I have put together an index page compiling my various #rstats blog posts using #Pacific island countries and territories; data: freerangestats.info/blog/pacific.... Topics such as choropleth maps of the Pacific, demographic techniques and trends, and multidimensional vulnerability.

I am looking for a psychometrician to consult on a short term project. Any recommendations for someone who has done a lot with IRT and test development?

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

The "smartphones/social media" discourse suffers from some amazing historical amnesia. There was no 2008 financial crisis and no global pandemic starting in 2020, it's all SCREENS SCREENS SCREENS. Major world events? Just the backdrop against which SCREENS happened.

Psychologists, what are your favorite (open) data sets for teaching multilevel modelling? I have a lot of observational examples, would love a therapy RCT with varying effects for therapists or some such.

Critique argues post-publication peer review "often focuses on minor details" and "risks damaging trust in both the research itself and the peer review process" found to contain: - Hallucinated references - Undisclosed COIs (EiC is author) - 8/9 authors have retractions or related scandals

Another day, and another reference to these bangers. Contemporary causal inference has fundamentally changed the way I think about control variables and mediation analyses. These can show you why: doi.org/10.1177/2515... doi.org/10.1111/spc3... doi.org/10.1177/2515...

Favourite books from Taylor Routledge? Already have @vincentab.bsky.social ‘s book in my basket

Project Implicit gives you feedback when you complete an IAT, and the IAT literature has aspired to individual level measurement since its inception. In this article, we quantify the individual level uncertainty around these estimates and show that IAT effects can say very little about individuals.

Just published in Behavior Research Methods: The individual-level precision of implicit measures w/ @ianhussey.mmmdata.io 🧵👇 link.springer.com/article/10.3...

So...my undergrad thesis student is doing a quality analysis of studies found in meta-analyses. She identified a few and we contacted the authors to request their effect sizes and other variables for the studies in their papers. Here's what happened: scientiapsychiatrica.com/index.php/Sc...

in psych, whole subfields have decided to simply skirt the issue, so the causal inference happens in the introduction of the next paper that cites the "totally-not-causal-I-swear" paper and of course absolutely interprets it causally 🥲

Opening a new dataset for cleaning.

📢 Announcement: We are sunsetting the bookdown.org public hosting service. If you have #RStats docs on bookdown.org, please migrate them to a new platform by January 31, 2026, to maintain control over your content. (We recommend Posit Connect Cloud!) Learn more: posit.co/blog/bookdown-org-sunset

Friends of Arab and Muslim descent, please fill out our survey! Please share!

I am not familiar enough with calcium scores to know if this is weird. Is there any biochemical reason that all of these means/SDs would end in even numbers?

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke. uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...

Works the other way around too. “If I was Jonathan Haidt, how would I destroy the next generation?”

Applied longitudinal data analysis in brms and the tidyverse by A Solomon Kurz #RStats https://bigbookofr.com/chapters/statistics.html#applied-longitudinal-data-analysis-in-brms-and-the-tidyverse

"In 2019 we notified journals about serious integrity concerns in 172 clinical trials. Over five years later, only 22 have been retracted. The 135 unretracted trials have 1989 citations in systematic reviews, clinical guidelines, and consensus statements" [paraphrased] www.bmj.com/content/390/...

I don't know how I've missed it because it's *right on the documentation home page*, but if you use {glue} for nice string interpolation in #rstats and you have {stringr} loaded (likely through the tidyverse), you can use str_glue() instead of glue::glue() or loading library(glue) glue.tidyverse.org

Agreed. Of the pozoles, green is my favorite. But red pozole is pretty good, too. I lost some weight during the first two years of the pandemic, and hearty soups like green pozole with chicken were a big part of my meal plan. Here's a recipe from Kenji: youtu.be/u536QQp4oQ4?...

A colleague is looking for an open-source/online (pref. peer-reviewed) reference for properties of probability distributions. Any ideas? (NIST gives *very* basic properties e.g. www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handb... but I think they're looking for something more complete ...)

There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...

For those who don't have access to a smoker, the spatchcock method can help you cook your turkey faster and more evenly (no dried out breast). Here's Kenji showing you how with a chicken, and I can confirm it also works well with turkey. youtu.be/yUcZqyGrWYw?...

Sasha Gusev declares case closed by comparing studies that assessed different traits using different measurement methods in different countries at different times with different estimands for heritability, ignoring the denominator (total variance). Academics who disagree are "overly cautious"

Springer Nature flags paper with fabricated reference to article (not) written by our cofounder

If you compute an effect size (say a Cohen's d type standardized mean difference) several different ways and then selectively report the largest one, what would you call that? p-hacking research misconduct fraud something else?

🚧 OSF experienced a temporary slowdown today due to a surge of automated bot traffic. This overwhelmed parts of the production environment that didn't yet have the right safeguards in place, causing performance issues. The underlying issue has been addressed, & further protections are now in place.

Over the last few weeks, the weight of the world has really been getting to me and I’ve found it hard to get motivated to write any articles. But today I'm ripping off the bandaid. With a post about ripping off bandaids. Enjoy! open.substack.com/pub/epiellie...

#30DayMapChallenge #30DayMapChallenge2025 #30DayMapChallengeRbanism #30DayMapChallengeR Day 18: Out Of This World Render a 3D map of Olympus Mons on Mars using elevation data by Ignacio Urria Yáñez. #GeoData #rstats #DataViz #Maps #SpatialViz

This is another example of why I think default priors are generally inappropriate for professional work. They're still great for teaching, though.

The default prior for the intercept in both {rstanarm} and {brms} are very wide. Counterintuitively - being on the logit scale, this is actually translates to a **strong** prior that p(y=1) is near 1 or near 0. Always check your priors! #rstats

I grew up with that beauty in my backyard

Our experimental study on the effects of negative mood and alcohol intoxication on reinforcement learning in the Iowa Gambling Task is now published OA in Judgment and Decision Making: doi.org/10.1017/jdm.... as always, anonymized data, materials, and code can be found on the OSF: osf.io/ky3aj/

A paper critiquing post-publication peer review has numerous made-up references, including a @nature.com article falsely attributed to our Ivan Oransky. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Time once again to be linking to @cghlewis.bsky.social when I do my winter class that involves data analysis

🚀 New paper (open access) out in Cognitive Therapy & Research: we (@herzog.bsky.social, @evalottabrakemeier.bsky.social, @hudsongolino.bsky.social and me) ask whether group‑level symptom‑change networks in CBT actually capture what happens inside each patient. #Psychology #CBT

Pretty cool is an understatement. There is 1.5 million hours of video game play recorded, via telemetry data! This is a very cool study🎮

Trust was not among the things for which I got into science. Trust no one.

I should probably explain this, with context. Over several years we have caught MANY researchers playing silly buggers with artificial cutoffs designed to engineer group differences. (No one more so than the Vitamin D weirdos. One of the least reliable and most annoying areas of health research.)

@bmj.com has issued an expression of concern for a paper claiming stem cell therapy can reduce the risk of heart failure. The move comes after sleuths and scientists critiqued the “complete mismatch” between the study data and the article itself.

Hey alcohol research folks, is anyone still looking for symposium speakers for RSA? I have some EMA data on rural young adults that I’d love to present but I don’t think I have bandwidth to also organize. Hit me up if you want to hear more!

Well now I'm pondering - what is the best Introductory Biostats book out there that folk have had success with. I used to like Whitlock & Schluter, but have come to find it too test-based and not enough thinking-based (to use a term of art?).

Two-group pre/post data are deceptively simple, and you could analyze them in many different ways, depending on your goals. Here are three blog posts on the topic: solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2022-06... solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2020-12... solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2023-06...

Peer reviewers-I’m curious, why do you track your reviews with web of science?

This one surely has something on offer for every one: In this cross-sectional mediation analysis, the "effects" of soft drink consumption on depression were "mediated" by abundance of Eggerthela in the gut microbiome. This was sent to me via dm and now you all got to suffer as well.

Agreed. I'd go further and say if you see language like this in a paper, it's a huge red flag the research team has a poor grasp on statistics.

This is related to a private conversation I had recently. IMO, if you want to use Bayesian statistics in your professional work, either (a) work through at least one Bayesian textbook yourself or (b) collaborate with someone who has already done that work themselves. Take your data seriously.