to report that I had to cancel my graduate seminar on Open Science Methods and Practice due to low enrollment. I had some fun speakers like Andrew Gelman and @simine.com joining-so I'm disappointed that the students won't hear their thoughts and ideas.
December 13, 2023 at 2:56 AM
thofel.bsky.social
Unpopular opinion (for R coders):
|> > %>%

And as an addendum:
= > <-

I know, I know, apples and oranges. But I do prefer apples.

—
#r #rstats
December 10, 2023 at 6:03 PM
thofel.bsky.social
Hello new platform, hello world!

Ready to make noise.
That is, Perlin noise. With R package “ambient”. And“ggplot2” for rendering. Post-processing with Snapseed.
Cheers.
2D Perlin noise rendered with a colorful palette. Intermediate values are rendered in pastel light blue shades and serve as background. Areas with more extreme values appear as “islands”: green-yellow-red for high values and blue-fucsia-white-red for low values. Random grain perturbations are added for texture, and a faux tilt-shift effect makes the 2D plot look like a macro photo of some colorful print.
December 9, 2023 at 7:43 AM