🌈 The website for the inaugural rainbowR conference is now live! 🎉 🗓️ Save the date: Feb 25th-26th, 2026 📣 Call for submissions is open 👯 We're bringing together LGBTQ+ R users to promote our work and foster connections among community members conference.rainbowr.org

"earlier this year, the Trump administration quietly dismantled the external peer review procedure that assured that CDC-funded extramural research reflected the “most meritorious ideas and projects,” and maintained public accountability." insidemedicine.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

Defend Public Health is hiring an Organizing Director (full time), and Organizing and Operations managers (part time). Apply! www.defendpublichealth.org/jobs-defend-... @defendpublichealth.bsky.social #jobs

I’m looking for folks with IDD and their families who rely on SNAP and want to talk to a journalist about it. DM me here, email me at sluterman dot 19thnews dot org, or hit me up on Signal at slooterman.18.

Direct File is survived by its code, lovingly preserved on GitHub for potential revival whenever the leaders of the executive branch are no longer bent on looting the country.

Defend Public Health is hiring an Organizing Director (full time), and Organizing and Operations managers (part time). www.defendpublichealth.org/jobs-defend-... @defendpublichealth.bsky.social #jobs

Now I'm also looking for a research software engineer to implement a pile of research results to R packages loo, posterior, bayesplot, projpred, priorsense, brms or/and Python packages ArviZ, Bambi and Kulprit. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact info at users.aalto.fi/~ave/)

NYC and adjacent friends: I'm thrilled and terrified to be giving a public lecture in Manhattan at 6pm on Wednesday, 19 November. If you feel like coming into the city* for the evening, I'd love to see you there! *Yes, NYC = "the city" for Jersey girls. www.simonsfoundation.org/event/trade-...

Here's my latest contribution to the "Lost Science" series at the New York Times: Jay Falk, a scientist who studies why some female hummingbirds look just like males. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qF7Qje

TIL about Faculty First Responders, a group that offers "peer-to-peer counseling and advice to academic workers experiencing media attacks, campaigns of harassment, doxing, or other threats to their academic freedom and free speech." facultyfirstresponders.com Thanks @hormiga.bsky.social !

Defend Public Health is hiring an Organizing Director (full time), and Organizing and Operations managers (part time). www.defendpublichealth.org/jobs-defend-... @defendpublichealth.bsky.social #jobs

In interviews with THE CITY, members of a local representing environmental workers criticized their national leader’s call for Democrats to pause health care demands in order to reopen the government. www.thecity.nyc/2025/10/31/g...

This is one of the many things the Continuing Resolution needs to place guardrails on.

I wrote an explainer about the mass firings—the RIFs. The RIFs all year have been clearly illegal. Russell Vought is using them to lawlessly clean out federal agencies. Lower court judges have said so. But the Calvinball Supreme Court has allowed them. 1/

New story up on the non-existent banned words from NIH grants (based on my grant title, word cloud analysis) www.statnews.com/2025/10/29/n... 1/3

good piece. and nirav shah gets it exactly right — grievance and retribution are trump’s motivations for destroying our nation’s public health agency. as simple and horrific as that.

Your regular reminder that NSF is required by US law to support increasing the participation of historically less represented groups in science and technology fields

I'm an #RStats users, but I know some of the R 📦s I use have reticulate + Python under the hood. Thank you @python.org for standing up for everyone in your community. I've made a small donation, hopefully a lot of small $$ can help fund what's needed.

Open Science and Open Source only with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility. Inclusion is essential to science, and science is only worthwhile if it lifts everyone up together. ropensci.org/blog/2025/02... #OpenSource #OpenScience

Between @python.org and @carpentries.carpentries.org, the open-source ecosystem is rejecting the administration's inquisition against DEI. If you can support them with a donation please do. I just did! Does anyone know about others who have declined NIH or NSF grant funding over over these terms?

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

But I’d like to vet this threat model with folks who properly know. Please share for better/expert analyses.

Worse, it’s not just the federal government that can bring suit, but individual racist, bigoted, transphobic “whistleblowers.” Who receive 10-30% of the settlements, which can balloon b/c mandatory *per-violation* fees of $14,000-28,000. To me, this looks like bounties. It looks suffocating.

It led me to read up on the administration’s weaponization of FCA (False Claims Act). It’s our strongest civil rights & anticorruption law, ofc. If I have this right, UVA (& all accepting federal $$ w/these anti-DEI stipulations) now at risk of *massive* financial penalties beyond grant revocation

I did something unusual w/my first briefing point this week b/c the UVA deal raises my hackles. No fees? Assurances of academic freedom? Great. where’s the catch? I think it’s really odd that UVA president is required to *personally attest* there’s “no DEI here!” every 3 months until 2028. Why?

This is a great way to contribute to the #rstats and #TidyTuesday communities!

October news! 🗞️ #rstats 🦋 2025-11-06 Community call: Graceful Internet Packages 📼 Community call recording: R-multiverse, a new way to publish R packages 📆 Coworking 📦 New package {partialling.out} 👋 Call for new maintainers 🗒️ 4 blog posts! 🧰 Package Development Corner […]

A potent and plain-spoken defence of DEI in science - from the experts. Representation *matters*.

This week @defendpublichealth.bsky.social tackles Sec Kennedy's repeated claims that vaccines create "Immune Overload" correcting his falsehoods about the functioning of the immune system. www.defendpublichealth.org/opinion/whop...

POSTDOC JOB AD: I'm hiring a Bayesian ecologist to build a (IMO, extremely fun) model of humpback whale spatiotemporal dynamics in California 2-year position starting fall 2026. in-person in Santa Cruz; collab w with Mevin Hooten's lab at UT Austin. ask me Qs or apply: recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF02003

New York AG Tish James has urged members of the public who have witnessed and documented ICE activity to share their videos and photos with her office through an online portal ag.ny.gov/federal-acti...

[blog] ¡Prepárense para el lanzamiento! Paquetes enviados al R-multiverse https://ropensci.org/es/blog/2025/10/22/paquetes-r-multiverse/

[blog] Go for Launch! Packages Shipped to the R-Multiverse ✨ https://ropensci.org/blog/2025/10/22/packages-multiverse/

New email to Director Bhattacharya this morning... 1/5

On 20 March 2025, Trump’s NIH terminated a grant exploring structural racism as a second hit on APOL1 in kidney disease. The majority of the patients on the study’s stakeholder advisory board heard this as: ‘Your life does not matter to us’. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

EFI Social Science & Ecoforecasting Award RFP. 📆Deadline: Dec 15, 2025 $1,000 grants available for 5 project groups led by a social scientist to either 1) develop a proposal for external funding or 2) convene a group to explore ideas and potential funding sources. ecoforecast.org/social-scien...

DARTMOUTH OUT! We are at 6 rejections. Vanderbilt is the only private left standing "considering" the compact along with UT Austin and the University of Arizona.

This bit right here particularly

One protest not enough for you this weekend? Get it started right tomorrow with @standupforscience.bsky.social you can also join virtually:-)

Scientists at UT eyeing the vague promise of "increased funding preferences" as if Trump will escort you tp the front of the NIH line. No. What they mean is, they're gonna hire the unqualified nephew of a Senator for something, and now they've made a mechanism to give him the federal money instead.

If you are looking for a way to help ensure Palestinians in Gaza are not forgotten, please consider donating to my friend Fadi who is trying to ensure his son gets the physical therapy he needs. Message below:

The more quickly and publicly prestigious institutions reject this, the easier it is for the rest to do the same (and, indeed, the more embarrassing it becomes to consider folding)

Perfect

Would any fluent speakers of Korean or Chinese have a couple of minutes to review some updated pkgdown translations at github.com/r-lib/pkgdow... ? These were generated by claude code, so they're probably ok, but I'd love a human to double check.

Learn more about Grandparents For Vaccines and our own @nurseteria.bsky.social

Judge Illson's order: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... RIF's begun Oct 10 or after must be halted and all notice periods paused.

I can't seem to find this in any articles about this ruling: does the TRO prevent the layoffs of people already (informed they were) laid off since last Friday? Or only new ones going forward?

The WH budget for FY26 includes a proposed $18B cut to NIH, a $5B cut to NASA, a $5B cut to NSF, a $5B cut to CDC, and a $5B cut to EPA. You don't need a math/econ PhD to see that a $40B bailout to Argentina covers this and more right here in the USA. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...