With all the July model runs now in, it is very likely that 2026 will see the largest El Niño event since records began in the late 1800s – and potentially by a truly mind-blowing margin. The median estimate is now 3.6C, roughly 0.8C hotter than the prior record (2.75C). www.theclimatebrink....

Today we launch the first stable release of RegCheck: v1.0.0. RegCheck makes it easier and quicker to compare study registrations to published papers for consistency - something we know is important in principle, but rarely done in practice. A 🧵 on what's new: regcheck.app

🤩 bingkaiwang.github.io/RCT_Bench-ma...

#rstats question: Is the mean of the BLUPs from a multilevel model unbiased? I have a couple clarification statements below.

Follow-up achievement unlocked: First full book draft submitted to the publisher

At a basic level, I think this depends on what you care about. If you want quick pubs for a grade or a promotion, just do t-tests. If you are interested in your data, learn how to fit and interpret ordinal models.

This part of history touched my family in profound ways. My fist to my heart if it hit you and yours, too.

Who has a paper on why mediation analysis is bullshit / a legit thing we should do?

Impressive blog post. I'd only add that in may cases, "Statistical control requires causal justification" (doi.org/10.1177/2515...).

Another example of how useful {geomtextpath} can be, imho. This is from the item category probability plot in my {easyRasch2} package. Most psychometric papers within the factor analytic tradition seem to disregard evaluating how the response scale works, which I find difficult to understand.

This paper is worth it for table 1 alone. 👏 @sabinehoffmann11.bsky.social @boulesteixlaure.bsky.social et al onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Had to read this one to figure out whether it's as click-bait-y as the title. As somebody who has written a lot about causal inference with observational data, I'm quite conflicted about it.> asteriskmag.substack.com/p/the-case-a...

You know what? Agreed. If retrospective meta-analysis were all we had, they'd be better than nothing. But now we have other options, it may be time to replace them.

Friendly reminder:

Don't sleep on scarpaccia. This is the solution you've been looking for for your I-have-too-much-zucchini-laying-around problem every summer. It has no business being as tasty as it is.

Maybe they should just hire a tough nurse

A new paper by @dominiquemakowski.bsky.social, @mattansb.msbstats.info, me and colleagues just out! We show how to choose informative priors in Bayesian regression models using a systematic simulation study and a practical step-by-step tutorial in #Rstats and #Stan! doi.org/10.3389/fpsy... >

Trials that fail INSPECT-SR trustworthiness assessments (inspect.sr) have much larger and implausible effect sizes. Checks are as simple as "is the mean within the scale range". Review included 857 Chinese RCTs, just published in the Lancet Psychiatry: doi.org/10.1016/S221...

Loss functions for statistical decision making is one of the issues Kruschke and I have grappled with in our upcoming textbook. IDK that we solved the problem, but we've done our best to move the conversation forward with theory and examples.

The third edition is coming out soon (end of the year)! You can get your preorders here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0F93CXTR...

Are there any good existing color palettes for typical human eye colors? Bonus points if they're #rstats. This is for a visualization using the HairEyeColor data set, which has the levels: "Brown" "Blue" "Hazel" "Green."

#Academia hivemind: What resources do you love for teaching trainees (grad students and others) about functionality in #PowerPoint that makes for good/easy talks/teaching? Youtube videos, online resources, etc. Tell me what reference you like!

I'm really excited to share a new preprint! Lab studies have consistently shown that stress and negative emotions make people drink alcohol, but studies of daily life (EMA) keep failing to find it. What does that mean for the shared theoretical prediction both designs test? osf.io/preprints/ps...

Retracted studies threaten the conclusions of meta analyses that include them. “Where a retraction undermines confidence in the conclusions, a decision may be required on whether the systematic review itself should be retracted, in line with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics”

Just found this intriguing new function by Wadea Abu Dahoud for making a log-scale axis squiggly, mostly to act as a visual cue/speed bump that the axis isn't linear. github.com/wade31985-ar... #rstats #dataviz

These are some great tips for power point slides, especially this one and the next. When in doubt, dramatically simplify the content on your slides. A complimentary tip to Andrea's is: The presenter should be the most interesting thing in the room; slides are only props to augment the presenter.

Lesson learned: close read all questions in a validated scale before picking it &/or analyzing it. I often find my target construct does not fully overlap w the scale’s. Yet picking & choosing questions has non trivial psychometric implications. Any literature on that? @eikofried.bsky.social ? 1/

If you have access to any the following stats software, would you be willing to run some chi squared tests on a handful of simulated datasets and send me results? I need to verify that that my R implementation of what other software does is correct. - Stata - SAS - StatXact - SPSS DM me :)

OSF has sent me more than a hundred emails today #ReplicationCrisis

Very bad response to the critique of @kauspurg.bsky.social & Brüderl. Doesn't address their main points and instead, absurdly, criticizes them for publishing too many commentaries that conclude original papers aren't robust/reproducible throughout their career.

🆘 Help! 🆘 How should we treat subjects lost to follow-up in an agricultural trial & does it change if H0 being tested is some form of "assuming the subject makes it to time period x, there is no diff between treatment & control groups"? stats.stackexchange.com/q/676127/1390 #statistics #RStats

I can't be the only one who hears this, right? #statsmeme

Looks like {ggcube} plots work with {patchwork} syntax, too. Kruschke and I have a few 3D plots in the upcoming DBDA3, and we might just use this. Here's a quick and dirty mockup:

This is a good piece. Julia got a little optimistic in middle, but she really brought it home at the end: “So what would I recommend if a friend actually wanted to run a moderated cross-country regression? I’d probably suggest they spend their time on something more fruitful.” Many such cases...

New blog post: Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/05/eval... On an AI generated description of a non-existent study, incorrectly citing findings from studies, and the importance of scientific criticism.

I posted about this Roast Pork Loin with Pineapple recipe a few weeks ago as a troll comment to another thread. But I actually made it this weekend and it's really quite good. memoriediangelina.com/2025/11/07/a...

Happy #ClinicalTrials Day Trial design and conduct is no place for novices with best intentions. Patient participants make sacrifices. Medical progress holds its breath. Large sums of public and private money is invested. So get it right, from the start. statsepi.substack.com/p/dealing-wi...

Smartphones can do a lot, but apparently they cannot keep you from analysing your data in an incredibly wacky manner to feed a certain narrative about smartphones.

#StatsPubs No matter how many times you read it, this paper on hierarchical GAMs keeps giving. Clear model explanations together with R code (mgcv). So useful! doi.org/10.7717/peer... Thanks for writing @ericjpedersen.bsky.social, D. Miller, @gsimpson.bsky.social @noamross.net

woohoo filing away in my “good in-class dag example” folder

I'm going to pass this talk along to the folks in my center. We had a brief workshop on DAGs a few weeks ago, and this is a nice follow-up. Descriptive research is totally cool, but vague causal, JK not causal, but maybe causal LOL language is no longer okay.

Social science researchers need to face up to the fact that a substantial number of their colleagues are just idiots (or grifters) who learned very little during their training and are now winging it on a regular basis.

Done with my last talk before leave! This one was fun and I'm glad I added Columbo last minute. Slides here, in case you're curious: juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

#rstats visualization question: This plot shows multilevel shrinkage by comparing intercepts and slopes three models. I'm trying to highlight the effect by emphasizing a few of the groups by displaying their group numbers, rather than as dots. Does this work?

Imagine a short book (~200 p.) introducing Bayesian statistics in the context of clinical trials and drug development. Scope would be introductory -- sort of "your first short course on Bayes". But practical enough to be applied out of the box. What would you like to see covered in such a text? 👇

Do you know a good framework to document data analysis choices? Ex: dropping obs, recoding a var, tuning pars, model + test statistics, etc. Ideally human-readable so people don't have to read my entire codebase. Low-maintenance+ machine-readable for bonus points! #RStats #PyData