All models are wrong; many models are useless

#OTD 1923 Jacob Cohen b (d 20 Jan 1998) ASA Fellow 1983, Psychologist & statistician, developer of Cohen’s kappa, d, and h for effect size, & critic of misapplications of null hypothesis significance testing ["The Earth is Round (p < .05)" is a classic].

Genome-wide genealogies reveal deep admixtures forming modern humans

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

On April 18, 1905, William Bateson introduced the term “genetics,” giving identity to the study of heredity and variation. 🔗 Learn more: buff.ly/Yuqq3aC

Photographic portrait of Erwin Schrödinger, and a quote : "A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift from a fairy."

"A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift from a fairy." – Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961)
#quote #mathematics #math #maths

“a bacterial enzyme that synthesizes DNA without a nucleic acid template, using its own structure as a guide.“

We are so excited to see our work out in @nature.com! We present a multi-omic single-cell atlas of 12 organs in human fetal development, explore the enhancer landscape, use deep learning to infer rules of transcription factor activity, and interpret non-coding variants in complex traits: #GeneReg 🧬🖥️

Reposting this old thread on the "Pervasive findings of directional selection" from ancient DNA. While the authors extended their results in various ways, I think many of these points still stand.

A scientist drills a skull in search of ancient human DNA

Until now, scientists have identified only a few dozen variants that went through natural selection in humans in the past 10,000 years. A new study claims to find hundreds--maybe thousands. Here's my story on the provocative research, and the mixed reception it's getting. Gift link: nyti.ms/4tSJH9G

In case you aren't aware, TinyTeX has started offering binaries for ARM and musl-based Linux since last month: yihui.org/en/2026/03/t... Enjoy the extra 5 minutes saved!

BTW, I didn't know musl/Alpine Linux before. While working on TinyTeX binary for it, I was intrigued and also quite impressed.

As a recipient of federal grants from #NIH (for now! 😭) that funds research in my lab, I'd like to sincerely thank American taxpayers on #TaxDay for investing in scientific research that lays the foundation for medical and technological innovation in this country and keeps us ALL safe and healthy

In 1977, two fifths of faculty were under 40. In 1996, that had gone down by approximately half.

Age distribution of US university faculty 1977, 1987, 1996. Anyone know what this looks like today or in other countries?

Genetics reveal why people respond differently to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs Genetic variants in GLP1R and GIPR, which encode targets of GLP-1-based medications, offer insights into why responses to these drugs vary and who might face adverse effects.

Why do people respond differently to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs? Genetics has the answer - provided in this genome wide association study led by @adamauton.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Just over two-weeks left to apply for this PDRA position!
(deadline: 28/04)

The arc of history is long and has extremely poor convergence bounds

Very proud to share our new work on General, orders-of-magnitude faster whole-genome analysis with genotype representation graphs (GRG). We topped ourselves in this one 🚀 and made GRG a practical foundation for biobank-scale population and statistical genetics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Create a magnified inset of a plot — geom_magnify geom_magnify() creates a magnified inset of part of a ggplot. Optional borders are drawn around the target and inset, along with projection lines from one to the other. from gives the location of the target area, and to gives the location of the inset. Usually, these are specified as c(xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax).

Just discovered ggmagnify hughjonesd.github.io/ggmagnify/re.... love it! But quite probable that I will overuse slightly creating figures for my next talk. You have been warned.

Guy I’m sponsoring very quietly releases #rstats package I’ve been wanting for the last couple of years.

pkg.yihui.org/gglite/doc/g...

Guess he shut up and took my money. 🤣🤣🤣

Screenshot of the webR assembly playground for the litedown package showing an Rmd document being 'fused' in browser to show a rendered HTML page mirroring what would be present if rmarkdown or quarto were used locally to render a page (albeit with different styles).

Localized package playgrounds is a cool idea. Easier to reach for than inlining webR on pkgdown examples & litedown::fuse() makes it sing.

Impressive to see an Rmd be rendered in a WebAssembly world where pandoc-based Quarto/rmarkdown would be highly problematic.

pkg.yihui.org/litedown/pla...

“Here we reframe the inference of coalescence times as a problem of translation between two biological languages: the sparse, observable patterns of mutation along the genome and the unobservable ancestral recombination graph that gave rise to them.”

#PopGen #PopulationGenetics

Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin? Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin?

Buckle up
'So let’s finally talk about peptides. And I don’t mean peptides as chemists and biologists understand them (short chains of amino acids) I mean “Peptides!”, the hot new wonder drugs that you can order by mail. Oh man.'
www.science.org/content/blog...

Other specialties:

A block of experimental designers
A stratum of survey samplers
A realization of probabilists
An ensemble of data scientists
A cohort of epidemiologists
A coherence of subjectivists
A chain of Bayesians

We have a new Postdoc position, exploring how genetic factors and environmental factors (e.g., early life stress) influence brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., autism) based on brain MRI data. Welcome!

Delighted to share our latest research from the 23andMe Research Team, just published in @nature.com !
We looked at data from >27,000 participants to uncover how human genetics influences weight loss efficacy and side effects of GLP-1 medications like semaglutide. A short thread 🧵👇

Where the McDonald's are.

I have a journal joke, but the punchline's been on arXiv for months

Anyone of any nationality interested in a postdoc working with me on human genomic structural variation and disease? Full details here, let me know if you are interested, let others know, and repost please!!

marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/ne...

arg! I wish R packages had better error messages!

Now they can, thanks to my newest #Rstats package, {arg}! 😉

{arg} produces clean, simple, error messages for checking function arguments, similar to {checkmate}, {dreamerr}, and {chk}, using {cli} formatting.

25 YeaRs: Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics <em>Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics</em> is an international statistics journal covering statistical theory, methodology, applications and computing.

Would you like to read all the articles from the 25 years of R special issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics? They are all freely accessible for the next month or so at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1... #rstats

“Looking is not the same as seeing, after all, and this may be why some of us may stumble upon discoveries in data that others have already analyzed.”

#stats #statistics #DataExploration