Weird ggplot thing that got me this week with the update to 4.0 - it supports new ink and paper arguments (www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09... ) and they've changed how transparency works! If you a transparent bg, you can control it with theme_*() now #rstats

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The person who did all of these things was called a “tyrant…unfit to be the ruler of a free people” in 1776. Yup. Give it a read…

Everything is so stupid.

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

I have never seen such a blistering rebuke of a President by a federal judge. He is telling us clearly to stand up for our liberty against a dictator. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Another week, another magical #rstats gift from Emil. 🥰

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Trying to keep my professional chill but I’m SO excited Carnegie Mellon is launching a cluster hire in computational humanities—MULTIPLE JOBS! 1. Asst Teaching Track Prof in Computational Humanities - apply.interfolio.com/173622 2. Asst Tenure Track Prof in CH - apply.interfolio.com/173626

One of my favorite #PositConf things, from @hadley.nz : the Pac-Man inclusiveness "rule" #PositConf2025

"It places you in a powerful state of extreme empathy — that our user’s code is our responsibility"

The new {marginaleffects} release for #RStats (0.30.0) comes with two new vignettes: 1. Speed up computation with automatic differentiation (often 10x gains) marginaleffects.com/bonus/perfor... 2. Power analyses with {marginaleffects} and {DeclareDesign}. marginaleffects.com/bonus/power....

By request: Same #rshiny app → native #electron desktop app workflow now on #Windows11 shinyelectron::export() → #rshinylive → installer → app.exe [Worth the Parallels license to record this from my Mac] Still no #rstats dependencies for end users. Living the cross-platform life (virtually).

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Disease prevalence in US states before & after vaccine introduction 🧪 From Edward Tufte & graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

I gave the keynote at Cascadia R Conf 2025: “25 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do with R.” R isn’t just for stats — it’s great for visualization, mapping, automation, and more. Watch the talk + get all the resources here: buff.ly/6svaIME Hope you learn something new! #rstats

Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life? Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social) Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...

For those of you who like a bit of socialism with your nationalism. truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT...

The Zotero browser plugins + its integration with RStudio & Quarto is game changing quarto.org/docs/get-sta...

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Welp, {chores} by @simonpcouch.com is an immediate install for sure. Basically it's {usethis} plus llm bundled into RStudio/Positron key encoding. Excited!!! 🧹🧺 #useR2025 #rstats #couchverse?

Still smiling after my keynote abt Community at #useR2025 💜 Huge thanks to the organizing team for the invite, and to everyone who joined, asked questions, and shared their thoughts — you made it truly special! Slides docs.google.com/presentation... Video: www.youtube.com/live/CTTvTQ-... #rstats

@rundel.bsky.social gave us insights into using both {parsermd} (well established, tested) and {markermd} (newer and used some vibe coding) that makes extracting info the actual documents of quarto/rmarkdown files *very easy* (extremely useful for teaching/grading/checking) 🤩 check it out! #useR2025

I had a blast at #useR2025. Here are my slides on `tinyplot`. grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/vig... (Rendering of the title slide is a bit off on mobile. I'll fix when when I get sec.)

Last but very definitely not least in the #useR2025 ⚡️talks: @vincentab.bsky.social showing us the power of {tinytable}! IMHO: {gt} is king for fancy reproducible html tables, but {tinytable} should be the go-to for quick formatting and other file formats. vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/

Super useful tool called ~ flourish ~ in quarto presentations presented and developed by @visruth.com 🙌🙌🙌 super easy to use and adds an powerful way to present code github.com/kbodwin/flou... cc @kellybodwin.com

Hex wall at #useR2025 🥳

Cool, cool, cool, cool … cool… 😭 humans aren’t built for handling this. Can only imagine that the powerful will make all good decisions with this power 🫠

“I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business,” said Mike Osterholm, an Univ. of Minnesota expert on infectious disease mRNA vaccines “certainly saved millions of lives,” said Dr. Paul Offit—a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

tl;dr tariffs = bad (and John needs to learn left from right)

Vaccines work www.news-medical.net/news/2025080...

We could have had cancer vaccines, and instead the United States will contribute nothing whatsoever to mRNA research, condemning millions of people worldwide to unnecessary illness and death

This is awful. Reliable economic data is a key strength of the US economy. When Argentina and Greece faked economic data it contributed to major crises. I don't think Trump will be able to fake the data given the procedures. But there is now a risk plus an awful appearance.

What an amazingly powerful and depressing tool The district where I live and work (NC-04), which includes Duke University, will lose $1.3B from cuts to the NIH 😢

Trump's new executive order about AI states that companies' models must not incorporate the idea that trans people exist as a concept. Seems bad.

#rstats polars 1.0.0 is now available! polars provides bindings to the eponymous Rust library, a very efficient dataframe library. This is the outcome of a 1-year long rewrite led by @eitsupi to refactor the internals and match the API of Python polars. pola-rs.github.io/r-polars/ Details ⬇️

Yes, there's a learning curve for sure. I have also developed tidypolars to keep using tidyverse code while using polars in the background: tidypolars.etiennebacher.com This takes care of most dataframe-level functions, and there's a number of other functions supported.

Open AI accusing DeepSeek of using ChatGPT to generate training material.

v1.1.0 of {ggsurvfit} 📦 is on CRAN! This release primarily includes updates to account for changes in the {survival}📦, but does include a few other gems. www.danieldsjoberg.com/ggsurvfit/in... #rstats #datascience #survivalanalysis #ggsurvfit #cran

I recently came across the idea of adding a /ai page to your personal website—similar to /now and /uses—to explain your LLM use (see this for a bunch of different ones slashai.page and this for the overall idea www.bydamo.la/p/ai-manifesto), so I created my own here

Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K. thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

I think I counted 19 of 26 but she was hitting them so fast my eyes started crossing

"We [statisticians] need to be accepting the changing winds and planting flags more quickly. If we don't bring statistics into the new tools, something is lost. I don't want a country of AI Sheeple. ... We are the front lines for responsible AI Education." - @zarek-drozda.bsky.social 👏💥

Not a surprise for those that know @kellybodwin.com but this was super fun 🥳 totally recommend getting hex infused tattoos!

Our next new exciting NumFOCUS Sponsored Project: data.table! data.table (pronounced: data-dot-table) provides a high-performance version of base R’s data.frame with syntax and feature enhancements! We’re thrilled to have data.table be the newest NumFOCUS project. rdatatable.gitlab.io/data.table/

Side note from @kellybodwin.com - as @healthandstats.bsky.social can attest, I told them that the typical pronunciation is "data table" and that I'm the weird one for saying "data dot table"! But... looks like my version has stuck... oops. 😜

76% of Americans think that democracy is under a serious threat, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. And their faith in political leadership in the White House and Congress is low.