🚀 Aww! It's so good when the promise of open source delivers and when the community starts contributing. Bruno found a small but impossible-to-find-otherwise typo in my R package bsvars 💝 submitted a PR, and it's all fixed now! Thanks, Bruno! ✨ github.com/bsvars/bsvar...

#bsvars #foss #rstats

Attention’s relevance problem Friday, April 10, 3:30-5pm COB1 265 (UCM main campus) Intuitively, attention serves to attune an agent to what is relevant. A distracted agent is one that attends to things that are not, in fact, relevant. But what is the standard by which something is relevant? Answers often point to specific internal states, such as goals or intentions, or to specific external states, such as tasks or settings. The story cannot be so simple: something task-, or goal-unrelated can be highly relevant, and staying “on task” in the face of such events is seen as an attentional failure: a hungry bunny that fails to notice the arrival of a bird of prey is missing something relevant. This suggests that what is relevant is not just dependent on an agent’s occurrent goals or tasks, but is dependent on a wide set of interests. My aim in this talk is first to motivate that this is the right way to think about relevance. My second aim is to spell out a number of consequences for attention. If what is relevant is dependent on a whole array of interests, then attuning an agent to what is relevant becomes much more complicated. I will argue that the problem at hand is one of unencapsulation, similar to the more familiar relevance problem for belief fixation. I will try to show that many activities that are typically labeled as distractions can actually be thought of as “relevance-checking” behaviors. This talk is intended for an academic audience.

Embodied cognition meets the attention economy Thursday, April 9, 5:30pm UC Merced on Main (1635 M Street, Downtown Merced) Herbert Simon’s credo that “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is generally taken to be foundational for the attention economy, the economic system in which human attention is the scarce commodity: it is because there is too much information in our environment that attending has become so difficult. My aims in this talk are twofold: first I want to show that the attention economy rests on shaky conceptual foundations that are untenable in the light of contemporary cognitive science of attention. Second, I draw on principles from embodied cognition to provide an alternative diagnosis of our current situation. The problem is not so much an abundance of information, but an abundance of always available action possibilities, making selecting the relevant course of action much more difficult. This talk is intended for a general public audience.

For people in the Central Valley: there will be TWO talks by Dr. Jelle Bruineberg (Copenhagen) at #UCMerced this week. One is public and criticizes the idea that we face "too much information," and the other is academic/scholarly and focused on a problem for attention theorists. All are welcome!

GitHub - milla-jovovich/mempalace: The highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked. And it's free. The highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked. And it's free. - milla-jovovich/mempalace

Yeah. Milla Jovovich (actress) and Ben Sigman created AI memory system, called MemPalace.

github.com/milla-jovovi...

Screenshot of the linked page with arrows pointing at “look inside” and “read sample”

First look inside the book!!!

“We are called to go back and get the history of space-time. And who am I to argue with the ancestors?”

You can now peruse the TOC and read the first few pages of The Edge of Space-Time, which debuts in 2 weeks! 💙📚
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746817...

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...

I agree on both ideas. Here in California Newsom might change the Chave's day, perhaps something to celebrate labor right movements is better as you said.

These news have been shocking here in the Central Valley in California. I guess many celebrations will be justifiably canceled. I hope the victims are not attacked by the union's leadership, instead they need to listen to them.

Working smarter with dplyr 1.2.0 R-Ladies Rome | Isabella Velásquez. The dplyr hex logo on the side.

There's a new version of dplyr out, and I'm thrilled to chat about it with @rladiesrome.bsky.social tomorrow!

Let's learn the new #RStats functions that help you grip your data better (hehe).

3/18 at 12pm CT. Sign up here! www.meetup.com/rladies-rome...

I had that cassette...

Credit Where Credit is Due: Mary Eleanor Spear Exploring the life and work of an overlooked mid-century dataviz pioneer who may have discovered the Box Plot 17 years before John Tukey.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 4, 1897 Mary Eleanor Spear born in Jonesboro, Indiana, USA 🇺🇸

A data vis specialist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, she pioneered the boxplot and wrote books on effective graphic techniques (done by hand!)
👀 bit.ly/4baeFSY

I can relate ... 😞

Statistical Rethinking Lecture A09 - Modeling Events YouTube video by Richard McElreath

Lecture A09 - I get mildly ranty about the low quality of papers on discrimination and somehow also introduce generalized linear models for events and illustrate post-stratification. The theme continues next week with modeling sensitivity to unmeasured confounding. I will try to be less ranty.

good morning everyone project your personal imposter syndrome onto this gif ur welcome

What She Said Tracey Matney GIF ALT: What She Said Tracey Matney GIF

No doubt about it!

#rstats

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics will be running a special issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the official release of R. (The Univ. of Auckland was the birthplace of R.) They invited various people to contribute articles, including me. 🧵 1/

What NIH Staff Can’t Tell You—And Why That Matters The people who understand most clearly what is being lost at the NIH are also the people least able to say so.

Dr. Ginexi's latest blog states, "Constraint is not the same as consent." My colleagues and I move things. Maybe we move differently from before. Maybe we communicate differently. Please consider our safety. Keep talking with us. #NIHStrong #FEDstrong

Bowie is deeply missed...

Totally interested. I need to secure data for a city project I'm developing.

I might need it for a project, this looks promising.

In my country Costa Rica they did a lot of shady things, but I only remember the company next to my school giving us Chiquita stickers, we didn't know what it meant, just innocent kids playing with packing stickers :(

Statistical Rethinking 2026 Lecture B05 - Social Networks II YouTube video by Richard McElreath

Witness the power of this fully operational Bayesian latent space social relations model - Lecture B05 of Statistical Rethinking 2026. Incremental model construction and testing workflow for dyadic and generalized exchange networks, posterior network simulation, one dank Insane Clown Posse meme.

The uncritical adoption of AI technologies puts scientific integrity, diversity, sustainability, digital sovereignty and democracy at risk. We will discuss ways to resist this adoption in our Summer School “Critical AI literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming”

Cato Study: Immigrants Reduced Deficits by $14.5 Trillion Since 1994 The best way to balance the budget is to reduce spending—particularly on wealthy retirees—but rather than hinder our efforts to control deficits, immigrants are helping.

Immigrants are carrying this country on their backs while the right screams into the void.

Here’s the Cato Institute report:
www.cato.org/blog/cato-st...

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:

Watching @rmcelreath.bsky.social's both A and B lectures feels like a watching a movie which jumps between two different time periods

Using R to extract results from Stata log files – Ben Harrap

Are you a #Stata user? Maybe you work with one?

Have you ever found yourself copy-pasting from the results window?

It's annoying as hell! And terrible practice. So I wrote a blog post on using #rstats to extract results from Stata log files

benharrap.com/post/2026-02...

#AcademicSky, I need suggestions. I am looking for a (university?) press that does good critical editions for literature, a press that is NOT Norton or Broadview. I'd also love if the critical editions in question had new scholarship as well as old, and archival materials included as well.

screen shot of lecture playlist links and table of lecture topics

Possums in your yard? News got you down? Fear not, I have made playlists for the A and B sections of my ongoing Statistical Rethinking course. Click the section of your choice, sit back, and forget the possums and decay of the international order while your brain updates. github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Statistical Rethinking Lecture B03 - Adventures in Covariance YouTube video by Richard McElreath

Adventures in Covariance - Lecture B03 of Statistical Rethinking 2026. Prelude about MCMC effective sample size, Multilevel varying slopes models with correlated features, non-centered parameterizations for covariance models, model expansion workflow. Next week is social networks.