Ben Bolker

Anyone up for this?

Google Maps Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.

I remember such a sign on the road from Brisbane to Townsville (don't remember exactly where it was) 🇦🇺 www.google.com/maps/dir/Bri...

The Sakura Cherry Blossoms in High Park are firmly closed in brown buds. It is still too early to make a definitive prediction on when peak bloom will occur. Note: Sakura Cherry Blossoms in High Park typically reach peak bloom anytime between late April to early May.

Meanwhile in Toronto 🇨🇦 highparknaturecentre.com/cherry-bloss...

Shoulders of giants: Wahba → Wood → {Ross, Pedersen, Miller, Simpson} → the rest of us ...

While working full-time & raising a child, Grace Wahba earned advanced degrees, completing her PhD at Stanford and becoming the first female faculty member in statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. #womenshistorymonth #statwomen magazine.amstat.org/blog/2026/03... #statssky

For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors. To determine the length of copyright protection for a particular work, consult chapter 3 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the United States Code). More information on the term of copyright can be found in Circular 15a, Duration of Copyright, and Circular 1, Copyright Basics.

(b) Copyrights in Their Renewal Term at the Time of the Effective Date of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act7—Any copyright still in its renewal term at the time that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act becomes effective shall have a copyright term of 95 years from the date copyright was originally secured.

Oops, it's more complicated (sorry). life+70 is for publications after 1978. Otherwise ... maybe have to ask someone who has this stuff at their fingertips ...

Coming soon! (end of year of death of author [1957] + 70 years) = 2027-12-31 ?

Ten Thousand

Congrats, it's useful (if obscure) obXKCD: xkcd.com/1053/ (OK, maybe & vs && isn't as exciting as diet Coke and mentos ...)

Can you ask Claude to redo this on a scale where we don't get negative paylines? (e.g. something like a logistic fit with logit(percentile) as the preditor?)

🎉🎉🎉 Long-awaited: lme4 2.0-1 now handles some simple structured covariance matrices: diagonal ['true' - not just semantic splitting of `(x+y|f)` into `(x|f)` + `(y|f)`], compound symmetric, AR1 (no GPs/factor-analytic/reduced-rank/etc. yet ...)

it's on my "peeves" list too: bbolker.github.io/bbmisc/peeve...

couverture du livre introduction à la statistique bayésienne avec R

📘 Nouveau livre !

Introduction à la statistique bayésienne avec le logiciel R

Découvrez pas à pas la statistique bayésienne et sa mise en œuvre dans R : théorème de Bayes, MCMC, priors, régression, GLM/GLMM et comparaison/validation de modèles.

Aux éditions Quae 🙏

📷 Crédit photo : Yann Raulet

What's your Erd"os-Bacon-Sabbath number? (Is it finite?)

Maybe not "statistical concept", but this is fun for MCMC algorithms chi-feng.github.io/mcmc-demo/ap... (references at chi-feng.github.io/mcmc-demo/)

MixedModels.jl A Julia package for fitting (statistical) mixed-effects models

A quick plug for juliapackages.com/p/mixedmodels (by Doug Bates and phillipalday.com -- similar capabilities to lme4 but **much** faster

What happens if the explanatory and response variables are sorted independently before regression? Suppose we have data set $(X_i,Y_i)$ with $n$ points. We want to perform a linear regression, but first we sort the $X_i$ values and the $Y_i$ values independently of each other, forming data set $...

For those who haven't yet seen this classic: stats.stackexchange.com/q/185507/2126 (someone whose manager was insisting that they do this ...)

The Bayesian results imply much higher risk of early collapse than maximum likelihood methods. This difference is due to large probabilities of early collapse for certain parameter values that are plausible in light of the data. Because of simplifying assumptions, these results are not directly applicable to assessment. Nevertheless they imply that maximum likelihood and similar methods based upon point parameter estimates will grossly underestimate the risk of early collapse.

This is decision-theoretic rather than stats only, but: Ludwig, Donald. “Uncertainty and the Assessment of Extinction Probabilities.” Ecological Applications 6, no. 4 (1996): 1067–76. doi.org/10.2307/2269....

My thoughts on this aren't fully cooked, but: this presupposes that non-null results are more interesting than null results (which is mostly true given the way most scientists set up hypotheses but doesn't have to be). Is there a bias-interestingness tradeoff dial we could adjust?

complete separation?

It's good you asked, since I got to go down a rabbit hole/didn't know about him before.

Ernest Everett Just - Wikipedia

I think your AI overlords are bullshitting/hallucinating. See the other part of thread on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_... (who sounds like a true badass BTW ...) [off-topic: is there something I can read to update my mental model of BSky threading, which I don't get at all?]

Sorry, missed alt-text on the second screenshot: "As Just remarked in the symposium this morning, he is interested more in the back than in the bristles on the back and more in eyes than in eye color"

"Embryologist E. E. Just complained that genetics and selection could explain why populations of flies had more or fewer bristles on their backs, but it couldn't explain how a fly constructed its back in the first place (Harrison 1937: 372; Gilbert et al 1996: 361)

Quote is attributed from Amundson R (2005) The Changing role of the embryo in evolutionary thought: Roots of Evo-Devo.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (Google books screenshot → Harrison, Ross G. 1937. “Embryology and Its Relations.” Science 85 (2207): 369–74 (JSTOR screenshot)

Think this is what you want? philarchive.org/archive/LIAT... quotes: "I am interested more in the fly’s back than the bristles on its back, and more in its eye than its eye color (E.E. Just)" . Paper has more details, plus see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_...

I get the idea ... I thought the people I tagged might have an idea about the source (both fly people, although I think more on the evo of morphology side than strictly evo-devo ... [my characterization, not theirs])

@idworkin.bsky.social ? @thelonglab.bsky.social ?

"newbies" check (pkgs w/o prior releases on CRAN) have a particularly fussy human-administered set of checks (e.g. do all functions have explicitly documented return values?) Also, things like spell-check false positives (can be fixed via dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08... )

don't forget the 🇨🇦 fentanyl czar! www.canada.ca/en/privy-cou... (not really Canada's idea ...)

... in the bottom of a locked file cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of Leopard" ...

results of `apropos("R.?[Vv]ersion", ignore.case=FALSE)`: c("getRversion", "R.version", "R.Version", "R.version.string")

argh.