iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben Harrap

Do you have thoughts about data skills for the 🇦🇺 #grains industry? 🌾 Complete the survey so we know! It will inform the National Industry Training Program within the Analytics for the Australian Grains Industry ✅ 📥 adelaideuniwide.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... @asps-oz.bsky.social

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 14h

And of course this photo of Randy He's on my website, he's tattooed on my arm What you don't see in this picture is me, crouched down, holding his butt so he doesn't wander off

A white greyhound wearing a red neckerchief and black cowboy hat, against a backdrop of cacti and desert

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 14h

This photo of Cheeky, because this is basically every photo of her We adopted her at 9 and she'd never lived indoors. Her favourite thing immediately became cushions and at least one part of her body would be touching a cushion at all times

A black greyhound, asleep in her bed with her head resting on a cushion

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Fonti Kar @fontikar.bsky.social · 21h

🌏 OceaniaR 2026 is fast approaching! 🌏 Join fellow #Rstats nerds in Naarm, Melbourne, Australia and work on meaningful projects. Learn skills, wrangle interesting data and solve problems! 🗓️ Sun 29 Nov 0900 - 1600 📌 Register statsoc.org.au/event-6818002

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 23h

Haha I only *sometimes* read the documentation!

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

WOMBAT 2026 @wombat.numbat.space · 06/10/2026

Early bird closes 11 October so hurry up and register #WOMBAT2026! You can register for the tutorials or the workshop, or both! wombat2026.numbat.space/participatio... #RStats #DataScience

WOMBAT 2026
Workshop organised by the Monash Business Analytics Team
"Early Bird Pricing"

30 November–1 December in Naarm/Melbourne.

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Today in Ben Actually Reads The Documentation: Quarto HTML output has an email obfuscation option!? quarto.org/docs/referen... Images showing document YAML and corresponding output Is it effective? No idea, but it's cool! #quarto #rstats

A screenshot of a Quarto document demonstrating the email-obfuscation option:

format:
html:
email-obfuscation: javascript

followed by markdown text with an email address

A screenshot of the HTML source output by the Quarto document, where the email address is wrapped in a HTML script tag

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hah I have this exact conflict in my intro to R workshop!

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If you're coming along to WOMBAT2026 (I am!), come along to the OceaniaR hackathon the day before too (I am!) statsoc.org.au/event-6818002

statsoc.org.au

Statistical Society of Australia - OceaniaR 2026 presented by the Statistical Computing and Visualisation section

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I saw some cool work at an SSA talk recently statsoc.org.au/event-6765503 Covering some approaches to combining probability and non-probability samples to reduce the impact of selection bias and measurement error I don't think probability samples are *completely* dead!

statsoc.org.au

Statistical Society of Australia - SSA National Speaker Series: 2026 Foreman Lecture

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Alessandro Nai @alessandronai.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

still one of my best work

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

On the flip side, maybe the funniest joke is the LLM joke. ChatGPT looms over the set, the audience questioning their taste with every laugh

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

If I was doing stand up comedy I'd start my set telling the audience that one joke is written by an LLM None of the jokes actually are, but when they bomb I can go "that one was ChatGPT" and it becomes a bit in itself

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Next stop, making their own themes! benharrap.com/post/2024-04...

benharrap.com

Making a custom RStudio theme – Ben Harrap

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Speaking from personal experience, having a website has certainly helped me gets jobs. Make a website!

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

It's not that somebody put a single packet of beef stock cubes in my work's communal leftover food area that's baffling me, it's that there's fewer cubes in the packet today than there were at the start of the week

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I used the `pdf-standard: ua-1` feature the other day, which was super helpful for flagging stuff during rendering. But Adobe's pre-flight tool still flagged a whole bunch of issues using the same standard. All I want is to produce accessible pdfs, is `pdf-standard` sufficient?

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If you missed today's @rinpharma.bsky.social workshop, here are a few of my favourite "quick fixes" for some common #ggplot2 issues 📊 1. Use {ggview} to preview plots at the same size and resolution as you want to save them with ggsave() to avoid the annoying resizing #RStats #DataViz

library(ggview)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg)) +
geom_point() +
canvas(
width = 6, height = 4,
units = "in",
dpi = 300
)

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"My earlier correction was wrong — your original code was fine as written" That's right Claude, don't try me 😤

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The presentation we can all aspire to

a five-panel meme of vince mcmahon getting progressively more excited

panel 1: Our next presentation is on <complex topic>
panel 2: 20 min presentation. slide 1/41
panel 3: "so here's the results" slide 8/41
panel 4: "thanks for coming to my talk" slide 19/41
panel 5: every question answered by the extra slides

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

After what feels like forever, I've gotten to do some statistical modelling and two package-related things stuck out to me: {glmmTMB} makes parallel processing very easy {marginaleffects} is SO useful! Plots of predicted probabilities seem much easier to explain than a table of odds ratios

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Amstat-American Statistical Association @amstatnews.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Last call! Nominations for the 2027 International Prize in Statistics close Oct. 1. #STATSSKY #STATISTICIAN Recognize a breakthrough contribution in statistics or data science: statprize.org/nominations/

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Makes sense to focus on boss fights when every enemy is basically a boss fight

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

You can use rel() to specify the size of individual elements relative to the base size. Means if you increase the base size, then you don't need to readjust sizes of each individual element again

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Regent my fave, I should look at the dailys more often

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Forthcoming readxl update to read these as list cols @hadley.nz @jennybryan.bsky.social?

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

My limited experience with being taken out to lunches and dinners is it's just as good an opportunity for me to filter out the job as it is for them to filter me out

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Getting the last speaker in a conference session to be the session chair like

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is super cool, and very fun to play with! I'd love to use it to develop palettes. Is there a way to set/fix the background colour of the site? I know ahead of time what the background colour of my output is going to be so it'd save me some back-and-forth when testing out the palette

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

What's been your recent highlights? I came across Mindforce earlier this year, their latest album is start to finish amazing. It's got that early 90s thrash sound (think Slayer)👌 music.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

music.youtube.com

New Lords

Album • Mindforce

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

ViCBiostat @vicbiostat.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Seminar announcement Dianne (Di) Cook: Practical Tools for Data Exploration in Biostatistics 15 October, 4-5pm AEST via Zoom Further details: www.vicbiostat.org.au/event/practi... @visnut.bsky.social

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Yeah base_size is sometimes useful, but often I don't want to increase the size of everything in the plot to the same degree I also don't have a good workflow for figuring out how things are going to look in the target resolution or screen size

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Fricken text sizes and scaling in general It's a very iterative, manual, and arbitrary process I go through to produce the right size/scale plot

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

When were your flabbers last gasted?

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My recent etymology journey was with flabbergasted. Origins unclear, but seemingly borne of two words which is all I needed to know to justify saying "my flabbers are gasted" "well gast my flabbers" etc

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · 20/09/2026

Please, I am begging you. Do not use dplyr::ntile() in any serious statistical analysis in which you want to group continuous observation into quantile-based bins. Despite the name it doesn't actually do that, and the thing it actually does is very dangerous when accuracy matter. #rstats

blog.djnavarro.net

The trouble with ‘ntile()’ – Notes from a data witch

Please, please, please do not use ‘dplyr::ntile()’ in an analysis that will be submitted to a regulatory agency. It’s secretly an ill-conceived SQL tool that doesn’t do what you probably want it to, a...

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It's a combination of: Using fontawesome extension for social icons not available by default Setting the link text to be just the icon (github.com/benharrap/be...) Using custom css to retain the row display (lines 49 to 60 github.com/benharrap/be...)

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Nice! Quarto websites as so easy to maintain! If you're a sucker for tweaking layouts, you might enjoy this change I made to the trestles theme. The social links are displayed in a row on mobile view, so your bio is visible on page load, inviting visitors to scroll down.

a screenshot of the mobile view of benharrap.com, where the social media links are displayed as icons in a row

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I'm really enjoying the implications of "Authentic BUT Australian"

A packet of tortillas that reads "cali mex tortillas. Authentic foods but Australian made"

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

On the bright side, everyone gets to see your sick nails 💅 Is that some kind of chromatic finish? Super cool

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 18/09/2026

the longer I'm a prof the more certain I become that each university operates in a wildly different way to the rest. most sensible, then, is to adopt a strategy of radical advice-seeking ask for help! early and often! academics love nothing more than to put off work to help out junior colleagues!!!

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Vision science: The difference between Rod Stewart and Cone Stewart finally clarified

Two photos of the singer Rod Stewart, left: B/W labelled Rod Stewart; right: color, labelled Cone Stewart

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

> Please complete your staff feedback survey > This is your personalised link, don't share it with anyone > No one can identify responses

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Roll up, roll up! Get your tickets for the Australian Data Science Network 2026 Conference before early bird pricing ends tomorrow! adsnconf2026.netlify.app

adsnconf2026.netlify.app

Australian Data Science Network Conference 2026 – ADSN2026

26th & 27th November 2026, Australian Bureau of Statistics House, Canberra

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Reposted by Ben Harrap

Jon Harmon (he/him/his) @jonthegeek.com · 16/09/2026

I made it through my #PositConf2026 talk! The Design of Everyday #RStats Functions. Slides here: stbl.wrangle.zone/slides/every... The underlying 📦 {stbl} is on CRAN!

stbl.wrangle.zone

The Design of Everyday R Functions

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Ben Harrap @bharrap.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Aha! I thought the title might be a Don Norman reference and was pleased to see the second slide haha

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