Next month the Cambridge Philosophical Society is hosting an event to celebrate David MacKay and his work on the tenth anniversary of his passing. The organizers are soliciting notes sharing how his work has impacted people -- you can submit at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F....

Offering you everything cheaper, or for nothing, costs you SO MUCH. It’s a really expensive deal. You don’t win. Not in the end.

“We don’t have trustworthy news sources or socially responsible media at all any more. But on the plus side, a machine that lies and makes us all more ignorant and furious saves me up to £3 a week. Bargain.”

This has been a long time coming. The first withdrawal, announced in July 2020, was halted by Joe Biden on his first day in office on 20 January 2021. Donald Trump signed an executive order reaffirming the withdrawal on his return to office on 20 January 2025. One year later here we are.

*Environmental Modelling meets Infectious Diseases: from Mathematics to Applications* Upcoming workshop in Warwick Stats, supported CRiSM, LMS and RSS. We aim to promote the transfer of ideas between the environmental modelling and infectious disease modelling communities. http://go.warwick.ac...

This is very sad news. John had an enormous influence over applied statistics through his books and software. It was always a pleasure to interact with him.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊 💀Nov 18, 1887 Gustav Theodor Fechner died in Leipzig, Germany 🇩🇪 1850: Fechner's Law: the subjective sensation is proportional to the log of stimulus intensity. This is a core idea behind accuracy of visual encoding of data -- eg, length > angle > area > color

Every ad now

This remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a bit dark. www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

student used some AI-assisted code to compute ROC stats with weights and the AI hallucinated pROC::roc(…, weights = weights). (the function doesn’t have a weights argument.) and because the function has a … argument, the fake weights argument was ignored without any warning

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation” - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." - Hannah Arendt

There are a couple of vacancies in Wollongong for Maths/Stats lecturers: www.uow.edu.au/about/jobs/j...

R Developer Day at University of Warwick brought together R-Ladies from around the world 🌎. Spaces like this remind us how powerful our global community is when we learn, collaborate and build together. Thanks to Heather Turner for making this possible 💜 #RDevDay #rladies

Absolutely unbelievable to see egregious anti-science nonsense being given an airing like this. Well done @lewisgoodall.com for calling it out. “A broad church… freedom of speech” - and that’s the excuse for platforming not just misinformation but disinformation.

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

At the RSS conference in Edinburgh where @firthstat.bsky.social is presenting his new tetraplots for displaying 4-way results in UK elections. Wooden tetrahedron by @warwickstats.bsky.social woodworker-in-residence Nick Tawn.

At next week's RSS conference I'll be presenting a poster (a first for me...it's about time!) "Tetraplot displays of UK General Election results" shows how to graph GE 2024 vote shares across 4 parties in a useful way. Full PDF poster at: github.com/DavidFirth/t...

Kyle [secretary of state for science innovation and technology] has been a vocal champion of AI … he had asked ChatGPT for advice on a range of work-related questions, including why British businesses were not adopting AI and what podcasts he should appear on. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

New paper, with P. Basak, A.R. Linero, and C. Maringe, accepted in JASA A&CS "Understanding Inequalities in Cancer Survival Using Bayesian Machine Learning" doi.org/10.1080/0162... #inequalities #cancer #survival #Bayesian #MachineLearning @icon-lshtm.bsky.social @statisticsucl.bsky.social

The problem with creating a centralised research institute is that you have to answer the question "Why here? Why can't this be done elsewhere?" Caught between industry and the university sector, the Alan Turing Institute is having a hard time answering.

#rstats I just submitted a new version of the {heplots} pkg to CRAN and got the message below. It's August, and the #CRAN maintainers deserve a break, but it seems to me they also deserve a vote of thanks for all the work they do in vetting updates and new packages in R.

Warwick Statistics is hosting the first Winter School in Probabilistic AI, 5-8 Jan 2026, targeted at PhD students, academics, and professionals; and features world-leading researchers speaking about recent advances in AI. www.probai.ac.uk/eve...

Let's say it louder for those at the back: Routine childhood vaccines do not cause autism, a major study in Denmark confirmed Wednesday, countering a myth that has been trumpeted for decades. www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

GPT increasingly feels like the next evolution of Gladwellian non-fic. Gladwell’s great trick was that you could flatter the reader’s ego by dressing up banalities and oversimplifications in a way that made them feel clever, like they were accessing special wisdom. This is the interactive version.

No it can't

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

We are recruiting! A three-year postdoctoral position at Warwick as part of the “Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence” hub on the mathematical foundations of AI. Further details at the link: warwick-careers.tal....

@danmcquillan.bsky.social has shared the text of his talk in which he applies Illich's ideas to the question of the role of the university in a world with now ubiquitous 'AI'. Here's a juicy bit.

The really strange thing about this ad is that it supposes a world in which Warren the slob can fake his way through work because his colleagues remain blissfully unaware that AI tools exist.

This is not necessarily prevention. It’s prediction. And prediction only leads to prevention if certain screening criteria are fulfilled including how good the prediction is & how effective the action is once you have the info. Otherwise there may be harms. IMO this hasn’t been well thought through.

Philip K Dick correctly predicted how annoying the future would be, and I think it’s because he was a Bay Area guy

Spam emails from predatory academic journals: Dearest Dr Professor Landes, may you grace us with your world-leading expertise? Emails from actual academic journals: We've created an account in our system for you. Review this paper, kthx.

Great day! Definitely recommend checking out the talk recordings when they go online - loads of cool stuff on show.

Let this be a warning to you all: nobody steals my charts and gets to be Prime Minister of Canada

Welcome to a morning free of all constitutional and legal crises; where there has been a heartening return to constitutionalism; and where there is a welcome renewed respect for the rule of law and separation of powers; and everything is going to be ok. Let’s see if this will carry on after noon.

Our next Discussion Meeting will focus on our journal paper exploring the statistical aspects of the Covid-19 response We caught up with co-author Simon Wood on the paper and what he'll discuss at next month's meeting rss.org.uk/news-publica... Register to attend here ⬇️ rss.org.uk/training-eve...

Graphic #rstats reminder that vaccines work 📊 www.databrewer.co/R/gallery/gg...

Hi #rstats friends! I'm starting consulting! I've had a great journey in academia working with brilliant people, and while it's bittersweet (and a bit scary!), I'm excited for this next step. I'll still be maintaining {greta} and am hoping to be even more involved with the R community. 1/n

You do not, in fact, have to wait until paragraph 5 of this story to explain that cod liver oil is not, in fact a "remedy" in any way www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/h...

Watching a global hegemon voluntarily surrender its position is extraordinary. A historical first.

New paper accepted in AISTATS! David Huk (@david-huk.bsky.social), Mark Steel and Ritabrata Dutta show that any copula can be represented as a classification problem, giving a new approach to model copula densities. Link to preprint: tinyurl.com/RatioCopula

🚨 The "penguins" data is coming to the base #rstats{datasets} in 4.5.0! @ellakaye.co.uk & @HeathrTurnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy r prepared an adapted and a raw version of the data set based on the {palmerpenguins} 📦 by @allisonhorst.bsky.social @apreshill.com and Kristen Gorman. 📈 Scatter plot:

Quick story here on what I've heard about cuts at NCI and NIH, and a few other things:

American science is under attack Opinion piece by Dr Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize winner, former director of the #NIH and the #NCI 🧪 “Perhaps what’s most disheartening is what feels like the absence of widespread opposition to this unraveling” www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/o...

Jeremias Knoblauch and other colleagues and friends in UCL launched a "Post-Bayes seminar series". Their will be many blocks of talks, including a series on PAC-Bayes (probably starting in September 2025). The first talk (by Jeremias) is next week. Please have a look: postbayes.github.io/seminar/

Due to the freeze on credit card use, my laboratory (in the FDA) risks losing the contents of our liquid nitrogen tanks which store INVALUABLE samples-they cannot be replaced, so they are literally priceless, and reflect about 50 years worth of research.

Periodic reminder the world of data analysis cannot be meaningfully categorised into "machine learning" and "statistics". Two cultures with substantial overlap in the use of methods (e.g. logistic regression), analytical goals (e.g. causal inference) and history jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing. OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT. They're crying their eyes out. What a bunch of hypocritical little babies. Cry more, freaks. www.ft.com/content/a0df...