Old Man Yells at Cloud

It is exciting to say that the first paper from the SCAMs@bristol group has been published! Check it out at doi:10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c00466 and it even comes with an awful, hand-drawn TOC graphic. This work was born from a blog post that I wrote earlier this year complaining about how Arrhenius data is fit by linearisation. However, in the process of writing the paper, I found a much larger issue: chemists aren’t trained well in data skills.

How I feel getting angry at bad Arrhenius fitting.

This lack of data analysis/handling skills means that, as educators, we are failing to provide chemistry students with a future-proof skillset. This is starting, to some extent, to be recognised by universities, i.e., with more offering Python training in their degree program. However, Python training is not enough, as data skills include concepts of mathematics and statistics. I hope in future, that we can bring more and more data skills to chemistry degree programs to reduce the problems highlighted in the paper – but until then I will just have to keep on shouting at clouds!