If it’s safe to leave, leave now. If VIC Emergency suggests you should leave, please leave

What’s the point of writers’ festivals — or, for that matter, writers — if they can’t discuss issues that matter? Australian arts administrators would rather destroy the whole sector than allow Palestinians to speak about genocide. It’s beyond shameful.

🚨 #statssky job alert 🚨 ANU's Statistical Support Network is hiring! Looks like a mix of statistical consulting and developing educational materials. IMO the best part would be working with the wonderful Professor Alice Richardson! jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/course-...

#rstats blogdown/netlify users: you might have received an email saying your site will go away because something something prerendering. If you go to the check link in the *comments* of the linked page (not the one in the text) it will likely tell you there's no problem because your site is static🎉

This kind of gives the game away? I mean we have literal neo-Nazi organisations like NSN in this country and they are openly advocating violence against our Jewish population. It beggars belief to suggest that a poet like Omar Sakr should be on this list while Thomas Sewell is not

"Trans ideology" should hit the same as "Black ideology" or "Hispanic ideology" or "Gay ideology" or "Female ideology". People are just trying to live their lives and be treated like people.

Tis the season of antacid and foods I probably shouldn't be eating

I was too busy enjoying myself and forgot pictures, but the milk buns from yesterday were accompanied by porchetta and several salads, followed by a peach tiramisu 🤤 Hope you're all having a yummy day

Getting ready for Christmas lunch Step 1, milk buns

There's still space on the starter pack! If you're a statistics/data science or adjacent person living in/are from the pacific region and you want to be added, just let me know (DMs are OK) #statssky #datascience #databs

🚀 The RSS presents "Statistics for Every Body: Inclusive Data Communication" on Jan 28, 2026! 📊 Learn to make your data accessible for audiences with visual & auditory impairments with experts from BBC News, ONS & more. 🔗Event details: bit.ly/Stats4Every1 #StatsSky #DataVis #RStats #InclusiveStats

Fantastic! $650k awarded via the Research Software Maintenance Fund for “Enabling the Next Generation of Contributors to R”—mentoring new contributors, modernizing R’s dev infrastructure, and strengthening the R Foundation. r-consortium.org/posts/650K-f... #rstats

In doing code reviews I have identified this same issue more than 0 times

I have enormous respect for people who write compilers and maintain software Internet held together by duct tape yadda yadda #rstats #databs

Have you got a PhD in Statistics (or related field) and experience in Statistical Consulting? A continuing position at the Australian National University is now open 🇦🇺🦘🐨. Would love to get an #rstats person if possible ☺️ Apply by 18 Jan 👉 jobs.anu.edu.au/jobs/course-... #statssky #statsky

Natural process Ethiopian coffee has always been my favourite and these beans from Market Lane are unbelievably tasty So good I almost want to change my rating scale to include an extra category

I know unseasoned chicken breast is very White People coded but the maillard reaction is an incredible thing

{ggview} can print plots to Viewer (Rstudio or Positron) with true scaling. Adjust plot settings and see the final proportions immediately. Save the plot once 👌 e.g.: ggplot(...) + ggview::canvas(width = 220, height = 220*2/3, units = "mm", dpi = 300) per @nrennie.bsky.social #datavis #rstats

Kicking off my annual leave in the best way possible... With a couple hours of meetings and ticking off ~20 emails

ViCBiostat Summer School: Register now below so you don’t miss out on e.g. Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen’s causal inference course covering a range of topics in “quasi-experimental” approaches: difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, synthetic controls etc. #EpiSky #CausalSky

It feels like a long time coming, but graduation time is finally here 🎉🎓

Friendly reminder to everyone (me) having time off soon - if you can't uncondition yourself from automatically opening your emails, maybe uninstall the app 🙃

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

HEY! YOU! ggdibbler 0.6.1 is finally up on CRAN! harriet-mason.github.io/ggdibbler/in... You can now pass random variables to any aesthetic in any ggplot geom/stat. If you can express it as a distribution, ggdibbler can plot it. It also works with ggplot extensions, like gganimate. #rstats

%notin% coming soon to an #rstats environment near you 🤩 developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/...

Where did this peer review norm of providing a summary of the research in the review come from? It should be evident from your feedback that you actually read the paper

I just realised that another blog post of mine had disappeared in my switch to a quarto sites, so I've reuploaded it (thanks github) Go read about the "Great Australian Statisticians" design I made for the SSA t-shirt competition #statssky benharrap.com/post/2020-12...

My favourite learning from #ASC2025 was from @robjhyndman.com The goal of forecasting isn't always to be correct, it can be to influence policy If you're successful, the forecast is probably wrong now and that's good

Tongs can help avoid cross-contamination of food items (important for those with allergies), but requires someone monitoring them. If someone drops the tongs on the floor and puts them back, you might as well not have them! In my past life doing serving/catering, tong refreshing was a common task +

I'm finally doing my #ASC2025 talk, so naturally I'll need to finish the slides today I never intended to be an academic yet here I am!

I need an #episky sanity check Providing tongs to pick up food seems like the less hygienic approach - everybody had to touch the same tongs Surely you're going to be more likely to spread a virus compared to just grabbing food with your hands Right?

"You see, Christmas is not a holiday. It is an ideological apparatus of family unity and consumer fetishism. The magic of the film—what we enjoy without knowing—is this collision between sweet kitsch and brutal violence. This overlap is not accidental; it is the truth of Christmas under capitalism."

Just over 2 weeks until calls for papers close!

I love #rstats but how are you all finding the energy to do all these extra curriculars like the advent of code? When I'm done with work I have nothing left 😮‍💨

I'm flying to #ASC2025 tomorrow, who else will be there? #statssky www.asc2025.net

Putting a general call out to my private sector colleagues - would anyone be interested in supporting an industry PhD? I would love to bring in students to work on imaging/time series problems, especially in space/remote sensing bridging astronomy and other applications.

I love learning about this kind of stuff, there's so many interesting little things like "The rev() function provides a reversed version of its argument. If you wish to sort in decreasing order, sort(x, decreasing = TRUE) is marginally (around 10%) faster than rev(sort(x))."

🎉 Announcing surveydown v1.0.0! surveydown is an #opensource #rstats package for building surveys with #Quarto & #Shiny. This release improves the survey design experience, including: - Simplified YAML settings - Auto page navigation - Previous buttons! More at surveydown.org/blog/2025-11...

I don't know how I've missed it because it's *right on the documentation home page*, but if you use {glue} for nice string interpolation in #rstats and you have {stringr} loaded (likely through the tidyverse), you can use str_glue() instead of glue::glue() or loading library(glue) glue.tidyverse.org

Today’s post is brought to you by my horrible neck & nerve pain, and is about the measurement bias we (almost) never bother to discuss in epi: measurement misspecification. open.substack.com/pub/epiellie...

Scrolling through lists of master's degree courses, unsure what to do with my life, I saw biostatistics and thought "that sounds sciencey and cool" It was

Voting begins for the #OceaniaR hackathon Looking forward to some #rstats nerdery on this Sunday 🤓

We're looking for volunteers to help Judge the 2025 Student Conference Awards! (Judges must have completed a PhD and not be a current student.) Register here 👉 www.ecolsoc.org.au/volunteer-ju...

Utterly dehumanizing, and thus evil.

#rstats go!

Love the glue package! Relevant blog post about joining strings #rstats benharrap.com/post/2025-09...

Confusing stats language: The "linear" is linear regression means "linear in the parameters". It does not mean "can only fit straight lines", and things like polynomials and splines can be included in linear models. online.stat.psu.edu/stat501/less... 1/2

Canberra peeps, come along! It'll be a double whammy with Pat Anderson AO talking health justice and self-determination, followed by discussion with Fiona Cornforth, Lisa Whop and Ray Lovett 🗓️ 26 Nov 🕠 5:30pm - 7pm AEDT 📍 Kambri Cinema, Acton ACT events.humanitix.com/yardhura-wal...

Australian #databs #datascience jobs 👀

I'm listening to the whole 'The Rest of New Order' album and the iconic track that features in Blade's rave scene really has no business going as hard as it does given the rest of the album youtu.be/-9dsrmGG4_o?...