The importance of taxonomists is exemplified in the line “Insects are by far the most diverse vertebrates.”

It was great to host @willpkay.bsky.social! Is your department interested in how we teach essential quantitative and reasoning skills to ecologists? Invite Will to come talk!

We are recruiting several PhD students. If you are interested in conservation conflicts, population ecology, quantitative ecology, or biodiversity, check these projects out (links in the thread, feel free to reach out):

I am HYPED

The previous version of this was my go-to recommendation for students, really excited to see it’s been updated! Great work and great leadership!!!

We are hiring a chair/professor in our Ecology and Environmental Modelling group at @uniofstandrews.bsky.social. Scotland is a lovely place to work, and my colleagues are fantastic! Reach out if you are interested in joining the CREEM family ☺️ vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

After much searching I’m sad to say that the Gosset plaque in the Guinness Brewery has been covered up. But a fun trip to Dublin regardless

Fully Funded PhD Studentship Alert! Do you want to figure out how we can improve water quality? Want to learn how to develop advanced systems-thinking statistical network models? We got you... www.findaphd.com/phds/project... Deadline: 2025-03-13 DM me if you have Qs.

Great talk from @ruiborges23.bsky.social at our Maths and Stats research day yesterday

Fantastic PhD opportunity to study invasive Pink salmon with a geniune multidisciplinary team - if you have skills in fish ecology, stats and/or social science then move quickly to apply. UK and non-UK students welcome. Please forward.

We are advertising a fully-funded, genuinely interdisciplinary @netgain.bsky.social PhD at the interface of ecology, ethics and statistics, exploring the nuances of wild salmonid conservation. Deadline January 31st. (1/3) www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

A load of cool projects here!!! If you’re looking for a PhD at the moment this is going to be a killer cohort to be part of!

We just posted our first round of fully funded interdisciplinary challege-led projects! netgain.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/phd-projects/ PhDs available at: @aberdeenunilib.bsky.social, @durhamuniversity.bsky.social, @glasgowunisrc.bsky.social, @uniofstandrews.bsky.social, @ukri.org

I am advertising a *fully funded* and genuinely interdisciplinary PhD looking at integrating ecology, statistics and environmental ethics. The project is part of the amazing @netgain.bsky.social. Please get in touch and share with anyone who might be interested! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

go.bsky.app/NiaWN5i I'm happy to receive suggestions for this.

Convention is not objectivity.

the mad lads actually did it

Had a conversation today about the royal family and it reminded me of one of my favourite paragraphs ever written: Had a conversation today about the royal family and it reminded me of one of my favourite paragraphs ever written www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

With the caveat that we can (and should) all be statisticians if we need to be! statsepi.substack.com/p/im-not-a-r...

Can I take you higher?  Maybe not, but this summer I can take you…hierarchical.👇

Did you know that I am a completely freelance statistician with no institutional support?  If you have found my freely-available work helpful then there are many ways that you can support me financially and otherwise.

Bayesian friends: I have to give 5x2hour lectures to first year maths and stats PhD students on Bayesian Statistics. What would your essential content be? Which aspects of the standard Bayesian intro course do you think is a waste of time?

Hello world! I'm finally dipping my toes into BlueSky after disconnecting from the twitterverse. Would love to connect with others in #ecology, #datascience, #rstats, undergrad teaching, and sci-tech spaces.

I’m giving my a seminar tomorrow in my department at St Andrews on how we can use information from citizen science ID guides, medical testing assays and similar to understand where and why misclassifications and misdiagnoses occur. Drop me a message if you’d like to join online or would like to chat

We are hiring in St Andrews Stats! Particularly looking for a statistical methodologist (but see advert). DM me if you have any questions www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

I’d forgotten how good it feels to spend a day coding on a tough project you’re really excited about. Tunes blaring, error messages glaring, computer fans whirring.

Is there a name for when an unlucky thing happens but conditional on that unlucky thing happening it was the luckiest version of what could have happened? You get a rare illness but it’s the least damaging (& rarest form) of that illness? I feel there must be a #dnd term for it.

My other new faculty struggle is what to buy for my new office. I’m keen to make it my own and welcoming to others. So far I’ve filled a draw with snacks…

The struggle is real! I just started in my first faculty job and it’s so hard to know what to prioritise. I’ve put together a big spreadsheet of things I need to do which has given me some sense of control but I suspect it will be fleeting…

The “principle of indifference” is often presented as an intuitively obvious motivation for specifying “non-informative” prior models. Unfortunately that intuition quickly falls apart in many common applications.  A long thread about applied probability theory!

Compact Graphs xkcd.com/2864

Come do a PhD with me and @ali__johnston on “ Quantifying Trade-Offs Between Simple and Complex Models for Decision-Making” Policy-makers in conservation and health frequently rely on relatively simplistic statistical models to inform their decisions. (1/7)

Current starting point for postdoc salaries at Oxford University is just over £36k - £2.7K under threshold. According to The Royal Society 62% of postdocs are non-UK nationals (5/6 in my lab). Two things: (i) postdocs are underpaid; (ii) UK science is screwed royalsociety.org/-/media/poli...

Today was my last day working at @bioss.bsky.social! It was nice to finish doing a two day workshop with excellent colleagues for great participants at UKCEH. Onward to start at CREEM in St Andrews Maths and Stats on Friday 🍰📈🧑‍💻

Dogs are the real victims of Sunday coding

New paper alert! The ways we collect and analyse data in ecology (and epidemiology and elsewhere!) are increasingly complicated. To make good inference, it’s necessary to model these observation processes with the same diligence we apply to the biological process (1/7) doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

Already worth moving to bluesky

Just in time for the holiday season I'll be hosting another statistics office hours livestream on Tuesday December 5th at 1:30 PM EST, www.patreon.com/posts/93283863. Ask all of your juicy statistics questions in the comments and come join for a rousing discussion.

Excited to join everyone on here!