Today has been a food-centric day! I arrived at RC without having eaten, so I took some time to eat a mango and spread some peanut butter and nutella on a mini naan… Yum. Also, I finally had a NYC-style bagel. No comment.

I have only read five pages of “Statistical Rethinking” so far, but I can already tell that it’s great and worthwhile. It makes me want to read more about the philosophy of science.

I had fervent conversations about philosophy and society with Ethan, about licensing and ShareAlike with Ashley, about sustainability and business with Ernest.

We agreed that stability (not growth) was related and relevant to sustainability. He got the point of my sister’s and my contribution on the sustainability of the digital commons right away (i.e., you may want to achieve sustainability by having a more engaged community).

I had another great intellectual moment when CF put this question so well: How do we protect our data while publishing it? Could we use blockchains to solve this problem, notably in the Life and Medical Sciences?

We discussed clinical trials and reproducibility over pizza, mentioning the Center for Open Science and Curate Science. I’m so pumped up! For lunch, Peter led us to the legendary Joe’s Pizza in Greenwich Village.

He also put together a survey for us to rate our pizza experience. I eyed the Likert items suspiciously and looked up this article by Rochelle E. Tractenberg et al. So far, my favourite part of it is the following: “Beyond these concerns about the unsupportable assumption that Likert, subjective, or otherwise ordinal (or categorical) ratings can be summed (and this total “score” can be interpreted), […]”

Finally, I sat down with Naomi, who is doing a PhD in NLP using recurrent neural networks. I approached Robert who just started studying them. We talked at the whiteboard.

I wouldn’t have done this in any other learning environment; I would have read more theory and explored more code on my own. But RC encourages you to pair up early on, so there you go. This is the only piece of code I ran today.