Finally finished up a blog post on estimating Bradley–Terry models using brms.

www.m-flynn.com/posts/2025-1...

Screenshot of the announcement by Simon Urbanek regarding Tomáš Kalibera’s untimely passing. It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Tomáš Kalibera on 1 April, a valuable member of the R core team for close to 10 years and a good friend, after a short but aggressive illness. Tomáš brought in fresh perspective and knowledge, enabling him to improve many aspects of R, including performance and reliability. He created many tools aimed at aiding package authors to make their packages more reliable, and was instrumental in modernizing the Windows build of R. He was an active member of CRAN and the R community, providing help to package authors, and he was the most prolific writer on the R core blog. He will be remembered for his profound contributions to R by millions of users. He is survived by his wife and 1 year old son. A full obituary will be posted in due time. Respectfully, Simon Urbanek

RIP Tomáš Kalibera. #rstats lost a huge contributor today. Condolences to his young family.

stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-...

‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK The long read: Universities in Britain rely on overseas applicants paying full fees, which has given rise to some unscrupulous recruiters and left many hopefuls and their families deep in debt

'In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate.'

'Once students got their offers, they were passed on to the visa team, and finally delivered to universities as a fully wrapped, fee-paying package.'

I Sued the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for Research Fraud and Won $2.6 Million Dollars YouTube video by Sholto David

Now that I have finally been paid I made a video about the Dana-Farber legal case from my own perspective: youtu.be/ioRtnMEV46Y

Back in 2019, TAing @yoavkessler.bsky.social's ANOVA course, I built #rstats tutorials w/@singmann.bsky.social's {afex} and {emmeans}.

I keep referring people to those materials as they basically give a complete overview of the analysis of factorial designs: joint tests, (interaction) contrasts...

We have a new PhD position at the University of Zurich to work on visual working memory. For more info see here:
www.psychology.uzh.ch/en/areas/nec...

Part 2 of my shrinkage estimator series is out! Part 1 covered the univariate case, but now we dive into multivariate shrinkage 🤓

We cover Spearman's classic correlation disattenuation formula, multivariate James-Stein estimators, and hierarchical methods too

haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

Gilead refuses to sell groundbreaking HIV prevention drug to MSF Blocking humanitarian organizations from accessing a medical breakthrough puts vulnerable people across the world in danger.

Today, MSF is going public with something we've been fighting behind closed doors for months: Gilead will not sell us their new HIV drug, lenacapavir.

The sticking point isn't even price, they just refuse to sell.

Open letter linked + explainer 🧵1/

www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gilea...

We (@felixgruenewald.bsky.social and our RA Lina Zündorf) have once again updated our encyclopedia of polarization with some great new examples of polarization research and documentation of further measures. You can find the new entries on polarization.wiki and some examples listed below:

Anchoring the anchor: judgments of both items assimilate in item-based anchoring Anchoring is a prominent judgment bias which causes people’s estimates of uncertain quantities to assimilate towards recently encountered values. Here…

Out now in Cognitive Psychology, paper spearheaded by @davidyoung-psych.bsky.social showing that questions like "Does a torch cost more or less than a laptop?" can generate mutual anchoring effects: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Homepage of the R Mailing List Archives showing a search bar, three popular lists (R-help with 398,500 messages, R-devel with 63,425, and R-package-devel with 12,125), and a full directory of core lists and special interest groups.

29 years of #rstats community knowledge was sitting in hard-to-search pipermail archives. So I built a more modern home for it.

Introducing the R Mailing List Archives: 631,000+ messages from 32 lists, fully searchable and available as open data.

r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com

New paper out in Psych Review: "Cognitive Constraints and Reward Environments Jointly Shape Memory Formation." We show that people strategically decide how to use their limited memory resources based on the expected reward of future events that might also need those resources doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Simulation-based validation of Bayes factor computation We propose and evaluate two methods that validate the computation of Bayes factors: one based on an improved variant of simulation-based calibration checking (SBC) and one based on calibration metrics...

Preprint alert: Simulation-based validation of Bayes Factor computation with @paulbuerkner.com and S. Stroppel. We bring lessons learned in SBC to validation of BFs. arxiv.org/abs/2508.11814 The idea is simple: simulate data from the models, fit and see if the inferences are calibrated. 1/10

Do y'all remember before the internet, when people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information?
Yeah, it wasn't that.

How to Estimate a Mean, and What It Means for Science | Computational Psychology Introduction If I asked you to estimate 30 means, you would probably compute 30 sample means. And you would be provably wrong (well.. maybe not wrong, but at least provably inefficient).

New blog just dropped!

This one is all about estimators—we cover James-Stein, classical test theory, empirical Bayes, penalized regression, and hierarchical models, showing how they all can be used to do a better job than sample stats alone 🤓

haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)

davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

Brutal, but evidently correct in that context. The whole piece is worth reading.

Understanding Maximum Likelihood Estimation A tool to understand maximum likelihood estimation

Do you know any other cool interactive applications that illustrate some statistical concept?
#rstats #stats
@rpsychologist.com

rpsychologist.com/likelihood/

This is brilliant.

After a few days of #rstats shitposting, we are lucky enough to get a thoughtful, content heavy, and, dare i say it, constructive contribution to the discourse.

If you live in London, consider becoming a subscriber to this independent journalistic substack. Absolutely worth it as this story shows.

UZH: Postdoctoral Position Research at the Zurich Cognitive Psychology Unit focuses on capacity limits of cognition, in particular working memory, long-term memory, and attention, which we investigate with experimental, individ...

We're looking for a postdoc starting this summer to join our efforts in understanding the capacity limits of cognition: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

After watching Richard McElreath's lecture on measurment models, I got comparatively more excited about my working paper with Yaroslav on accounting for non-classical measurement error in belief-updating experiments and my foray into measurement and time-series econometrics.

A thread.

#EconSky

on the roof

Postdoctoral researcher (80%) in Cognitive Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

The successful applicant will work with the head of the Cognitive Psychology Unit, Klaus Oberauer, and the Cognitive Psychology team.
Application deadline: 20 March 2026

#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

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

1.1 Introduction - Accessibility in Data Visualization - Open Visualization Academy

You can catch my full, open course on accessibility in visualization here:
openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/acce...

🚨New paper altert🚨

As a synthesis of my PhD research, we revisited the prevailing assumption about the mechanisms underlying repetition learning, and re-evaluated these assumption in light of recent findings.

Now out in Perspectives on Psychological Science:
doi.org/10.1177/1745...