Just learned that among the many savage budget cuts happening in #novascotia right now, they are cutting the Nova Scotia Graduate scholarships. Just straight up ending all the provincial graduate scholarships. Just horrible. It's a tough time to be a university student these days.

New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

Me? I'm just happy to be here #rstats

#EcoSpace dailygalaxy.com/2026/02/japa...

Are baby chicks more bouba or more kiki? 🐥🐣🐤

This week on the blog: Against the State! Another military theory primer, this time focused on groups that take on the state itself, both with violent and non-violent means. Given the enormous disparity in force, how can they win? How have they won? acoup.blog/2026/02/13/c...

A business-related #stats consulting question for those of you out there that do paid consulting. I was contemplating hiring a student assistant for my consulting business. I normally charge hourly at a set rate, but how would you do billing if you had an assistant do some (but not all) things?

nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyrann... Being popular causes all kinds of bad context collapse phenomena

It's severely important how we talk to school kids about subjects that they're interested in or not interested in, and it's criminal that it still seems to be centered on "what labor can we extract from you once you reach adulthood"

an image flashed in my head of a discord exec seeing everyone get together in IRC in protest and rambling to himself like the grinch trying to figure out christmas: "they chat without exclusive unlock quests. they chat without memes. they chat without emojis, video chat, and streams."

dplyr 1.2.0 was released last week and since I use {dplyr} a lot in my work, I wanted to take some time to try some of the new functions. This post provides some supplemental examples of the new functions, beyond what is provided in the new Posit materials. #rstats cghlewis.com/blog/dplyr_u...

average person picks 3 on sliders factoid actualy just statistical error. average person picks 0 on sliders. Sliders Georg, who has a monitor resolutiob over 16,000 x 10,000 aspect ratio, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited! - `filter_out()` for dropping rows - `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats! tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

Carney + 40 in Quebec lmao

Whenever Microsoft Word or some other software tries to finish my sentences for me now, even if that WAS what I was gonna say, I rewrite it now partially out of spite, but also because it's a good way to know that I was going to be overly predictable and basic in my writing

Tired: Assigned to a committee Wired: Assigned to be chair of a task force Making this committee I got assigned to be a "task force" makes it sound so important lol

Teaching my personality students a little bit about factor analysis (to a very non-stats audience, in a non-stats class), and in a group assignment a humanities student described items loading on two factors as being "balkanized into two groups" which I kind of love linguistically

Andrew Gleman just casually mentioning on his blog that he charges $850 an hour for stats consulting (American dollars, no less) makes me realize I live in a totally different financial world to some academics.

In the age of students submitting AI slop as papers, it's striking how that the new heuristic for quality in papers tends to be the presence of typos and grammatical mistakes (i.e., having errors is correlated with the ideas being more solid), which is the inverse of what it used to be like...

I just thought everyone should see this

A student liked my sweater and asked me where I got it because he "likes vintage stuff" I am getting so old lmao

Prime numbers 2-4999, animated with ggplot2+gganimate. #Rstats code: gist.github.com/stephenturne...

Can anybody help with this inscrutable R error? A student in my class has this problem only on their windows tablet, can't resolve Not my stackoverflow post but same issue. I think it is an Rtools issue #R #Rstats #stats stackoverflow.com/questions/79...

It was a better time

I just saw a chilling view of the future of classrooms Instead of having an hdmi cable to connect a computer to share your screen, the room was set up to ONLY go through microsoft Teams. So, you had to: a) Sign into a video chat Teams room b) Then share your screen to the audience through Teams

Stupid idea that has been plaguing me all weekend

There is a sense in which Kyle MacLachlan was type cast after Twin Peaks, but rather than stagnate, he took it and made being a weird guy on a suit into high art.

🇨🇦 Canadians, in case you missed it: there's a petition collecting signatures to ask that the federal government intervene to protect access to healthcare for trans people in provinces who have restricted it (eg Alberta's egregious use of the notwithstanding clause): www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

For any non-Canadian researchers out there, our government recently pumped a ton of cash to try and attract international researchers to Canada. So if you're looking for a change, timing could be good! Our university is hiring 30 international ppl, but you'll see similar things all over Canada

Even before this, I've been seeing more failed dissertation projects that have near 100% fraudulent participants b/c they advertised on social media. Compensated online surveys open to the internet are virtually unviable now. Data quality is the single biggest threat to psychological science now.

Interesting teaching term this year, in the past week or so I've encountered: a) A floating-point error making a number slightly different across different computers b) An Rstudio update that briefly killed the glm() function c) A #stats consult that was a perfect example of Simpson's paradox

The modern world feels like every agency and department is cutting costs, and tries to reduce workload by downloading the work onto their users instead of employees (e.g., an AI chatbot). In doing so, ALL work takes longer to do because users are less efficient than specialized employees.

Robert'); DROP TABLE students

There is a passage in Raymond E. Feist’s Magician books where the apprentices are alone in a room, each one hammering a nail into a sheet of wool until it falls to the floor, only to pick up the nail and begin the process again. I guess what I’m saying is, welcome to academia; hope you like it!

When I'm consulting on medical #stats power analyses, MDs always seem to phrase effect sizes as a "percent decrease". For a t-test basically: (PreTest - PostTest) / (PreTest) I've never been able to make any use of this for power analyses. Does it have some sort of hidden use I'm not seeing?

I was using notepad in Windows 11 and somehow clicked a button to format the text with bold, italics, etc. It's notepad, I'm using it explicitly so it won't autoformat anything. What kind of terrible world do we live in that I need to gesture to this @dasharez0ne.bsky.social T-shirt constantly.

"How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner" by Annie Mueller 😅 😂 😭 anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-...

Every time somebody asks me to run a long statistical re-analysis, and coefficients don't change more than 0.01, they should have to pay me a $100 penalty. This brought to you by leaving multiple imputation to run and analyze for AGES and finding absolutely no changes form listwise deletion.

Found in the wild reading a paper: "we elected to use a Bayesian estimator for our analyses, which do not require distributional assumptions associated with nonnormality of indirect effects as well as skewed distributions of predictors and outcomes" I'm no Bayes expert, but seems suspect to me

After years of teaching, there are two kinds of extension requests: a) I had a headache, so I didn't do the assignment b) I was hit from a car and intensive care, but I might need a 1 hour extension to do it on my laptop in the hospital bed. God love some students, they push themselves too hard!

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

We just officially ratified new the collective agreement at Dalhousie with 95.7% in favour. The lockout has officially ended, and back to work tomorrow after 5 weeks locked out!!! Glad to get a good deal and finally get back to work. #keepdalstrong

Week 3 of being on strike, and the board keeps sabotaging negotiations by trying to bargain in public. Still, hoping that a conciliator in the room on Monday will finally let us make peogress! #keepdalstrong

The Dalhousie Board is like: Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Hockey Rink: $36,000,000 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my university is dying #KeepDalStrong