We hope everyone is having a great reading week! We will be back next Wednesday Nov 12th with Dr Jon Rozeenbeek from University of Cambridge, talking about avoiding the online "bad bot" apocalypse. Full details on our website (surl.li/mqtofs). Join us in person at IoE (UCL)!

Short thread on today's HotFresh SJDM paper: bsky.app/profile/maxm...

Really cool new work from @mmrobinson93.bsky.social

New on Pinkerite: Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the world's biggest weasel www.pinkerite.com/2025/10/stev...

Charles Murray longs for the days when you could brag to the NYTimes about how much you enjoyed using Thai prostitutes. www.pinkerite.com/2025/05/one-...

You actually can turn off the annoying generative AI popups in Acrobat Reader!

Accurate. #academia #academy #philsky #philosophysky #philosophy #science

New preprint with @rogierk.bsky.social @paulbuerkner.com - we introduce "relative measurement uncertainty" - a reliability estimation method that's applicable across a broad class of Bayesian measurement models (e.g., generative-, computational- and item response theory-models osf.io/h54k8

Great post by @andrew.heiss.phd on animating #rstats {dplyr} operations www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/04...

I remember reading a blog post somewhat recently on here arguing that for open science practices every effort counts. So we should not expect every paper to fulfil all open science criteria immediately but researcher should start by making their data open, then their code, etc. Anyone has a link?

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Still a bit stunned but delighted to receive this from @royalsociety.org

New paper from @uclpals.bsky.social PhD student Calvin Deans-Browne and myself. We study to what degree prior beliefs and argument quality affect evaluations of arguments about political topics (e.g., abortion). Our results show prior beliefs play a larger role than argument quality itself. A 🧵

NEW FULLY FUNDED PHD POSITION Looking for a motivated PhD candidate to join our team. Together with Danya Muilwijk, Jeffrey Beekman and I, you will explore opportunities and limitations of AI in the context of organoids For more info and for applying 👉 www.careersatumcutrecht.com/vacancies/sc...

FWIW, both Clint and I discussed some points in the paper w/Uri (can't tag him b/c he blocked me) in private some time ago. To be clear, neither we nor he is entitled to "first comment" on anything. But if you say you have a policy you're willing to ignore when you feel, you don't have that policy.>

I am pleased to share that "the bird study" is now accepted at Psychology and Aging! A great collaboration with visiting intern Kishen Senziani, @leabartsch.bsky.social & @edamizrak.bsky.social 😀 Check out the pre-print below and a short thread on the study design and main takeaways 🧵👇

Two new preprints on multilevel HMMs! Time series data is now pervasive in psychology and new methods are needed to model the dynamics in such data. Hidden Markov Models (HHMs) are powerful models for dynamics in which a system is switching between a number of discrete states.

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

Insightful piece that resonates well with my experience of university governance in the UK. Paywall free link: archive.is/1yFiq

A night of Neuroscience comedy for all, featuring staff & students from UCL Brain Sciences with stand-up comedian Abigoliah Schamaun. 🎟️ Book your tickets for the Brain Science Comedy Club on 22 Sept here: www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-t...

Very excited to announce my student Andreas Arslan's first paper, "Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events" in Cognition! Out now open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Andreas isn't on bsky, but he very kindly wrote a summary thread for me to share. 🧵 (1/24)

New blog post! Ever wonder what geom_histogram is actually doing? How about geom_boxplot? In celebration of the release of #ggplot2 4.0.0 (ggplot8?), I explore the relationships between the “geoms” and “stats” offered by the core {ggplot2} functions. #rstats

Months of waiting but my review copy of The War on Science has arrived. I read Krauss’ introduction. What the fuck happened to this man? He comes off as incapable of basic research, argument, basic scholarship. He sounds stupid. I look into strange claims he makes and they’re demonstrably false

Most thing in stats should come with big red warning labels, but especially ideas about variance partitioning (and particularly anything related to R-squared). For some details see the cool blog post below.

Assistant Professor opening at University of California, Irvine | @mathpsych.org #iccmpsyched mathpsych.org/page/news/131

Major new release of ggplot2. Hopefully all packages using ggplot2 will soon be fully compatible with the latest version.

We now have a release candidate for the next version of #rstats bridgesampling that includes methods for CmdStanR and MCSE calculations (arxiv.org/abs/2508.14487). Install via: pak::pkg_install("quentingronau/bridgesampling") Please try it out and let us know how it goes!

Nearly 3 months since I contacted both the authors and editor of @jama.com about failure to share data. Article states data and code is available, but the github repo is empty. Not private or partial, empty. Has never contained anything. No replies from anyone. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Exciting #rstats news for Bayesian model comparison: bridgesampling is finally ready to support cmdstanr, see screenshot. Help us by installing the development version of bridgesampling and letting us know if it works for your model(s): pak::pkg_install("quentingronau/bridgesampling#44")

New on Pinkerite: A former neo-Nazi defects from Emil Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi network www.pinkerite.com/2025/09/a-fo...

The human visual system has specialized modular processing for multiple distinct categories of causal events. My new paper with my lab manager Katharina Wenig in Cognitive Science, "Causal Perception(s)" Free open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... #CogSci #PsychSciSky 🧵(1/22)

A new afex update is now on CRAN. it's mostly a maintenance update dealing with a bug in pbkrtest and preparing for the next major releases of ggplot2 and lme4.

🚀 gratia 0.11.0 is out! Now has a paper in JOSS — please cite 📄 doi.org/10.21105/jos... Experimental parallel processing ⚡ New assemble() for building plots 🎨 Better support for complex families + new diagnostics 🧪 Lots of bug fixes + polish ✨ 👉 gavinsimpson.github.io/gratia/ #Rstats

this slide is from a colleague's introductory stats course, I think it fits many statisticians' experiences

#rstats #statistics I've released my new open source book, "Powered by Linear Algebra: the role of matrices and vector space in data science," at matloff.github.io/WackyLinearA.... Turns the classic LA course on its head! Still proves the theorems, but with a deep emphasis on applications.

Posterior predictive checking of binary, categorical and many ordinal models with bar graphs is useless. Even the simplest models without covariates usually have such intercept terms that category specific probabilities are learned perfectly. Can you guess which model, 1 or 2, is misspecifed? 1/4

Beautiful example of how economists think. Link without paywall: archive.is/2025.08.12-1...

We know that a consensus of opinions is persuasive, but how reliable is this effect across people and types of consensus, and are there any kinds of claims where people care less about what other people think? This is what we tested in our new(ish) paper in @psychscience.bsky.social

We are recruiting a new PI at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, Associate or Full Professor. This is an amazing place to do cognitive neuroscience, in the heart of London. If you or someone you know might be interested, please pass it on. #neuroskyence www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢 🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method. Please RT www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

🚨 PostDoc Opening 🚨 The lab of Klaus Oberauer is looking for a new postdoc, starting end of this/beginning next year. Research focus is #cognition, #workingmemory, #methods and #computationalmodeling or anything in that direction. I cannot highlight ENOUGH how great it is to work in this lab 🥰🤓

I've got 1 event in one group in which we know the risk of the outcome is very low. This is creating enormous confidence intervals. Can I use firth penalization? Should I get more data? All ideas welcome stats.stackexchange.com/questions/66...

Incredible work on paper mills. I really wonder what happened to the cluster of fraudulent editors/authors at PLOSone in the lower right corner? Were there any real repercussions or are they still milling around?

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

As usual a super informative blog post by Danielle. This time about the Box-Cox power exponential distribution, which I have to admit I did not know before.

Me: This project will distinguish between Theories A and B My data:

🧠 New preprint alert! In this study, using a joint modelling method with the Diffusion Decision Model, we offer a mechanistic reinterpretation of the Late Positive event-related potential Component (LPC) as a neural signature of mnemonic strength during evidence accumulation in recognition memory.

Very happy that the first paper from my PhD has been published in Cognition! 🎉

Congratulations to Dr. Max Maier for passing his viva @uclpals.bsky.social. It was a joy working with you. I am looking forward to the work to come from your own lab at WBS! 🎉