NSF’s SBE directorate—which has long supported social and behavioral science research and training—is at risk of being dismantled. FABBS is gathering stories about its impact. If SBE has shaped your work or career, make your voice heard: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
“I have seen the future of science. It is ruled by bitter competition instead of collaboration, pageantry instead of exploration. . . .Those willing to toil over genuine questions will necessarily lose out to those that can furnish cheap answers. . . .”
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/04/20/94/
#OTD 1942 Sir Maurice Kendall ASA Fellow 1950, reads his paper ‘On the Future of Statistics’ before the Royal Statistical Society. Eighty-four years later, how many of his predictions pan out? 1/4🧵
Challenge #3: Look around you in your work, at your organization, in your department, at your institution and ask who still isn't being let into the room. Hiring managers, evaluate your hiring practices and salary distribution and advancement opportunities for your staff. Are they equitable across gender and racial groups?
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Challenge #2: At the conference or back at home - talk to someone in a role different than yours, or to a colleague with whom you don't regularly work, that you may not typically be in the same room with in your daily work. Ask them what questions they are working on, what challenges they are trying to solve, and how you might collaborate. I challenge you to step out of your lane, come out of your silo, and to try a new way.
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Challenge #1: Take a more critical lense to your own methods, models, and assumptions and to evaluate the evidence for your inferences. Speak up in challenge to the uses and inferences that others are making, based on AI or not.
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Moving the field forward requires: more evidence, more investment, more willingness to challenge our own assumptions; more willingness to communicate with and truly listen to our stakeholders - earlier and more often, more critical evaluation of our tools, methods, and theories and more tolerance for the discomfort that comes with change and criticism.
A few things from Amy Hendrickson's #NCME26 Presidential Address.
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NCME Values. The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) advances the science and practice of measurement in service of learning, human development, and the public good. Our values guide how we conduct our work, how we interact as a professional community, and how we engage with society. They reflect both enduring scientific principles and our shared ethical commitments as stewards of measurement in education.
ncme.org/about/
Promote Validity, Fairness and Quality in AI-Integrated Assessment. Bridge Measurement Science and AI Expertise. Strengthen Connections Between Research, Policy and Practice. Expand and Deepen NCME's Global Engagement.
Incoming NCME President Kadriye Ercikan's priorities for her term. There are some times I wonder what my annual dues are doing at different professional societies. That's never the case with @ncme38.bsky.social. #NCME26
#OTD 1810 Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) reads his paper on the Central Limit Theorem to the Académie de Sciences It took him about 40 yrs to develop & a theorem was not explicitly stated: he devised it as a tool ....1/3🧵
This essay captures what AI for science debates often fail to recognize:
That in many academic fields, people creation is the main goal. That the supervision IS the science. That the real threat is "a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"
ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...
Saving SBE starts before the bill is written.
SBE needs a distinct FY27 appropriation. If your sch. is on the list, get a group of colleagues to meet w your House/Sen. offices. Esp. for Republican seats, direct constituent comms matter. Timeline/templates/updates:
www.paigeamormino.com/pages/9337
NCME, together with 28 other scholarly and professional societies, submitted a comment letter urging the U.S. General Services Administration to withdraw proposed changes to the System for Award Management certification requirements.
👉 buff.ly/s6dXfBg
The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...
Our 40th department anniversary brings past & current faculty, alumni, friends and students celebrating together 🎉
We enjoy a lot from talks and sharing by founders, faculty, alumni, and keynote talk by Prof. Bin Yu, with the wonderful mixer and banquet!
Great to see you all!
#OTD 1 Apr 1895 Alexander Craig "Alec" Aitken b (d 3 Nov 1967) Introduced generalised least squares & the now-standard vector-matrix notation for linear regression models 1935. With Harold Silverstone he established the lower bound on the variance of an estimator, now known as Cramér–Rao bound. 1/6🧵
A line graph showing awards over time at NSF's SBE. The line for this year, 2026, is extremely FLAT compared to prior years. By this time in 2025, 179 grants had been awarded. In 2021, it was 243. This year... 16.
NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October.
No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out.
Why...?
1/x
source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
🟦🧠 #academicsky
The @uofscstatistics.bsky.social 40th Anniversary Conference. Finest group of colleagues one could ask for.
Professor Bin Yu gave a talk at the Palmetto symposium for the ASA SC Chapter about her sights on data science.
A great talk to learn from her!
Also, congrats to the student presentation award winners: Joe Hart (Clemson), Brian Harrold (USC Statistics), and Todd Wilson (MUSC)!
False claims in a widely-cited paper. No corrections. No consequences. Welcome to the Business School.
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/f...
“not one of the recommendations was a new idea to NCES,” said Peggy Carr. “Many had already been implemented or we were working on when the center was dismantled."
Great reporting by @jillbarshay.bsky.social hechingerreport.org/proof-points...
Described as an 'epochal' publication #OTD(?) 1774 Pierre-Simon de Laplace publishes 'Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événemens' [Memoir on the Probability of the Causes of Events] formally introducing the concept of inverse probability, the foundation for Bayesian statistics
Luckily no look-alike androids to come take the in-class exam for the other 80-90% of the course grade yet. And, for now, nothing to save them from the office of academic integrity if the usual hallucinations pop up.
Any chance it was made by Blackboard to knock their rival back? ;-)
NSF building on Eisenhower Av. HUD now owns.
Destroying the NSF mural in the foyer. Of the Eisenhower building.
The National Science Foundation sign on our Eisenhower Av building is now gone.
The NSF mural in the foyer is removed and torn off in sheets.
We were supposed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the agency in May 2025. That never happened.
I wrote the Foreword to EM5 as @ncme38.bsky.social President when it went to press. I thanked the herculean service of 103+ members over seven years, and Susan Trent, in Steve Ferrara's memory, who helped make this freely accessible to all to download, read, and cite: global.oup.com/academic/pro...
Experimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name.
"These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."
A corollary to this principle is that finding a single hallucinated citation should lead to an automatic rejection. Automatic. This should be a matter of policy.
And this is one of easier AI-related problems for our journals!
The editor of the ASA’s journal "Statistics and Data Science in Imaging" invites submissions for a special issue on spatial statistics in imaging with the support of the ASA Statistics and the Environment and Statistics in Epidemiology sections. Learn more: magazine.amstat.org/...
Is being in those colors on the @sc.edu campus begging to be tipped over? Would any self-respecting campus disciplinary group be able to bring itself to find against someone who did? (Brilliant plan to sell ad space quickly? Or fireable offense?)
I could never remember how to spell Bonferroni's name (is it a double n? double f? double r? double other n?). The trick is to remember he was raised by Pirates.
Google AI says that isn't true. But how trustworthy are these LLMs anyway?