R version 4.6.0 "Because it was There" (source version) has been released. It should be on CRAN by now. #rstats The choice of codename is in remembrance of R Core member Tomàš Kalibera (1978-2026). Among many other things, he was a keen mountain climber.

SORTEE Canada Chapter Join us for an informal online brainstorming session(s) to share ideas, and help shape future local activities! 🇨🇦 To register, please fill in the Expression of interest form on our website: sortee.org/chapters/ 📩

New blog post about R4.6 #rstats www.jumpingrivers.com/blog/whats-n...

In “Six Memos for the Next Millenium”, Italo Calvino distilled six literary virtues he felt should endure regardless of how the world changed. As we enter an age of automated evaluation & production of science, what are the parallel epstemic virtues we should try to preserve? We want your input! 🧵

This is very cool and I'm absolutely going to bother everyone around me with it

I now have a primitive interactive browser interface to the workflow graph. I can get this to support an interactive design mode I think. I just want to say, and let me be very clear so that no one misunderstands: javascript f'ing sucks.

"The publishers are – so to speak – having their cake whilst also eating it."

[R]eflecting on the harms of AI is not itself harm reduction. It may even contribute to rationalizing, normalizing, and enabling harm. Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing. Marcela Suárez et al. (2025, par. 7)."

I'm teaching git again this year at @csee-scee.bsky.social's 2026 meeting in Toronto. Motivated by the recent announcements on Copilot training, this will be my first time teaching an alternative for remote storage: Codeberg! This below is just another example of the slop we shouldn't accept.

I think we need to celebrate the death of Sora a bit more. This is a technology that, just MONTHS AGO, we were being told was going to literally destroy Hollywood and Disney was going to give them a BILLION DOLLARS and NONE OF THAT EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENED

"The uncritical adoption of AI can lead to students not developing essential academic skills such as critical thinking and writing." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

First thing that comes to mind is: could it be a new fun way to teach R?

@science.org should have higher standards than this unserious, click bait op-ed.

"The Grad Student Who Never Said 'No'" was a blog post by Brian Wansink in which he praised a grad student for coming up with new ways to reanalyze the data. This attracted quite a bit of attention which eventually led to Wansink's downfall: www.npr.org/sections/the...

It's only p-hacking when it comes from the p-region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling deep data dives.

A super useful and comprehensive summary! #ReproducibleCode

Which makes me think, does anyone have tips on how to run a successful book club on a textbook like Statistical Rethinking? We'll be meeting every two weeks, following Richard's older schedule at half speed. Different folks would sign up to lead the discussion. Mix of faculty and grad students.

Next semester I'm organizing a Statistical Rethinking book club for the bio dpt at @carleton.ca Interestingly we also decided to progress at half speed. This new 2 sections idea will be perfect if I ever decide to run future iterations of that book club (gotta learn the material first though!)

"The CSU isn’t investing in education—it’s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free."

The scientist-statistician was one of the most common professions in 21st century universities. In this era, statistics was seldom conducted by trained statisticians. Instead, subject experts, who possessed hard- and software, were responsible for tasks ranging from study design to causal inference

#OTD in 1967, Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars & changed our view of the universe. 𝘉𝘶𝘵... The #Nobel Prize in #Physics for their discovery went to to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish & to astronomer Martin Ryle. theconversation.com/fifty-years-...#OTD#Nobel#Physics#WomenInSTEM #astrophysics #MatildaEffect

I love the JBB story for a few reasons: - stringing 120 miles of wire - months of analzying paper roll data - her PI was like "that can't be right, do it again," the motto of PI's everywhere. - rare case of a landmark discovery becoming ubiquitous in popular culture for no particular reason

Tomorrow I'll have the pleasure of teaching version control to @carleton.ca ecology undergrads As a preamble, to drive the importance of professional tools for doing professional science, I've stolen @rmcelreath.bsky.social's entire lesson on the topic Of course, there will be classical memes

Marvel: "infinity war is the most ambitious crossover event in history" McElreath, Gelman & Vehtari:

I had to check what I recommend in my book. And Poison priors (right) are also cursed. I'm working on something new with Gelman and Vehtari, so will make a note to review our examples for some consistency in these contexts.

Yup, I've found this same need for periodic re-teaching of those fundamental concepts (both to myself and to others). I spent an hour yesterday reinforcing to a student the idea that smaller p-values != stronger effects, and that p-value = P(data | NH true) and not P(NH true | data).

Very much looking forward to this, and more than happy to support a good cause