I really wish we had more layperson abstracts for most papers. For example (random pull: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... ): blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal, detected in fMRI, reflects changes in deoxyhemoglobin

As promised, here’s my tax day rant. For 99% of taxpayers, the IRS already has the data to send you an almost fully completed 1040 for you to add a few pieces of data to, automatically recalculate, be done. It doesn’t because of Intuit.

Hey @governor.pa.gov, so PA DHS memorandum (www.pa.gov/content/dam/...) 'The CAO may also provide form PA 1795, “Household Members/Living Expenses” to applicants or recipients to be completed by a landlord or housing agency.' The link to PA 1795 is dead hhsdoc.dhs.pa.lcl/docushare/ds...

Are any politicians proposing to reduce the minimum limit for HSA eligible insurance plans?

The U.S. war on Iran is now estimated to cost $1 billion per day. Meanwhile Americans are told there’s no money for healthcare, hospitals, or basic social programs.

“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.”

As an R user and tidyverse devotee, I take issue with this. #Rstats

Bayes Rule in a Super Bowl ad: ✅

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

I support term limits for Congress, the Senate and SCOTUS.

I just thought everyone should see this

I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place

Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...

UX design so focused on optimizing for a given user task, while completely ignoring: - goal achieved, i want to get back to where i was - i want to immediately do goal again - i want to switch to different goal Way too many times is 3-4 clicks/touches just to... do more stuff with the same app.

why I have trust issues

this is a good reminder of how things that are shitty but have been accepted as normal and inevitable can actually turn out to be abnormal and evitable with some science, time, education and political will

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

Yes, exactly. Each missing value is equal to itself and unequal to other values. In contrast, R's NA is neither equal nor unequal to anything, including itself

From a senior faculty this morning: "As you get older you become 'former'. I'm the former chair of ..."

It's a good time of year to unsubscribe. A lot of happy holiday messages are showing me what lists my emails are on

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

April 14 #ChatGPT prompt tsunami: “ fill out my tax return that maximize my refund with the lowest probability I get audited”

If students and post-docs are workers, then academia may have some of worst turnover rates in any industry.

How long until the AI Chatbots start inserting ads in the responses?

AI teaching iPhones to fix themselves:

Does AI write commit messages yet?

Jobs with biggest % decline in job postings include lots of creative jobs. And *biostatisticians* 😬 These are thought to be most impacted by AI. Great job everyone. bloomberry.com/blog/i-analy...

“There’s more open imaging data about listening to music than menopause and contraceptives effect on the brain” #nexus @russpoldrack.org

Trump has only ever really cared about one issue: Email storage.

Best case: The President of the United States knew about a pedophilia ring and did nothing to stop it. Medium case: He also used his office to protect the perpetrators. Worst case: Because he was one of the perpetrators.

This is one of the most remarkable academic debacles I've ever seen. A large RCT got published in BMJ. There are currently 44 Pubpeer comments, mostly about the data, including...well. Read for yourself. pubpeer.com/publications...

I used to feel some type of way when people would write `library(tidyverse)` in #rstats scripts. I've written a lot of packages so it seems like a dependency hell (which it is for pkgs). Although introduces many dependencies for the script, I've come around to making scripts quick to make.

My NIH study section will not meet tomorrow because of the government shutdown. This may seem trivial but rescheduling these meetings will delay funding decisions for months to even a year! Let alone the uncertainty of what the FY26 budget will be. Awful for US scientists! 😓

Soft money environment: grants don’t care about sick days

One of the conversations I've been trying to have with anyone who will listen if that for unis like mine, which have big classes, this will require either shrinking class sizes drastically or significantly scaling up teaching assistance. There's no way around it.

Does editorial manager work with any password manager? Or is it either I change email for each journal (with + tag) or I have just one password for all reviewing/authorship?

probably my most deeply-held belief: it is not possible for a slide deck to be both (1) a good presentation aide; and (2) a standalone document that can be read and understood in isolation.

A software story: Positron rolled out AI test features (don’t think assistant was live) in release. Users 🤔. Posit - whoops logic failed - need more conditions, PR. Fin.

One day, my #rstats friends, one day....

Okay, I opened an issue to discuss adding hierarchical code folding to RStudio! github.com/rstudio/rstu... If you want to try it out yourself (and don't mind waiting walking away from your computer for a long time while boost compiles), try out the branch here: github.com/tylermorganw... #Rstats

"You have enslaved him. You have placed Fester under some strange sexual spell. I respect that. But please… You have gone too far. You have married Fester, you have destroyed his spirit, you have taken him from us. All that I could forgive. But, Debbie…pastels?"

www.nature.com/articles/d41... is discussing a surge in papers that likely use LLMs on open data. This is concerning since I work on one of those sets (NHANES) and this may be when the pendulum swings against fully public data sets since that data may then be used to churn out low quality papers.

Amazing how much the fascists hate and target anyone associated with anti-fascism in any way, and then at the same time claim that they are not fascists. 🤷‍♂️

Seems like this works?

I’ve been an Apple fanboy for 15 years and even I find this shameful and disgusting

This is important.