Amal Khalil smiling, standing with the backdrop of the hills of Lebanon. She is holding a microphone with a windscreen with a logo.
Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed today in a targeted Israeli strike. The IDF fired live rounds and stun grenades at the Red Cross ambulances trying to reach her. She is the 4th journalist killed by Israel while in the field since 2 March.
Photo via X @HindRFoundation.
Harrowing news as journalist Amal Khalil has been killed by Israel in a strike on Tayri in south Lebanon in violation of the ceasefire. Israeli forces prevented the Red Cross from rescuing her.
This on the eve of Israel-Lebanon talks tells you everything you need to know.
The Israeli army struck civilians in the Lebanese city of Mayfadoun.
And then, the Israelis double-tapped the medics who arrived onto the scene.
And then, they triple-tapped the next wave of medics.
And then, they did it one more time for good measure.
Particularly alarming that this includes Lebanon & Gaza. I had just shared imagery from March 18 showing the demolition of villages along the southern border of Lebanon by the IDF and now not even that imagery is available: bsky.app/profile/godi...
Mass demolitions haven't stopped in Gaza, either.
Anybody who isn't cooked by hype and has worked with these systems knows the technicians do tons of preprocessing, that racism and sexism are built-in due to the datasets, and that a doctor in the loop is invaluable.
#EMHA Euskara munduko hizkuntzalaritza argitalpenetan
Zuloaga, Eneko & Dorota Krajewska. 2026. Basque catechisms in the Early Modern period. In E. Parina & D. Bronner (arg.), Contents of faith in transfer. Berlin, Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler.
doi.org/10.1007/978-... 🔓
Pretty sure this will be reversed once legal notices... who knows... but it should be only opt in as I understand GDPR
Regardless, use it as an excuse to tell your university to move off this platform
after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...
We don't have to submit. I've said a long time that inevitability is the first lie of fascism. Think about that when AI boosters say there's no choice. There is. There always is.
Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
Psychology has a whole cottage industry in which people come up with some construct that is essentially "attitudes/beliefs/expectations/feelings about X", and then the central claim is that this construct is a super important determinant of future X outcomes.>
Like many methodologists, I often find myself arguing with someone that their method/epistemology makes no sense. That someone thinks I am arguing against their *conclusions*. But I am arguing they have no justification for their conclusions. Is there a philosophical term for this problem/confusion?
My effort to reproduce this paper began as part of the Institute for Replication’s ongoing project to systematically examine the reproducibility and robustness of papers in Nature Human Behaviour3; my participation in this endeavour was approved by the Ethical Review Board of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s School of Business and Economics. Inspecting the paper’s first two figures revealed a mathematical impossibility. There are nine EU countries that experienced zero terror attacks during the study’s time frame. However, the paper reports that the inverse hyperbolic sine of these countries’ per capita attack rates are positive, and increase or decrease over time. This is impossible; the inverse hyperbolic sine of zero is zero4. The main outcome variable displayed in the paper’s second figure is hard-coded in the replication data as ‘DVSin’. Figure 1’s top row of plots shows that DVSin is negatively correlated with both terrorist attack rates (r = −0.107, two-sided P = 0.024) and their inverse hyperbolic sine (r = −0.108, two-sided P = 0.022). These plots also show that in the 305/420 country-year observations after 2006 experiencing zero terror attacks (72.6%), DVSin takes on 292 different positive values. This implies that the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper.
"the paper’s main outcome variable cannot possibly be constructed as described in the paper."
Retraction of 2023 paper that did not use the reported variables. The replication report is astonishing www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Pre-publication peer review remains undefeated in laundering bullshit
#Statistics thought of the day: If you think you can find new disease subtypes by empirically clustering patients, think again: www.fharrell.com/post/cluster... #StatsSky
On the publication bias discourse, I regret that metascience has become a source of decontextualized, low-res, bean-counting-focused `science is in crisis' narratives. It is largely uncurious abt science, desperately lacking in theory & measurement. I'll quote a few takes I liked & add my thoughts🧵
A variation: Scientists who claim they’re “not interested in causality” because they assume the term only applies to deterministic, law-like relationships that are unrealistic in their field. Instead, they’re interested in how “X drives Y”, the effects of X, the “extent to which X matters for Y”>
I am doing a short workshop in this symposium (quoted below) for folks in and around Leipzig. Here's the abstract. I really indulged myself with this one.
A Guerilla Approach to Scientific Workflow:
📢 🏰 Aurten ere Historia Euskaraz hitzaldi zikloa bueltan da! Oraingoan EHUn egiten ditugun ikerketak zabaltzea asmoa daukan ekimena Gasteizko Bibat museoan izango dugu. Otsailaren 11tik martxoaren 4ra, asteazkenero, 19:00etan.
Animatu zaitezte!
Every estimand needs an estiplan - lecture A05 of Statistical Rethinking 2026. Total and direct effects, posterior predictions and causal contrasts, sermon about model assumptions and strength of inference. Next week is a back-alley intro to do-calculus. github.com/rmcelreath/s...
What's the best open book for data science from a base-R perspective? #rstats
Please do not let all the focus on the funding environment in academia distract us from the real victims of these crimes and their enablers. Please do not look away from the misogyny. Please notice the gender differential. Please pay attention to how women are talked about in these emails.
Wow, this looks fantastic. Gotta love free, open source, expert driven sharing of knowledge.
Screenshot of the OVA website, showing all courses
The Open Visualization Academy (OVA) IS LIVE!
openvisualizationacademy.org
Thread follows #dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVisualization
Important update. Google’s YouTube has not only erased thousands of videos of human rights violations in Palestine, it has now blocked livestreaming from Al Jazeera within the country. If you have not already divested from the platform, now is the time to do so.
"The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and 'catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.'"
www.reuters.com/world/early-...
I am even warier than the authors about the broad-brush applications of the QRP label. However, I stand firmly against classifying data dredging/fishing expeditions as responsible research practice and as exploratory research. Science reform has distorted our understanding of scientific exploration.
#rstats bat signal:
If any of y'all have experience with multilevel multinomial logistic regression, with {brms}, Kruschke and I could use your help. This is your chance to influence the upcomming textbook. discourse.mc-stan.org/t/problem-in...
I wonder if IDF is accepting this number to get out ahead of what is going to be found when journalists start getting into Gaza soon (hopefully). Because that number is definitely an undercount, no matter how much effort people put into challenging it to their eternal shame.
