America is great when kids can't play soccer because the secret police may steal their parents

I feel like we are in a golden age of AI right now, like when google first appeared and you could get your search results without adverts. How long before AI results start incorporating ads?

"Either politics throws open the doors, or it won’t be long before they’re kicked in by angry citizens as they smash every last stick of furniture and walk out with the chandelier of power" -this was released two years before Jan 6th open.spotify.com/track/4Sw9Xa...

Yeah so there's no way anyone is coming here for World Cup or Olympics. if you can bag up the son of one of the most famous boxers to ever live, you can do that to anyone.

protip for Gen Z working with older colleagues: if discussing data or studies which occurred entirely after the year 2000, you can refer to them as *21st Century*. It will sound futuristic and sci-fi to anyone who grew up on Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon (i.e., Gen X, Boomers) - very impressive!

This is a neat summary of the history of applied statistics I’ve read

We constantly empower people that have no interest in the truth whatsoever and I struggle to understand what can be done about that.

New blog post: You can outsource the grunt work to an LLM, not expertise brodrigues.co/posts/2025-0...

Add this to my reading list: “For “random intercept” models, adding the group-level averages of all included variables as regressors (or a variety of equivalent procedures such as group-wise centering) relieves the bias otherwise induced by this regularization”

Spoke to Jen a few weeks ago because I am also trying to pivot out of academia. Can confirm Jen is a great person to help you focus on what’s important (to anyone else who is in a similar situation). She would be a great asset to any community building enterprise

After two weeks, I'm finally done! In this post, I explain different approaches for solving linear regression in R: directly, using QR, singular value and Cholesky decompositions, and do some benchmarking for comparison with in-built approaches. thomvolker.github.io/blog/2506_re...

A lawsuit in Rockland County, NY, alleges election irregularities in the 2024 Presidential and Senate races. The plaintiffs claim statistical anomalies and uncounted votes. But do these claims hold up? I analyzed the data and I don't think they do: christophertkenny.com/posts/2025-0...

Lord save me! Where do people get the idea the y-axis must always include zero, and every panel in a collection of panels must have the same y-axis scale? These a fine “rules of thumb” but they are not stone commandments handed down by the #dataviz gods!!! #rstats

The quarto-preprint extension v0.16 (github.com/mvuorre/quar...) now enables full-width content in two-column #quartopub #typst documents (and more!; via github.com/christopherk...). Hope this makes Quarto a bit more useful for writing well-typeset reproducible #rstats manuscripts 💙

When your past is questionable—revise it! #CalvinandHobbes #FakeHistory

One of my pet peeves with dplyr verbs in R is filter(). It should remove the rows which meet the condition(s). What is the most readable way to remove rows which meet a joint condition? e.g., remove rows where col_a == "x" & col_b > y? #rstats

Bluesky snark at its finest. Just learnt so much from the linked responses. The debate is alive! :-)

Trying to keep an open mind only to end up confirming my prejudices

Just had a terrible experience at BMC Public Health. According to @springernature.com Australian universities can publish in their OA journals for free, so you might *think* an OA journal such as BMC Public Health would be covered... you would be wrong. Over $5000 wrong!

The UCLA stats group do fantastic work explaining things. This tutorial on SEM in R is gold: stats.oarc.ucla.edu/r/seminars/r...

I should really read the fcuking paper before butting in on expert discussion here!

TIL the difference between interaction and effect modification: "[An] interaction is the effect of 2 interventions whereas effect modification is the effect of one intervention varying across strata of a second variable." I think this means things like sex cannot interact with other variables...

Spent more time exploring {scales} for #ggplot2. I found the `label_dictionary()` function to be useful for relabeling the values of a discrete scale using a lookup table: scales.r-lib.org/reference/la... Here's what I came up with, using some NCAA basketball data from the #rstats {hoopR} package👇

Reporting observational research: www.auajournals.org/doi/full/10.... Some simple guidelines and good recommendations for language in intro, method and discussion.

stringr::str_wrap(width = ...) is fantastic! Works for facet headings as well: facet_wrap(~str_wrap(myfacet, width = 10)

The founder of scikit-learn: "Without causal thinking, machine learning is not enough for optimal clinical decisions." 🧵 1/ #CausalSky

In psychology, an operational definition specifies how a variable or concept is to be measured and defined within a particular study. How does this compare to a statistical estimand, which also defines what a study aims to estimate? I know they aren't the same but they seem quite similar #StatsSky

Well I feel like a fool. I’ve been saying NFTs and crypto serve no fundamental purpose. And I totally didn’t entertain the use case of bribing the US President. So embarrassing

I knew about with() but how did I not know about within()!? #rstats

Starting a PhD makes you sick. After entering a PhD program, Swedish students seek more psychotropics: swopec.hhs.se/lunewp/abs/l...

Why not subset, transform and aggregate? (filter and mutate were terrible verb choices anyway - we filter _out_, nobody filters _in_)

How do you write your probabilistic models?

Every few years I have to remind myself of this simple and clear post describing how modes, medians and means arise naturally from zero-one loss (accuracy), absolute difference (MAE), and squared error (MSE), respectively: www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/201...

for the last few weeks I've been getting more interaction on bsky than ex-twitter - more interesting people here, and more interesting content. I still visit ex out of habit, but bsky is where it's at, and I'm here for it

This is the first nuanced view of the role of replication in science I've read in a while. Like a breath of fresh air after sitting through the replication crisis in [insert favourite science here].

New data from the @economist.com suggests mental health among young people has started to turn: www.economist.com/united-state...

Learning maths again with my 11yo. Why does multiplying two negative numbers produce a positive? Consider: (-1)*[1+(-1)] = 0 since [1+(-1)] is zero By distribution: (-1)(1) + (-1)(-1) = 0 (-1) + (-1)(-1) = 0, so (-1)(-1) must be positive one

While I was reading, it occurred to me that this was a version of a mathematical puzzle I was already familiar with. It’s commonly known as the ‘German tank problem’, and it shows how we can sometimes extract a lot of valuable information from relatively little data. So, how does it work? 5/

Just updated to macOS Sequoia 15.3.2. Apple finally allowed me to set the scroll direction on my mouse and trackpad independently! Such a clever little company!!!

Great way to learn the basics of policy trial emulation for free! Paper here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39374529/

log-linear regressions: I learnt recently that lm(log(y) ~ x) is not a good idea. Better to use glm(y ~ x, family = poisson(link = "log")). #rstats #StatsSky

the amount of data is in petabytes. if you know ANYONE who can help, please reach out

does _bluesky_ support **markdown**?

Just found my first usecase for fct_inorder: occupations |> group_by(profession) |> reframe(wages_q = quantile(wages), labels_q = fct_inorder(names(quantile(wages))) |> spread(labels_q, wages_q)

Take risks when you are young (financial, romantic- maybe not physical!). You have time to overcome failure and you learn so much!

Please lord give me a reason to cite this paper. Parachute use to prevent death: a RCT pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30545967/

How do I save posts? This is an awesome resource:

Somewhere, someone studies the intersection of climate change and fascism and they have a drinking problem now.