Dr Alistair Legione

Dr Alistair Legione

Lecturer in Veterinary Microbiology and Public Health at the University of Melbourne

Blog posts

2020

Quick tips for using ffmpeg for video editing

4 minute read

Published:

In this brave new world of 2020, many of us are finding we have to use Zoom or other similar video conferencing software tools to teach classes. Then we wish to take those recordings and quickly edit them to trim, compress, and upload them to an online server. I’ve found the command line tool ffmpeg to be extremely helpful in this endeavour. Below are a few quick commands you can use to get your recording from its raw form in to a final version in just a few commands.

Building your Online Research Profile - Twitter

14 minute read

Published:

Twitter is the social media hub of choice for a vast array of academics. It’s a great place to share your latest work, ask questions of experts, communicate your research field to the general public and engage in the general discourse of your community. It can potentially be a hive of politically charged vitriol too, but we can hopefully avoid swimming in those circles more often than not.

This guide will take you through the basics of setting up a profile, and working through the basics of a ‘tweet’, your ‘timeline’, your ‘followers’, ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’. There is a decent amount of platform specific terminology (much of it general parlance for social media these days), but we’ll get through it together.

Building your Online Research Profile - Google Scholar

4 minute read

Published:

The goal of improving your online profile is that when people search your name, you’ll appear near the top (or ideally at the top) of the search results. I’d say globally the majority of people at time of writing will be searching using Google, so it makes sense to set up your Google Scholar profile too. Since lots of people search for papers through this service nowadays too, having a scholar page has the added benefit of adding a ‘clickable’ link to your name when your papers are searched. This link takes them through to your profile page where they can find even more of your papers! How convenient.

Building your Online Research Profile - Find an Expert

5 minute read

Published:

Most researchers in a University system will have a staff profile page. Here, your contact information, a photo, and your research outputs are going to be listed. Also, for most institutions this will have a brief biography on who you are as a researcher. This can be a valuable first contact for people searching you out on the internet as a University profile is likely to be considered one of the more trustworthy sites when people are trying to find you.

Building your Online Research Profile

4 minute read

Published:

Why do you, as a researcher, need to have an online presence? Why can’t your research just speak for itself? Perhaps it can, but unless you’re the lead in a niche field, the majority of us are probably left to work in obscurity. Consider this though, what have you tried to find on the internet in relation to research? You may have read an interesting paper and you want to find out what else this researcher has worked on, maybe they’re no longer at the institution listed on the paper, perhaps you want to contact them to work on something together?

It’s logical to think that others have used the internet to try to find you!

NBA Game Of The Day

2 minute read

Published:

A shiny web application that ranks daily NBA games for your viewing pleasure.

This application is primarily designed for those of us outside the USA, who have to watch NBA games on delay due to time zone differences. This app will show you, based on a formula, which game is going to me most worth your time investment. Particularly useful if you only have time to watch one game of the night, and you don’t want to waste it on the 40 point blowout

Recording Lectures with Microsoft PowerPoint

5 minute read

Published:

The aim of this piece is to introduce you to recording audio, and if needed video, through Microsoft PowerPoint to suitably record lectures for teaching.

I’m going to start off with the basics, and then add in a few more complex examples further on.

Note: This guide is focused on using Office 365 for Windows 10. If you’re using a MacOS you may face issues that I don’t address. Google is the best place to go to solve any problem you may have

Shiny - ScholarPlot

2 minute read

Published:

ScholarPlot is an R Shiny tool for visualising and exporting your Google Scholar data. The intent of the tool was for easy export of a plot or table of your research application for things like CVs, promotion applications, or other workplace examples where you need to provide evidence of output. The source code for Scholarplot is available on my github page

Computational Biology 101: Selecting and installing a package manager

9 minute read

Published:

Installing programs on a Unix machine/terminal can be a dark and scary place, particularly when it comes to things like ‘dependencies’, that’s when someone has written a bit of software (let’s call it program X), and that software relies on another bit of software (program Y), but when you install X, Y second isn’t automatically installed, so you have to work out how to install Y too, then program Z because Y relies on Z!! It’s a nightmare.

Package managers are designed to make this process simple, by installing all dependencies that you may need when you want to install software X. Aah, much better. But there are choices to make when you are picking your package manager! So I’m going to provide some information and brief instructions for two of these choices: Homebrew and Conda.

Computational Biology 101: Getting a Unix command line on Windows 10

9 minute read

Published:

So you want to use the command line to do some computational biology? Or perhaps some *gulp* bioinformatics? Well lets get you started in as simple a way as possible. This guide is intended primarily for University of Melbourne staff and students with access to the Melbourne Research Cloud, Spartan High Performance Computer, and MediaFlux data server, but up until the latter stages it should be suitable for most command line starters

Why don’t we have “Individual Game Voting” (IGV) for the NBA MVP?

14 minute read

Published:

Why do we do this to ourselves every year? The NBA plays for several months, 82 games for each team, and after All Star break comes and goes, everyone starts discussions about who will win the end of season awards. This inevitably leads to the narrative playing out. This year is no different. Giannis Antetokounmpo has been the best player for the whole year, everyone (humans and statistics) has agreed on this point up until a few weeks ago when, perhaps bored with same story for too many months, LeBron was touted as a competitor. Then on every talk show and podcast, media members start discussing the possibility. The league having to suspend/postpone due to the global pandemic put a dampener on these discussions to some degree, but if the season had continued momentum would have only grown.