A simple post: Why?

Trump administration sends letter wiping out addiction, mental health grants The Trump administration sent hundreds of letters Tuesday terminating federal grants supporting mental health and drug addiction services.

Last night with no warning, RFK Jr. cancelled up to $2 billion in funding for mental health and substance abuse research and programs administered through SAMHSA.

He and his minions did so because “they no longer believe the defunded programs align with the Trump administration's priorities”.

Why randomized controlled trials matter and the procedures that strengthen them Randomized controlled trials are a key tool to study cause and effect. Why do they matter and how do they work?

Read more about RCTs and why they’re so important: ourworldindata.org/randomized-c...

ManuscriptCentral Wrapped!
In 2025, you submitted 5 papers
AND all got rejected 🎉
You spent 💯 minutes in total trying to submit your papers!
You reviewed for 10 journals that would never publish your papers ❤️

How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias?
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/01/h...

I believe eigen fly. I believe eigen touch the sky.

https://insights.nswers.org/briefs/2025-chronic-absenteeism

NSWERS has released a new research brief examining chronic absenteeism in Nebraska’s K–12 schools and its effect on student outcomes, including assessment scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment. View the full brief here: insights.nswers.org/briefs/2025-....

This was state championship game in GI. The Islanders beat Creighton Prep to win the title.

Hey that’s my dad!

Grand Island linebacker Jim Jefferies celebrates in 1978.

A short explanation of p-hacking and why it absolutely makes sense to ask HHS to release the study methods of their autism report in advance.

“We used a Likert scale to measure…” — No, you didn’t! Understanding Likert, Likert-type, and Ordinal questions

A short weekend post on a pet peeve of mine: likert questions

substack.com/@mzloteanu/n...

#substack #likert #design #science #research

I made one for stats papers

If researchers find Cohen’s d = 8, no they didn’t.

(probably.)

Thoughts on the distribution of Cohen's d values in psychology and why we should think about their plausibility when reading articles.

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note to self: 83.5% CIs will just touch 💏 at p = .05 www.tjmahr.com/unenv/#p-val...

Checklist of items researchers can do to improve the reproducibility of their code

Here is my checklist summarising a small set of some of the simplest tasks you can do that have high potential to improve the reproducibility of your analysis code.

This is based on my year of reproducibility reviews for the J. of Archaeological Science:

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHjN_6yUM... 🧪🏺

Love this

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a countdown clock with the number 10 in the center ALT: a countdown clock with the number 10 in the center

Let us start 2025 in a positive mood: here are 10 methods things researchers can worry *less* about in 2025

Yesterday, June 2, was an interesting day at work. I was reporting a story about how the Education Department hadn't delivered a report to Congress on the Condition of Education, despite the June 1 deadline mandated by law. 🧵 (1/9)

Inkscape plugin to rescale figures without distorting the text, and other useful features!
github.com/burghoff/Sci...

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

A new use of the asterisk in the paper author list for credit assignment

By slashing teams that gather critical data, the Trump administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose consequences could ripple out for decades: propub.li/3RZzqHP

📽️: @josesepulveda.bsky.social

a slide showing the ridiculous process of publishing a journal article, highlighting how universities both pay for the work to be done and then pay to access the work.

Recently did the annual walk through of our totally normal publishing system for my undergraduate research methods students. Never fails to boggle their minds.

Although I have a *slight* preference for Mplus when conducting LPAs/LCAs, I have carried out LPAs using the tidyLPA package in R.

tidyLPA GitHub:
data-edu.github.io/tidyLPA/

Tutorial:
osf.io/wzftr/downlo...

A medical illustration of the human brain.

Train your own model.

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