I should have been consulted

This article doesn’t address the real hack: choose a starting word with common consonants instead of common vowels. Try CRWTH

Scientific journal editor here: If you're invited to peer review an article and you can't do it, please just click "no." That tells me "this person can't do it, I should invite someone else." Otherwise the system waits 3 weeks to tell me that you didn't respond and I should invite someone else.

Agent based model or drone footage of Limp Bizkit in Greece?

Handmade lino block print of Claude Shannon that I commissioned from www.etsy.com/shop/minouette

If I were an action hero, this is what I’d say to the bad guy before the kill shot.

This semester I taught a new class, Statistical Model Evaluation, that covered frequentist, Bayesian, and information-theoretic philosophies and methods of model evaluation. Each week students had to submit a 1-page reaction to an assigned reading, along with a question to discuss in class

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed throughout this commencement speech at the University of Arizona for his praise of AI. This comes just a week after another commencement speaker who mentioned AI was booed at a school in Florida. Read more: www.404media.co/ucf-ai-comme...

I will never stop talking about this: The lovely and profound "If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known" is from an NYT article about the author accidentally being CC'd on an email where his friends were making fun of him for renting goats.

Graphic designers: I designed this in PowerPoint but printing company needs a PDF. But export to PDF messed up the kerning (see “ia” in “Williams”). It looks great in pptx, just not after exporting. Any ideas?

The circle of life

Classic academic's wikipedia page arc

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

Me discussing Camper Van Beethoven

If only psych measurement was as straightforward and practical as physical measurement

This is great! (Paper was helmed by the brilliant @winterstat.bsky.social and two former students from my IRT course.)

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

If you're attending @ncme38.bsky.social this week, stop by the "Majestic" room on Thursday @ 1:45p to hear about our majestic new project on "Corroborative factor analysis."

If I had any students to advise, I'd start a reading club where we'd talk about the composition of creative prose. I'd have them dissect Nicholson Baker's novella about riding an escalator to buy shoelaces & they'd probably hate it but at least learn that boring topics don't require boring writing

One of the simplest ways

how lucky I am to have fifty incredible years of posting ahead of me

That which can be depicted with a simple photograph need not be generated with a complex prompt

Now out: How did earthquakes come to have a (quantitative) size? How can we quantify without experimental control? @cristianlarph.bsky.social and I answer both questions and show their implications for human science measurement. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #philsci #histsci #seismology

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

Costco Connection magazine just published a full article about why and how to stop your car

Interesting story about legendary Bayesian Sir Harold Jeffreys refusing to update his prior

where do you think the term occam’s razor comes from? i suspect it originates from the Oceanic Coastal and Continental Alliiance of Magistrates (OCCAM), an ancient global court system that was founded in what we understand to be the 14th century, but what they know to be the 32nd. they were feared t

I enjoyed the Super Bowl halftime show but it would be nice if next year the halftime show was a plain black screen for fifteen minutes, giving football fans a quiet moment to contemplate their own mortality

Only British Vogue has the courage to publish true science as it was practiced in the 18th century Transactions of the Royal Society

I love to read about a big number freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/20...

Due date for proposals was Feb 1, but if you submit a proposal by Feb 15, we will add it to the stack. Please share this announcement!

Exercise your prerogative as teacher

Scientists should invent a Good Day clock that counts down to everything being fine

Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.

Researchers often treat ordinal variables as continuous. What if we could mimic this in an ordinal factor analysis/IRT model? We propose new identification constraints so that the latent variable goes from 1 to (# of ordered categories), with connections to treating ordinal variables as continuous.

Excited to share a new call for papers for a special issue in Psychometrika focused on Data Intensive Methods in Psychometrics that I'll be guest editing with @kyliegorney.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social, @leonievogelsmeier.bsky.social, and Ben Domingue: www.psychometricsociety.org/post/call-sp...

Enroll in my new workshop to realize your dream of learning IRT #quantpsych #psychometrics #psychsky #statssky

Consider submitting a proposal to the (open access) Psychometrika special issue on Variable Selection for Complex Psychometric Data, with a proposal deadline of Jan 15. Full details:

My first read of 2026 will be this biography of Willard Gibbs by poet Muriel Rukeyser (published by @mariapopova.bsky.social)

Asking for a friend

Reupping the call below + sharing that @winterstat.bsky.social and I will be presenting our work on model evaluation & fitting propensity analysis at the upcoming Pacific Quant Psych Conference (Jun 29-30; UC Davis) organized by @mijke.bsky.social and Ben Domingue. Request for proposals coming soon!

here’s a free version: neat_research_panel <- data.frame( id = 1:100, treatment = sample(c(TRUE, FALSE), 100, replace = TRUE), outcome = rnorm(100, mean = 50, sd = 5) )

Gonna be rejecting any paper that draws any inference about people from this approach.

Yellow-Red-Blue, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925 (detail, rotated), 📸 by @riogiancarlo.bsky.social

A perspectivist framework for understanding statistical assumptions: "The description of the world underlying statistical models has to be understood from the perspective that is sketched by the statistical assumptions." By @kinozhao.bsky.social hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/qasl4fza #PhilSci

While teaching a course on Item Response Theory this semester, I created a Shiny app for visualizing some polytomous item response models: falkcarl.shinyapps.io/polytomous/ This is an initial draft, so comments/questions/suggestions are welcome! #Psychometrics #RShiny #IRT