Hairbrush lily and extradimensional tentacle monsters

This is a really nice blog post about the value of open source in #DataViz 📊 "Trust matters in data visualization. People need to believe what they see. Open source makes that possible because you can look under the hood and see how things work." - couldn't agree more!

And here’s the crowdfunding link if you want to contribute or share www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/852...

BusinessDesk has a fantastic (and rare) for a data journalist in New Zealand. The Herald and BusinessDesk are separate publications, but whoever is in this role will work with me on projects like Budget day visualisations 1/2 careers.nzme.co.nz/jobs/6697721...

And we have another open position, this time with a focus on Genome Biology! Join a great community in Vienna to bring your research to the next level!

Ok,a very informal survey. I need suggestions as to the best UG programs in criminology, criminal justice, crime science internationally. Context: we need to persuade my Uni of what the contents have to be for our reformed program & need to arm myself with arguments and good examples

Ooh, can I push you into writing a story about the MPs (especially the opposition MPs) who clearly think New Zealand law is perfect and needs no updating or changing because they almost never have a members bill proposal in the ballot?

NZ First MPs keep proposing laws they have no intention of passing, and the media falls for it every time. thespinoff.co.nz/politics/06-...

Biosecurity lays over 100 yellow-legged hornets traps, genetically tests captured insects

A list of all successful 2025 #MarsdenFund projects can be found below. Congratulations to all of the funded researchers! www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/f...

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄! Kevin Caners sits down with Rory Fitzgerald, Director of the European Social Survey and laureate of the 2024 Kohli Infrastructure Prize, to uncover the story behind one of the most influential social research projects in Europe. pod.link/1786456001/e... @ess-survey.bsky.social

Look, I love polling, considerably more than most people. But if you start crafting an agenda from what polls well, rather than starting with what a better world looks like, one that connects to the general public's needs, and how you get from here to there, then you have no business in politics

Hey anyone at #mpi or #biosecuritynz. We do wasp genomics. I reckon I could tell you in about 24 hours if these invasive yellow legged #hornets you have found in Auckland are sisters, or a larger invasion. For free. Hit me up now!

This is exactly the sort of thing genomics is good for (my colleagues use it for more challenging problems related to rat colonisation)

Annoyed at how much worse my new glasses are for laptop use. They're a bit better at distance, slightly worse peripheral vision, and about the same very close-up where it doesn't matter because I can see without them. Optometrist optimizing the wrong metric.

Only a great fool would think of such a simple password, and international jewel thieves are not great fools #iocane

Just over 2 weeks to go until the Australian Trials Methodology Conference! Join us on 20th November in Melbourne (or online) to hear the latest developments in clinical trial methodology! #atmc25 @austrim-cre.bsky.social www.atmc25.com/home

Spring up/fall over

ANES Data Release! electionstudies.org/data-center/... The 3-wave ANES panel is now available. It merges data from 3 election studies (2016-2020-2024), the first time the ANES has collected interviews of the same respondents across 3 presidential elections.

I think the wastewater team in PHFS deserve to be noted and congratulated for the best practice of, as well as publishing the dashboard, continuing to publish the underlying data (at the GitHub site).

Exciting day today. Not only is it Halloween, but my crowdfunding campaign is also live! Please support me by making a pledge and/or sharing on all your socials and with your friends, family, and colleagues. Thanks to everyone offering rewards. You rock! www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/852...

People sometimes ask why we want to rate DAGs. Couldn't we just rate statistical models instead? We like to explain it with capybaras and bicycles.

"Casual directed graphs" would be a good description of #tidytuesday, actually

“Bonferonni correction”, an invaluable method in #statistics, refers to the act of repeatedly correcting misspellings of the word Bonferroni at multiple places in a draft manuscript. #science #academia

student used some AI-assisted code to compute ROC stats with weights and the AI hallucinated pROC::roc(…, weights = weights). (the function doesn’t have a weights argument.) and because the function has a … argument, the fake weights argument was ignored without any warning

🚨It's finally here!🚨 AAPOR's Taskforce on 2024 Pre-Election Polling report is out! Full report: /https://aapor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AAPOR-Task-Force-on-2024-Pre-Election-Polling_Report.pdf Executive summary: aapor.org/wp-content/u...

It turns out there's an instagram for the late Leslie van der Sluys, an Australian artist known for linocuts of birds with plants www.instagram.com/leslie_van_d... #bloomscrolling

We're looking for a new colleague in Media and Creative Technologies at the University of Waikato (L or SL level). Feel free to ask me any questions you might have, and circulate to anyone relevant! elhs.fa.ap1.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

JOB: Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 using a very large dataset of more than 120,000 viral genomes generated as part of the ONS Covid Survey in Prof Katrina Lythgoe's Ecology and Evolution of Viruses Research Group. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

I had not previously noticed that the Minister for Energy was Simon Watts. (he should technically be the minister for power)

The Python Software Foundation got a competitive US research grant, but it came with a condition that they recant and abjure any diversity and inclusion ideas, on penalty of having to repay the money. Obviously this is not desirable or safe, so no grant. Donations would help them not regret this

I'm writing a blog post on making high-quality reports with Quarto and Typst like the ones we recently made for the Johns Hopkins University International Vaccine Access Center. Anything in particular you want to know about how we make reports like these? #rstats

Really interesting work (and thoughts on experimental design)!

Want to come work on SNAP, BALANCE+, and STRAP? And change how we treat and manage bloodstream infections? See below. #IDSky

looking forward to the Statistical Society of Australia's annual Belz Lecture this afternoon, delivered by @tslumley.bsky.social who will apparently showing us why everything I thought I knew about ordinal outcomes was wrong

Spent the day promoting Census at School Canada at a BC Math Teachers conference (BCAMT). Census at School is a program for K-12 students to take a survey & analyze data about themselves! Its free, easy to use & very engaging, making it fun for students & teachers (and parents). 🔗 censusatschool.ca

Citizen M rooms look like they’re auditioning to be on a transit ring in the corporate rim of @marthawells.com ‘s Murderbot Diaries.

Nice example from @mikecaulfield.bsky.social of how #GenAI can "help" people search more effective. mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/water-powe...

"He did not believe the coalition Government’s use of urgency and truncated select committee processes was behind the rise in submissions..." Of course he would say this, but he's wrong, and disingenous. The evidence suggests that an overall poor legislative process IS significantly implicated.

All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.

I remember my first driving lesson. Tony, my instructor, picked me up at four in the afternoon as a giant grey-green anvil of thunderheads piled up in the western sky. It was fine, thanks to Tony, who was an utter and degenerate rogue of a man.

Two more cases of #measles today. We urge vigilance over long weekend. Stay home if unwell, check locations of interest, call Healthline if symptomatic. tewhatuora.govt.nz/corporate-information/news-and-updates/measles-cases-and-exposures-continue-to-escalate

“On the 50th anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, journalist Russell Brown charts a potted history of New Zealand's outdated drug law.”… #nzpol drugfoundation.org.nz/news-and-rep...

My department (Computer science) is recruiting a postdoc (18 months) on any topics related to trust and AI (could be a philosophical project or a more empirically minded one). Belgian postdoc salaries are competitive. To apply: jobs.unamur.be/emploi.2025-...

Yellow-legged hornets have been found Glenfield and two other spots in Auckland. We don't want these here! They're twice the size of our other introduced wasps, kill and eat honeybees and lots of native species, and have a nasty sting. www.mpi.govt.nz/news/media-r...

"Investigations have confirmed that the fire originated from the car involved, and the bus batteries were undamaged and not a factor in the resulting fire." www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland/...

DO NOT WANT www.mpi.govt.nz/news/media-r...

It’s always funny to see how robust Evil Functionalism is. This is the thesis that literally anything that happens must ultimately serve the interests of “the system” through some perverse feedback loop. Presented as radical critique, it is just Panglossian Functionalism with the polarity reversed.

St Ursula of the 11,000 virgins, who should be the patron of data cleaning (the patron of traditional intro stats would be Our Lady of the Assumption)

When I made this slide, 27k parameters seemed like a lot