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Alex Franks

@amfranks.bsky.social
760 followers 164 following 24 posts

Associate Professor of Statistics afranks.com

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Reposted by Alex Franks
Matt Vespa @missionvespa.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
@governor.ca.gov - this is an easy one. Keep already allocated funds to help schools deal with extreme heat!
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
This is an example of a scientific association censoring its members, real scientists, for defending attacks on science. The police were called to remove the scientists for handing out hard copies of this editorial. diabetesjournals.org/care/article...
diabetesjournals.org
Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!
The opinions expressed in this editorial are the personal views of the authors (S.E. Kahn, C.A.M. Anderson, J.B. Buse, and E. Selvin) and do not represent
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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 28/04/2026
My friend is teaching to his Economics Ph.D. students and explaining why they should be interested in topics that are not in their subfield. The friend asked for statements about why learning from other fields is good. Here was my answer: " Five things:
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.
cover of the book "Bayesian Workflow" by Gelman, Vehtari, et al. Coming out later this year, in the summer probably.
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 02/04/2026
"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."
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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 20/03/2026
It’s amazing how quickly Black women have been targeted by these laws and doubly so how little this factors into the analysis around the sexual and gender politics of this movement.
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 25/02/2026
We ought to be very worried when an AI company has more integrity than the DoD. (TLDR: DoD wants to remove safeguards preventing AI from being used to kill people and mass-surveil citizens; Anthropic says the tech isn't accurate enough for that). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
US military leaders pressure Anthropic to bend Claude safeguards
Anthropic presents itself as most safety-forward AI firm and Pentagon has threatened penalties if it does not yield
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 14/02/2026
This is such terrible advice that I should use it to update my example of when stretching your y-axis is misleading, and truncating your y-axis is fine. Hint: Only a fraction of people in a trial will get infected regardless.
Tweet: That slide is even worse than the NEJM KM curves with the truncated y-axis graph inserted on the proper graph. 

Now show me the curves without massively truncating the y-axis

Thank goodness Vinay is at FDA
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse serving veterans. He died trying to protect protestors being assaulted. A group of anonymous & masked men fired chemicals into his face, beat him, disarmed him, and shot him in broad daylight in front of witnesses. Then his government smeared him & defended his murder.
picture of Alex Pretti
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Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
RFK Jr.'s claim that COVID vaccines are deadly? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. In this new extraordinarily large study, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to those unvaccinated. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults in France
This cohort study uses the data from all adults aged 18 to 59 years living in France on November 1, 2021, to evaluate whether there is an association of receipt of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine with long-t...
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Emanuel Maiberg @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...
404media.co
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
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Alex Franks @amfranks.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Who is teaching causal inference at the undergrad level? What do you cover? Recommended textbooks? Slides you're willing to share? Advice? #stats
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Mark D. Levine @marklevinenyc.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Congestion pricing by the # ‘s 6 months in: * 67k fewer drivers entering zone daily * Delays in Holland Tunnel down 65% * Traffic deaths down 32% so far in 2025 * $500m projected this year for MTA capital improvements * B’way attendance +12% * Subway ridership +7% So yes this program is a SUCCESS.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.
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Leah Stokes @leahstokes.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
This is downtown Santa Barbara right now. The No Kings protest stretches for over a mile along the water. The cars who drive by are all honking in support. Probably the biggest protest this community has ever seen.
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United Farm Workers @ufw.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
We feed you. They hunt us.
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Dr Alessio Veneziano @aveneziano.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
At the risk of sounding like a big nerd, I love when assumed/perceived trends are found to be the result of the Simpson's paradox! Here, the gender-equality paradox is getting fried! 🧪 #science 📊 #stats #equality
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Elizabeth Stuart @lizstuart.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
@noahgreifer.bsky.social was my post-doc and I cannot recommend him more highly if you need a super smart statistical consultant / programmer. He is the force behind MatchIt, cobalt, and other packages, and is also just a fantastic team member.
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Richard Van Noorden @richvn.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts for US science in next fiscal year NASA cut by 24% NIH cut by 40% EPA cut by 55% NSF cut by 56% Analysis from @maxkozlov.bsky.social @dangaristo.bsky.social @alexwitze.bsky.social and @nature.com team www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts to US science
Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline, critics say.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/04/2025
The man at left separated the mother and baby at right. The mother is now in Venezuela. Baby daughter, in foster care in the US, exact location unknown. Dad? He's in CECOT prison without trial — because he had tattoos.
Stephen MillerMother and young baby wearing a pink hat
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Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
🧵In March I wrote about how Trump's attacks on science & universities followed the authoritarian playbook & set out Qs as warning signs for escalation. 🚨 THESE ARE NOW HAPPENING This 🧵is on how those warning sign Qs have been realised full post: christinapagel.substack.com/p/warning-si... 1/15
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Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · 25/04/2025
Wow. Randall Monroe is not fucking around *at all*.
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Karyn @karynregal.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
“When the men approached me, my first thought was that they …. wanted to harm me.” As a woman who spent a career working alone in weird and dangerous situations, my first concern was being hurt. Thanks, @cambridgeday.bsky.social for being one of the few news outlets to capture that.
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 12/04/2025
She is still in custody www.wbur.org/news/2025/04...
wbur.org
Tufts student details harrowing transport by ICE, lack of food and medical care in detention
Rümeysa Öztürk's sworn statement was filed alongside a motion from her attorneys seeking her immediate release from detention while they fight the revocation of her visa.
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs. Find out how your community may be impacted. Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org a 🧵
US map via scienceimpacts.org visualization of economic loss due to IDC cuts to 15% as part of Feb 7, 2025 executive order, with shading denoting intensity of cuts.
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
What people in every part of higher education need to understand is that Republicans now want to do to universities what they’ve tried to do to labor unions: erase them from the institutional landscape. The question is how much you want to collaborate in your own destruction.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
This is completely terrifying, a huge violation of the first amendment, and part of the coopting of a distorted version of anti-semitism to justify persecution of people speaking out against Israel's genocide. And the broader pursuit of a police state.
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Rachael Sirianni, PhD @docsirianni.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH
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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · 12/03/2025
I just heard this as well. The entire staff of the National Center for Education Statistics, created in 1867, has been fired.
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Scott Galloway @profgalloway.com · 26/02/2025
DOGE savings (WSJ): $2.6b TSLA subsidies (10 years): $15b Annual increase in deficit: $900b Cuts to Medicare: $880b
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Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
If people were really just dying from chronic diseases then how come they weren’t dying from their chronic diseases until after March, 2020?
Graph of U.S. excess mortality since March 2018 showing significant change starting in March 2020
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 22/02/2025
If anyone who receives this would like help writing a suitable prompt injection for when they use an LLM to evaluate responses, I am at your service. DM or @hmason.64 on Signal.
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Charles Ornstein @charlesornstein.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
NEW: Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.
propublica.org
Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.
ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.
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Rachel Maddow @maddow.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
after the overturning of roe, black infant mortality has spiked nearly 11% in states with abortion bans: www.reuters.com/world/us/inf...
reuters.com
Infant mortality rises in states with abortion bans, study finds
Increases in infant mortality have been found in U.S. states that enacted abortion bans or severe restrictions after the Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling that guaranteed a right to the procedure, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
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Alison Gemmill @alisongemmill.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Our two papers on abortion bans and fertility/infant mortality are now out. In 14 states w/ abortion bans, fertility increased 1.7% and infant mortality increased 6%. Key takeaway is that these impacts were disproportionately felt among those w/ greatest structural disadvantages. Links below.
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Alex Franks @amfranks.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
I'm very proud of this work that wouldn't have happened without a wonderful collaborative team. On the stats side, it involved a novel Bayesian hierarchical panel data modeling for inferring heterogenous effects. We're planning on a methods paper related to the tools we developed.
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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
#stats hot take: additivity and linearity are forms of regularization, and part of the reason OLS/GLMs are so effective is because they're basically very regularized models already
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Michele Guindani @mguindani.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) has joined Bluesky. You can follow the account at @isba-bayesian.bsky.social to stay updated on events, publications, and discussions within the #Bayesian community. Please add the account to your starter packages.
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Alex Franks @amfranks.bsky.social · 04/11/2024
UC Santa Barbara invites applications for an Assistant Professor position in Statistics and Data Science. Come join us in beautiful Santa Barbara! Priority given to applicants who apply by December 15: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02859
recruit.ap.ucsb.edu
Assistant Professor - Data Science
University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!
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Avi Feller @avifeller.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
Great thread. Excited to hear what’s next. With @darbour.bsky.social @amfranks.bsky.social (and Ben-Michael) we also thought a lot about the time component and proposed a Bayes model that’s similar to Guido’s DWCP. Love to see more attention to these issues! projecteuclid.org/journals/ann...
projecteuclid.org
Estimating the effects of a California gun control program with multitask Gaussian processes
Gun violence is a critical public safety concern in the United States. In 2006, California implemented a unique firearm monitoring program, the Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS), to address g...
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Sanjay Srivastava @sanjaysrivastava.com · 30/10/2024
“And we will have different names for different kinds of missing data. When it is random, we shall call it missing completely at random.” “And when it is not random, sir?” “Missing at random.”
Nate Bargatze and SNL cast members as George Washington and troops.
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