:-). I remember being completely perplexed. Why waste someone's time with a suboptimal tool? Yes, it can be done, but why?pic.twitter.com/WRQzWpL06E
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in general, it's good for a team to standardize on a small set of shared tools so that team members can understand each other's work product and (hopefully) so that the product remains useful after the person who created it has left and thus "COBOL programmer" is still a thing
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agreed. the key phrase is 'a small set of shared tools', presumably the best for a group of tasks. I've never heard of matlab being considered even vaguely optimal for human online experiments. There are much better options, on many dimensions.
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A lab is not just a team like in industry though. We do not have to comply with shareholders' requests and we certainly should (in theory) try to teach useful skills.
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Replying to @o_guest @aeryn_thrace and
By useful I mean useful in more contexts than just the current lab set-up!
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I would add that "useful" should move beyond the lab.
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Exactly!
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In an ideal world labs are not just there to create a "product". Science is not a product nor a service. It's something else. And through tax we fund it, not on the "open market", but through government grants primarily. Thinking of it as a business venture is confused IMHO.
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Society, we, have decided to do it this way. If we decide basic science is not worth funding that's another story. But currently all our actions & decisions lead to this: a lab is not a business & the skills we teach should NOT be selected on the same merits as a business would.
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I agree -- science is not a business. I've done research in both contexts, and the cross-cutting concern is reproducibility of analyses. Standard tools are necessary but far from sufficient. IME business is mediocre at this, and academia is miles worse .
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Agreed! Hence why I said "in an ideal world"...
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