Joel Herndon
LightNews LightNews
Joel Herndon
@herndonj.bsky.social
72 followers 300 following 2 posts
Director of Duke Libraries’ Center for Data and Visualization Sciences. Interested in all things data/computational research. Personal posts on this account.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Joel Herndon
libbyheeren.bsky.social
Does Jenny Bryan #VibeCode? 🤔

She shared on the Hangout that she's been thankful that she gets to learn #rust and #typscript in the age of #AI and these are her thoughts on #LLM use. (We really need a #RubberDuck emoji 🦆)

#rstats #databs #VibeCoding #DSHangout #python
August 20, 2025 at 10:13 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
mikemahoney218.com
I love Quarto because when you show the outputs to data scientists they go "oh, a quarto doc, nice" while when you show the outputs to anyone else they go "oh, you're a wizard, that looks incredible"
August 21, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
posit.co
Streamline your Streamlit development with #Positron!

Our new IDE provides a unified environment w/ a live previewer, integrated terminal, and context-aware LLM assistance. See how #PythonProgramming works in @ivelasq3.bsky.social's post:

Blog: posit.co/blog/streaml...
Video: youtu.be/VO2pBeX0g-U
August 11, 2025 at 2:00 PM
A special thanks to useR 2025 planning group for a compelling set of sessions and good fellowship over the weekend. Looking forward to the recordings: user2025.r-project.org/program/in-p... #useR2025 #DukeCCT #rstats

PS - great job with the weather!
August 11, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
kellybodwin.com
Update: we (lovingly) bullied McCall into posting her code! 🙌

mccall-pitcher.quarto.pub/storytelling...
August 10, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
kellybodwin.com
Huge 👏👏👏 to @calpolyslo.bsky.social WunderKind @visruth.com for his #useR2025 talk on {flourish}!

🌟{flourish} is a Quarto extension for adding highlighting to source code chunks - the successor to {flair} in Rmd.

🔗 V's slides: visruth.com/flourish-talk

🔗 Github: github.com/kbodwin/flourish
August 10, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
healthandstats.bsky.social
Hex wall at #useR2025 🥳
Map of North Carolina with it filled in with hex stickers of many R packages.
August 9, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
karaswisher.bsky.social
The offline impact of the twisted online mind of RFK Jr.
acyn.bsky.social Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · Aug 8
CNN on Emory Shooting: Police are operating under the theory that the shooter either was sick or believed that he was sick, and blamed the illness on the covid vaccine
August 9, 2025 at 1:13 AM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
user-conf.bsky.social
You can watch Hadley's keynote at this link: www.youtube.com/live/ctc2kx3...

#useR2025
August 8, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
justinwolfers.bsky.social
Firing the BLS Commissioner — the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality — is an authoritarian four alarm fire.

It will also backfire: You can't bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.
August 1, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
kellybodwin.com
The result of being in the "Writing poetry about statistics" workshop at #USCOTS2025 while all my friends are in the Positron one....

(This one's for you @minecr.bsky.social and @posit.co 😘)
Do you want to reposition all your panes in IDEs? Is it in your disposition to set shortcuts on your keys? Do you hate the imposition when RStudio full crashes? Do you want more exposition of your Git and GitHub caches? Is your work a composition of both R code and python? Then you’re in a great position To start trying Positron!
July 17, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
karaswisher.bsky.social
We’ve been warning about this on @pivotpod.bsky.social for 6 months now.
cwarzel.bsky.social Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · Apr 27
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from reporting on the current DOGE collection of govt data, it is that the people who’ve previously spent their careers carefully handling this information believe there is almost no limit to how it could be abused (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
American Panopticon
The Trump administration is pooling data on Americans. Experts fear what comes next.
www.theatlantic.com
April 27, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
andrew.heiss.phd
Legal crackdowns on NGOs are a signal of worsening human rights abuses www.andrewheiss.com/research/art...
NGO Repression as a Predictor of Worsening Human Rights Abuses Look at state actions —not formal NGO laws— to predict abuse. Suparna Chaudhry and Andrew Heiss, “NGO Repression as a Predictor of Worsening Human Rights Abuses,” Journal of Human Rights 21, no. 2 (2022): 123–140, doi: 10.1080/14754835.2022.2030205
April 17, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
cosmowenman.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/josh...
March 22, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
joshtpm.bsky.social
4/ The point is the information is provided for specific lawful reasons and "silo'd" inside the government precisely because it's provided only for that reason. The aim of this new EO is to create thick packets of data on targeted individuals, for a different kind of federal govt that aims ....
March 22, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
ucs.org
The potential elimination of EPA’s Office of Research & Development would take a huge toll on public health and be a massive giveaway to polluting industries. These destructive actions are reportedly part of the Trump administration’s mass layoff strategy.

Statement: act.ucsusa.org/4c1H2T9
A quote graphic features a statement from Chitra Kumar, Director of Climate and Energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The quote reads: "This is not acceptable. Everyone, including President Trump and his cabinet’s children and grandchildren, would feel the consequences of this move, not to mention the most polluted communities, predominantly Black, Brown, and low-income, who would bear the brunt." The text is white on a dark background with a blue highlight emphasizing part of the quote. Below the quote, Chitra Kumar’s name and title are displayed in white and blue text. A circular cutout on the lower right side of the graphic shows a headshot of Chitra Kumar, who has short black hair, wears glasses with a patterned frame, and is smiling. She is wearing a dark blue top with a black beaded necklace. The background of the image is a darkened photograph of dead fish on a polluted shoreline. At the bottom, there is a blue button with white text that reads, "READ THE STATEMENT." The Union of Concerned Scientists logo is in the bottom left corner, and a small credit line attributes the background image to Natalie Fobes/Getty Images, with a copyright notice for UCS in 2025.
March 18, 2025 at 7:54 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
andrew.heiss.phd
Article I is the biggest chunk—more than half of the constitution is about the legislative branch! #rstats code here: gist.github.com/andrewheiss/... (with an actual real life use case for as.roman()!)
Bar chart showing the rough word count of each article of the US constitution, and Article I comprises 51% of the document
March 17, 2025 at 1:49 AM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
skirchy.bsky.social
This follows a story we published about how changes to a Biden-era plan to help rural Americans get connected to high speed internet (in other words, many Trump voters) is going to be changed to benefit Elon Musk. A top official has sent a warning on his way out www.politico.com/news/2025/03...
Top broadband official exits Commerce Department with sharp Musk warning
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Evan Feinman warned.
www.politico.com
March 16, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
amlibraryassoc.bsky.social
President Trump's executive order to eliminate the Institute of Museum & Library Services would have disastrous effects for communities nationwide. We call on all Americans who value reading & learning to reach out to their elected leaders.

Read ALA's full response: www.ala.org/news/2025/03...
ALA response to White House assault on IMLS To dismiss the mission of an agency that advances opportunity and learning is to dismiss the aspirations and everyday needs of millions of Americans. And those who will feel that loss most keenly live in rural communities.  As seedbeds of literacy and innovation, our nation’s 125,000 public, school, academic and special libraries deserve more, not less support. Libraries translate 0.003% of the federal budget into programs and services used by more than 1.2 billion people every year. Show Up for Our Libraries, ALA American Library Association, #ForOurLibraries
March 15, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
datarescueproject.org
Thanks to the @waybackmachine.bsky.social we were able to find a copy of this report on Climate Literacy that was removed: web.archive.org/web/20250225... They don't want us to see it, so we should share it even more.
web.archive.org
March 13, 2025 at 11:47 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
altnoaa.bsky.social
Farmers use them to adjust watering cycles, when to sow, when to harvest. Truckers use them to decide what routes to take so they can be on time. This mostly goes unnoticed by most. But without the National Weather Service, our lives become much more difficult and our economy would suffer.
March 12, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
nytpitchbot.bsky.social
If Americans don't like the direction of the country, they should speak directly to power—either by taking a Supreme Court justice on an all-expenses-paid trip or by paying Donald Trump 5 million dollars to have dinner together.
March 8, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Joel Herndon
hypervisible.blacksky.app
“With agentic AI, Whittaker warned we’d further undermine privacy and security in the name of a ‘magic genie bot that’s going to take care of the exigencies of life…’”
Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having 'profound' security and privacy issues | TechCrunch
Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking on stage at the SXSW conference in
techcrunch.com
March 7, 2025 at 10:04 PM