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.

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

The @jhubiostat.bsky.social has a post-doc ad out, please see at apply.interfolio.com/174430

Vech Tentures

Successful first day at #positconf2025

80% of being an adult is scheduling

Code in the R script that I have been using for years to monitor recruitment in a long-running study. #EpiSky #StatSky #rstats

Remembering MN house speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark and their beloved dog Gilbert. Murdered in June at their home by a rightwing Trump-voting evangelist, who also shot another MN lawmaker and his wife at THEIR home, 9 and 8 times, respectively (miraculously, they survived).

Read this quote for the first time today: www.goodreads.com/quotes/72354...

It's not rocket science, guys. Companies can't hire as many people because they have to pay more tariffs on virtually everything in their supply chain.

Got review from authors, and they have a link *to their own GitHub repo*. Click link. Query has `?utm_source=chatgpt.com`. Weird?

Who do you have to formally notify that you would like to quit email?

Spending 3 full days coding up a simulation for a method that *should* be better, but performs identically to a common R function (that takes about 5 seconds to apply). Absolutely priceless. #rstats

Hey #rstats, How do people feel about the swirl package for learning R? I remember finding the lessons helpful, but I notice the package isn't maintained anymore judging by the github repo: github.com/swirldev/swirl

The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a boss😏" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.

“utterly shapeless mayhem” letterboxd.com/colonelmorti...