Happy Friday! I am clearly in a mood.

Extremely proud of this paper, which finally has an issue number! psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

Please share this opportunity to listen to Dr. Kenneth Bollen talk about #StructuralEquationModeling. Check it out and register, it’s free! bit.ly/3Jrw2Es

Who needs ordinal regression. I mean, it’s not like nearly *all* of our variables are ordinal or anything … 🤣😂😢

FIU is disabling email forwarding as of tomorrow, which is understandable for cybersecurity but means I’ll have to send all emails using their garbage Microsoft Outlook interface. On the bright side, I guess this’ll help my compulsive email checking, since I refuse to get outlook on my phone.

Great thread in which @kevinmking.bsky.social says everything I think and feel about latent classes. From now on, any time people ask me about these analyses, I’m going to just send them a link to this thread.

“Most youth own smartphones.”

Had a blast teaching SEM at #APS2025! Great group of workshop attendees asking thoughtful, engaging questions. Hopefully folks learned something and had fun in the process!

Last chance to sign up for Intro (June 9-13) and Advanced (June 16-20) Mediation & Moderation at GSERM either in-person in beautiful St. Gallen, Switzerland or online from the comfort of your own home/office. gserm.org/programme/co...

8 mo home sick from daycare. No big deal but marathon kinda day. Circa hour 11 of the waking day we’re watching Ms Rachel-throwing that at the wall in case it sticks-and all of a sudden, I swear, she goes, “Can you say … help? … HELP … heeeeeelp …” And my brain starts to break, just a little. 😅😂🤣

Definitely take the free SEM workshop with @centerstat.org! And while we’re also shamelessly promoting our own things, I know of an SEM workshop at APS next week that I can recommend as well … 😉 www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/...

If you are planning to attend #APS2025 next week, please come by our (@winterstat.bsky.social & @ashleylwatts.bsky.social) invited symposium on the myriad problems of widespread statistical model evaluation practices (e.g., goodness-of-fit testing), along with some insightful solutions

I have neither beneficence nor respect for the persons who created the extremely long CITI Training Good Clinical Practice modules and mandatory 100% quiz question pass rate requirement. 😒

Matrix overview slides for my regression class are coming along.

Hey @wesbonifay.bsky.social, I finally got a NYT Letterboxed in 2 words, so now I’m preparing to ascend to heaven as a being made of pure light. 🙌🏻🌅 Just figured you’d want to know.

The negative binomial is just like the regular binomial, except everything is terrible and nothing matters and what’s even the point?

It is only our hubris that ever led us to name it “the negative binomial distribution” instead of “the Poisson distribution with wiggly gamma means.”

New paper on dealing with MNAR intensive longitudinal data. Ran into this problem in an empirical study and didn't find too much in the methods literature on MNAR ILD, so this was the best I could come up with. Lots of opportunity to improve methods in this area! psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

As always, treating the history of statistics with the respect and reverence that it deserves.

I can’t catch a break. But I *can* catch literally every virus my daughter picks up at daycare.

One of the old FIU cybersecurity trainings talked about building a ‘strong shield’ against cybersecurity threats. Now, when I report a phishing email or text, in my head, I’m like, “FUCK YOU, MY SHIELD IS STRONG!” Not sure if that means that the training was effective or not.

No one: Daycare: March 3rd is dress up like Dr Seuss day! 😃

First he called my dependent variable a count (rude), then he told me to run a POISON REGRESSION. 😳☠️

Count outcome slides are coming along.

Today’s 90s movie reference that my students will never get. Context: discussing why you shouldn’t treat ordinal outcomes as if they are continuous.

Hot off the press! 📣📣In this tutorial we illustrate available multiple imputation approaches for handling longitudinal data including when they are clustered within higher level clusters. A reproducible example with R and Stata code provided! #OpenAccess onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I reviewed this paper-it is excellent and everybody should read it!

New preprint with @winterstat.bsky.social and Ellen Fitzsimmons on ordinal factor analysis, where the latent variables are scaled so that they generally take values from 1 to # of ordered categories. The scaling is intuitive because it is what you use when you treat ordinal variables as continuous.

I've gotten through all of my materials and ended class early two weeks in a row, and now I am both excited and scared.

::Stat class student sheepishly raising their hand:: "But I thought the first rule of logarithms was we don't talk about logarithms ..."

Happy “The Unspeakable Dread of the Semester Approaching has been Replaced by the Abject Horror of it Actually Arriving” to all who celebrate this week. 😃

Time to fill in the placeholders (and edit the times) on the syllabus for my new spring class.

Goodbye 2024, hello 2025! I’ve already forgotten my auld acquaintances.

“🎵 I-I-I-buprofen It’s how I start my day. I-I-I-buprofen Makes the pain go away. 😃 I-I-I-buprofen’s Gonna make it all okay! Tha-a-a-t’s why *I* buy I-buprofen! 🎶” -Look me in the eye and tell me with a straight face that I shouldn’t have gone into marketing in the 1950s.

Prep for my “Assumptions of Generalized Linear Models” lecture is going about as expected…

“I found this revision very good and you should accept it very much. Thank you! Bye bye!” -Me, trying my best to get through my journal reviewing commitments with tired new parent brain.

You take your baby to daycare for three days? Sick. Right away.

Agreed. In the original Rubin paper he distinguished between Observed At Random (OAR), which loosely means random with respect to the observed (seen) data, and Missing At Random (MAR), which means random with respect to the unseen data (missing scores). MCAR-not coined until later- = MAR + OAR.

All models are wrong. No models are useful. ::WOMP WOMP::

Fantastic piece by Marten Scheffer on the forgotten half of thinking: ".. taking walks, reading things unrelated to your research, and hanging out with strangers in a campus pub should be considered part of the serious process of thinking .." www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

There's still time to sign up for 3 days of Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis with me and @StatHorizons! April 18 - 20! Come get all your questions answered! statisticalhorizons.com/seminars/med...