Travel, Tech, Thoughts…
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On the Future of Sociology
I had an interesting discussion a few days ago with my wife. We were talking about the futures of our disciplines (hers: genetic counseling; mine: sociology). I haven’t said this publicly before, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I don’t think sociology is long for academia. Before I go down this path,…
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Redacting PDFs on Linux
I had an odd situation pop up where I needed to redact a PDF. It wasn’t anything nefarious or super exciting, but it did involve a complicated PDF that included images and tables in addition to text. In figuring out how to redact the PDF, I ended up learning a few things and thought it…
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Fixing Zotero Corrupt Database Issue on Linux
I use Zotero to manage my references and have for decades since it was first developed. I’m a huge fan and teach all my students how to use it. But I also don’t follow one of the programmers’ recommendations on where to store my Zotero database. As soon as I install Zotero, I change the…
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Kubuntu 25.04 – Reset Wayland
I just installed Kubuntu 25.04 on my laptop and started running into an issue. It started when I tried to load Spectacle to take a screenshot. Spectacle froze and so did my panel, but I could still hit Alt+F2 to open new programs. I could also use Alt+Tab to switch between non-frozen programs. I couldn’t…
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Changing Default Browser for Links in Thunderbird
I just reformatted my computer (I try to do that about once a year) to Kubuntu 25.04. That meant setting up Thunderbird (version 128.10.0esr) with my email again. I use Firefox as my default browser (because it respects privacy), but install Chromium as a backup for the occasional website that doesn’t work very well with…
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Imputing Missing Data in R – mice
I got a revise and resubmit on a recent paper. We noted that we had some missing data on some of the variables in our dataset. One of the reviewers suggested we address the missing data issue, which I have typically just managed using listwise/casewise deletion (a.k.a. complete-case analysis, which entails not including cases that…
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LibreOffice Calc – Search for Specific Text Across Columns
I have a task I am asked to do fairly regularly that involves searching through a large spreadsheet (around 4,000 rows with about a dozen columns) looking for very specific text. There are, of course, various ways I could accomplish this. But I finally found a solution that speeds this up and want to document…
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Aruba – Jamanota
I was in Aruba for four days for a conference. I didn’t have a lot of free time but, after checking out all of the details of the highest point, I thought that I could skip lunch one day, climb the highest point, and still make it back for the next session. So, I tried…
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Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud
I’m probably just naive and am definitely far too idealistic, but the email I just received crushed my spirit. I need to share it. Here’s the email with contact information removed but the website still intact so everyone can see who is doing this: Dear Professor, I’m XXXXX, a researcher at Well-online, the flagship editorial…
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Batch Convert MP4 to MKV
I ran into an issue where a number of my MP4 files on my fileserver were stuttering when I tried to play them back using Plex on my TV. After a lot of googling, I found out that this was due to some header information in the MP4 files and that the simple solution was…