“I’m here to tell you that there’s something very valuable in struggle. That there’s something very valuable in friction. Friction is good.”

Happy Father's Dad! www.smbc-comics.com/comic/number...

The 2026 laureates are Brian Ripley, Martin Maechler, Kurt Hornik, Peter Dalgaard, and Luke Tierney who have made the longest sustained contribution to #RStats. Half of the $1m prize money is awarded to the laureates and half to the rest of the Core Team.

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

Warwick Statistics is recruiting a Tutor. This is a one year fixed-term role for the academic year 26-27. Closing Deadline: Thursday 9th July 2026 at 11:55pm (UK Time) warwick-careers.tal....

this flight safety card is all of us

With friends at the University of Warwick (in particular, Rocco Caprio and @adriencorenflos.bsky.social), we've recently arXived some work (arxiv.org/abs/2605.30253) on a method for approximate inference known as "Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference", or "CAVI" for short. Let me explain:

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes

Super excited to get this at my door today! Ursula Laa and my book on exploring high-d data and models is in print! Book website is www.routledge.com/Interactivel... if interested I think my 30% discount code might work for you - msg me. Time to update dicook.github.io/mulgar_book/ too! #rstats

And, with error bars, no less

When I started legal blogging I thought it would be a little bit of contract law or libel law, and the occasional judicial review with constitutional implications. Now: a constant stream of constitutional crises, fundamental human rights abuses, and war crimes and other crimes against humanity.

Going beyond the spherical cow approximation. The paper we all needed. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 ♾️ 🐄

Me, when I call a credible interval a confidence interval

#rstats RIP, John Fox @yihui.org just published this lovely tribute to John Fox and his work yihui.org/en/2026/02/j...

I think there is not enough appreciation to how good this FT visualization is the original is like this 👇

We’re living in a constant loop of this cartoon:

Anything that deviates from normal is a conspiracy, including when things are precisely normal. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/curse-2 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

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....

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.