🚀 Announcing unicefData — open-source access to 700+ child welfare indicators from UNICEF’s SDMX API One syntax across Python, R, and Stata. No API expertise needed. 🔗 github.com/unicef-drp/unicefData #OpenData #SDGs #RStats #Python #Stata

I blogged with #rstats about New Caledonia's nickel exports and how they have collapsed in the past few years, from a combination of global economic conditions, local political economy, and security and civil unrest problems in 2024. freerangestats.info/blog/2026/01...

LLMs are biased towards their training data. Most published research is...not brilliant. What is the likelihood that an LLM produces a useful hypothesis and not, say, "why not try flax seed oil for liver disease".

For last week's #TidyTuesday, I created a map of endangered languages around the world. Built entirely in R/ggplot2: transforming spatial coordinates, identifying hotspots and composing multiple charts! Code: github.com/gkaramanis/t... Inspiration: www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/co... #RStats #dataviz

I see the guy who said sinking the Bismarck was a war crime has deleted his account or something. This was a classic kerfuffle that should have just been about facts (did the Bismarck surrender before sinking or not? And the answer is "no") but instead became an abusive bunfight in all directions.

I have put together an index page compiling my various #rstats blog posts using #Pacific island countries and territories; data: freerangestats.info/blog/pacific.... Topics such as choropleth maps of the Pacific, demographic techniques and trends, and multidimensional vulnerability.

The death of Brigitte Bardot necessitated the update of this marvelous chart. Only three people mentioned in Billy Joel's banger "We Didn't Start The Fire" are still alive. Source: buff.ly/cWkphRB

That is pretty obvious to me. If a paper has hallucinations, fake citations or other LLM artifacts, it should be immediately desk rejected.

I generally think @maiamindel.bsky.social is a very good commentator and her take on the Are White Male Millennials Oppressed? discourse is good too. someunpleasant.substack.com/p/whose-lost...

OK books that I read for the first time in 2025 and gave five stars to! - a thread. First up, Marc Morris' The Norman Conquest. I don't remember much about this but I read it in a day this Jan and gave it 5 stars so it must be good. I remember learning more about the post-Hastings stuff.

AI is accelerating the velocity of stupid promises by 5x

The #1 movie when you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go.

A really nice—and surprising—chart from Amanda Shendruk's excellent newsletter, Not-Ship www.not-ship.com/when-do-most...

Here’s an article from this year with the Australian gun lobby boasting that, with surging gun numbers, it was winning the fight against firearms control advocates. Blame guns. Blame anti-Semitism. Blame terrorists. Do not blame everyday Australians who marched for peace.

Keeping this at hand in case I need to point to it and tap

⬛🟦⚪ Two years in the making! In a fantastic collaboration with Miguel from the International Labour Organisation! 🖤💙 The 'bpvars' package for Forecasting with Bayesian Panel Vector Autoregressions is out on CRAN! And it's spectacular! cran.r-project.org/package=bpvars #bpvars #bsvars.org #rstats

'Most stuff .... is in response to other stuff' is a common problem whenever looking for in depth reading on a topic. So frustrating to have to wade through multiple chapters on why Wiggins is all wrong. Different if you knew the chap, of course.

Legal question, can a seizure warrant signed by a US judge legitimise a seizure on the high seas (outside US jurisdiction), or is this piracy? edition.cnn.com/2025/12/10/p...

Brilliant use of a Sankey chart, for any sceptics doubting that they have their purposes.

One thing I learned today is that the US State Department was using New Courier font until 2003, presumably to emulate the look of everything being typed out on mechanical typewriters. Apparently not just for the secure cable system but douments in general?

A nice piece on algorithmic pricing worth your time. A question I got frequently when I led BLS was why the agency went into stores and didn’t just collect prices online. My answer, “prices online are often different than in the store, so we do both” often surprised people.

The world needs more indicators of country-level governance that are not perceptions-based and that can change faster and more responsively than existing measures.

I quite like this model combining open publication, postpub review, and journals downstream pick and choose. What are the arguments against it?

People post more code and preregister more, and have very positive attitudes about it www.nature.com/articles/s41... Increase in sample sizes: Bakker, M., Lê, T. T., & Marzalek, J. M. (2025). osf.io/preprints/ps...

My most cheesy view is probably that I find Kipling's *If* motivating and inspiring. (Fully conceding that the last line hasn't aged well and needs interpretation to work.) Comparative British and Roman imperial stoicism is presumably a topic discussed in depth somewhere.

Second #rstats blog post in a series on Pacific island population issues. This post looks at net migration estimates from the UN Population Prospects. For most Pacific countries, net migration is strongly negative most of the time. freerangestats.info/blog/2025/12...

Second #rstats blog post in a series on Pacific island population issues. This post looks at net migration estimates from the UN Population Prospects. For most Pacific countries, net migration is strongly negative most of the time. freerangestats.info/blog/2025/12...

Absolutely love this. Very clear and neat

The statistical performance indicators data from the World Bank for 2024 has been released today, and I've been working on a little interactive explainer 📊 Check it out here: nrennie.rbind.io/statistical-... #DataViz #ggplot2

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

For the avoidance of doubt: does svyglm() use robust standard errors? Yes! notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/12/01/d...

It seems pretty obvious in this story that the water pollution problem is nothing to do with Amazon, but is nitrates from farms' fertiliser.

In which horses are more common than zebras and this isn't a reason to oversample notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/12/01/h...

Today I learned about "World Data Lab", founded by ex-World Bank types and an attempt to make global data (poverty, population, SDGs, etc) accessible for the masses. It feels a bit like @ourworldindata.org but with a more commercial angle. What other such (non-govt) data aggregators are out there?

First in a series of #rstats blog posts about drawing charts of population growth, migration and remittance issues for Pacific island countries and territories. Today's starts with the simplest - a couple of different ways to summarise population size and growth. freerangestats.info/blog/2025/11...

New blog! Today in #CosmicStories I'm going to take a deep dive. I'm considering Doctor Who serial "Robot" as a case study of representations of robot intelligence, science and scientists in the 1970s. https;//www.warwick.ac.uk/CosmicStories/doctor_whos_robot/ #DoctorWho #ScienceandSF #AI

First in a series of #rstats blog posts about drawing charts of population growth, migration and remittance issues for Pacific island countries and territories. Today's starts with the simplest - a couple of different ways to summarise population size and growth. freerangestats.info/blog/2025/11...

Sad that he's gone. A very great playwright in a world where there seem to be fewer and fewer, whatever his opinions on other matters.

Last night, was waxing lyrical about how datavis as an art/craft is dead. A little bit from mobile-first making deep/big exploration stuff very difficult, but mostly from the industrialisation via PowerBI/Tableau dashboards, which changed the expectations for what datavis should be...

A *huge* vaccine victory. I've been writing on this for years; Australia has seen remarkable progress in cervical cancer prevention with the HPV vaccine. I love seeing science triumph like this.

A recent essay claims the poverty line for a family of four should be $140,000. I disagree: economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/11/26/t...

To get this takes time. We hire software engineers, and they learn with us about epidemiology, NHS data, and TREs. We hire researchers, and they learn with us about GitHub, and what technical product managers do. This is the team that won this award!

Genuine question for historians, putting Trump aside, who would be the 'most openly corrupt president in US history' if we limited it to 2016 and earlier? For comparison purposes.

I have been alternating a chapter of @causalinf.bsky.social 's excellent 'Causal Inference the Mixtape' with Enid Blyton's Malory Towers, a notable contrast. Generally works, but a little worried the exhortations to be kind, mature and decent at games may clash with the DDD identification strategy.

Some thoughts on empirical distributions of z-scores statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/24/s...

These are indeed some great photos of birds

If anybody is interested in a good cry xkcd.com/3172/

This, by @giacgrassi.bsky.social, remains one of the simplest and best climate visuals

'I’m not sure which is worse, a total lack of self-awareness or just enough to recognise the problem but insufficient self-discipline to do anything about it.' It’s too late for Robert Shrimsley, but you can still follow his advice: on.ft.com/4of0ocb