RFK Jr is a consequence of decades of anti-science media, promoted by both the right and left. Subtle forms of anti-sciencism like organic food or raw milk or "removing toxins" snowball over time. Calling them out in their early phases may be critical.

After spending more than an hour on the phone with Microsoft Support, I have learned: 1. It is impossible to disable Copilot in OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint, or Windows itself. 2. It will not become possible to do so for another month AT THE EARLIEST. (1/?)

Whenever I see these articles on 'publish or perish' culture being to blame, I always think of Tal Yarkoni's blog post: talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10.... Yes, the pressures are there and they can force our hand, but that means we should work to improve the structures where we can (not abide by them).

Are you not a fan of journals' "enhanced online PDF viewers"? Me neither. I put together a little Firefox add-on that helps you skip the "enhanced" reader and download the PDF directly.

Check out this incredible video from 1941 that details the physics of visual perception using the mechanics of the eyeball from Karl Kurt Bosse pennstateoffice365-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/person...

Hey #StatsSky, what are you favorite papers to cite when you need to justify something that is obvious (I once had a reviewer ask we justify the use of logistic regression on a binary outcome) or when you need to push-back on silly reviewer requests (e.g., asking for p-values in table 1)?

Flu cases have quadrupled over the past month in hospitals in England, with NHS leaders warning that “skyrocketing” cases could make this winter “one of the worst we have ever seen”. Just published @financialtimes.com: on.ft.com/4j4g0h5

Have tried to make the dish many times, with varying success. This is an important pepe: "Finally, we present a scientifically optimized recipe based on our findings, enabling a consistently flawless execution of this classic dish."

Everyone is running away with this one, but I took the time to trace the source, and these are 80% confidence intervals, the true meta-science story (and there is one!), was written up as one about selective reporting and calibrating standard errors..

I've settled on an approach to giving up on TV shows: If a show has a serialized plot and goes more than 1 year between seasons, it's dead. It doesn't matter how much I like it, I cannot keep track of characters or follow a plot with a gap of more than one year.

Researcher: "We let the data speak for itself." Earlier that day:

How can sharing our uncertainty with others alter our confidence when we're alone? Delighted to share the lab's new paper, with Einar Andreassen and @cdfrith.bsky.social. Particularly pleased as it's Einar's first! Link: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇 #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

Happy New Year

Everything is more advanced and yet shittier.

Timeline cleanse! Allow me to share with you my favorite images from the 10 billion dollar telescope JWST this year 🧵🧪 Starting off heavenly with this star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud… 📸: NASA, ESA, CSA, O Nayak, M Meixner

How did the tech industry get so powerful? It's simple. There are major media outlets that will simply copy paste anything they say

Stop Forcing A.I. into Fucking EVERYTHING!

I would love if this feature were limited to people you follow. "What are the people you follow talking about?" Otherwise, I don't find it all that useful. I suspect that'd require a lot more computational resources though.

Happy holidays! #microscopy #neurons

Psychology attaches too much prestige and credibility to formalized theories. We need more patience for incremental advances in reasoning about phenomena. doi.org/10.1111/jasp...

Oof

Today is Festivus. I look forward to your feats of strength.

Are you going to take this from him, psychologists? Show Andrew he is wrong by directing him to a conjoint experiment with open data

When news reports about scientific papers make causal claims that are not justified by the original study, the mistake often traces to a university press release. Here, observational data reveals an association. The press release asserts causality. today.ucsd.edu/story/walkab...

Stuff like this is genuinely fun as a silly game, but a reminder from your friendly neighborhood color vision scientist that it absolutely CANNOT be used to compare performance between people using different/uncalibrated displays or even the same display in different viewing environments.

What we could have had...

A rounding error in the defense budget could double the NIH budget!

“Artificial Intelligence”. Probably one of the most consequential domain name choices, and yet endlessly misleading.

Opinion: It doesn't matter. Once misinformation enters the public zeitgeist, there is no procedural remedy. It's like dumping sewage in a pond and then closing off the drain that it came from. The pond will take a LONG time to be clean.

Commentary: AI? Ai-Yai-Yai! By Jean Teasdale theonion.com/ai-ai-yai-yai/

Apropos of nothing, childhood cancer mortality has been driven down substantially thanks to cancer research and better cancer therapies.

🫵 EastBio PhD time! 🫵 4-year PhD project on behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying visual stabilisation 🧠👁️ Please get in touch if you are interested (UK/International) Applications deadline: Jan 17th #visionscience #cogsci #psychsky #neuroskyence #EEG

Humans are curious not just about the world, but also about their own minds. In our new paper, we describe a specific form of curiosity in which people strategically seek information not only about their decisions but also about the accuracy of their self-evaluations. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

At long last, the article by Jenny Huang & me on the "universality test" for quantifying the statistical evidence of small-sample studies is published in Psychological Methods: doi.org/10.1037/met0... #PsychSciSky #VisionScience #neuroskyence Meri Kirihimete & enjoy your summer break y'all! ☀️🎄 🥂

Question for #Rstats: How are Apache Spark and dplyr/dbplyr different? Is something different about their approach for accessing a database?

Very proud to announce that @posit.co has joined the opensourcepledge.com. We're committing to spending $2000 / developer / year to support open source software that we use (but don't develop): posit.co/blog/posit-p... #rstats #pydata

I think it happened: We were replaced by an IA. It's for PPT presentations. Main tells: the pictures are of course, some dataviz is nonsense, the text is too small, lack of coherence. Unsure what to think about it, but I'll dump a few ideas in the thread and am curious to hear your thoughts. 🧵

Oh sure retract it now. The horse hasn’t bolted, it’s more …developed advanced horse technology to conquer the furthest galaxies, and left the solar system. That we couldn’t kill this paper in *April 2020* was frustrating, this is almost mockery at this point. Unfit for purpose.

For a between-participants design, 30 participants per group would reliably (80% power) detect effect sizes of d ≥ 0.736. According to our paper last year, the median effect size for psychotherapy treatments for depression (n = 366), after adjusting for pub bias, is d = 0.53 doi.org/10.1016/j.jp...

*sighs* Percentage change should *always* be expressed on a log scale, because it’s multiplicative. A doubling and a halving should be given equal space. I did a whole thread on this at the time x.com/jburnmurdoch...

Why I don't use the base pipe in #RStats

1320 chrome browser tabs open. I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY.

It has taken more than 4 years but the methodologically poor (doi.org/10.1016/j.th...) and questionable paper (1-day peer review bmcmedresmethodol.bi...) that promoted HCQ for COVID-19 is finally retracted. We've been saying for years it had to be (doi.org/10.1016/j.th...).

A few papers I think worth reading. Mostly open access. Causal inference is hard: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Aanandita Kothurkar, @colinchulab.bsky.social, Ryan MacDonald and colleagues @ucleye.bsky.social apply IBEX to simultaneously identify all the major retinal cell types. Highlight: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/... Article: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

I was hesitant to watch the series version of "What We Do in the Shadows" because I loved the movie so much. But it's excellent! The Collin Robinson character is genius. He's an energy vampire who feeds off of people's boredom and frustration. Here he is feasting at a city council meeting:

Apparently, the drones in NJ have the ability to instantly degrade the video quality of your camera and prevent you from holding the phone still. I don't know how they do it, but they have a 100% success rate.

Dear academics We could dramatically reduce our administrative workload if we all just agreed not to ask for reference letters until we made our list of finalists. This is massive collective action problem has already been solved by… *checks notes* …every other industry on earth.