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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Canadian negotiators will be pushing hard for a moratorium on Europeans calling anything "poutine" until they have been properly trained in how to make a proper cheese curd

Banner hanging in Leipzig train station advertising "Kabadische Poutine" for 7.20€, with a picture of fries covered in what looks like salsa and salad dressing

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

I've estimated a GAM to estimate how mean velocity varied as a function of individual ("tag"), hour, day, and distance from shore. This plot compares the smooths estimated for a model estimated via REML (base) vs. NCV (using `compare_smooths()` from @gsimpson.bsky.social's gratia package). 12/n

Partial effect plots of smooth GAM curves (output from the gratia package) for two different GAM models. There are four plots: top-left is an effect plot for day of year (s(day)), top-right is for hour of day, bottom-left is for shore-distance, and bottom-right is for individual (s(tag)). Black curves represent functions estimated via REML, and blue lines represent curves estimated via NCV with the given blocking/neighbourhood structure.

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Here's an example of the blocking and NB structure for some code I'm working on. Data is spatiotemporal movement of fish. Blocks: 12h periods for each individual. NBs: blocks+/- 6 hours. Yellow: which obs. are in each block, purple = which obs. are also in the NB for that block 10/n

Figure showing a matrix representing group membership, with rows indicating blocks and columns indicating observations. Labeled as a 12 x 1835 dimension matrix.

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Just visited Saxon Switzerland in Germany. Breathtaking vistas, deep sense of history *and* very high quality bryophyte communities

Wide landscape photo of huge sandstone mountains, taken on a lookout platform. Morning mist covers the hills

Photo looking across at of an old bright yellow building on top of a castle wall on a high plateau looking down hundreds of meters to the valley below. There is a large Plateau mountain in the distance.

Close-up photo of many types of lichen and moss growing on an old stone wall. Colours range from bright orange to iridescent green

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Our cat was convinced that she could take one if we just gave her a chance

Picture of a small white cat staring out a window at a very large and unconcerned turkey sitting on the deck

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Andrew McDonald and I were just talking stats memes, and I was reminded of my proudest creation

Meme picture of two Spidersman pointing at each other, one labelled "penalized smooths" and the other labelled "random effects"

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

The sad thing is that desserts are one of the places where we actually*do* have a distinct food culture! And you can't tell me Germans wouldn't love butter tarts

Picture of butter tarts, a flaky pastry tart with a rich butter custard filling

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

I'm slightly disturbed about what Germans seem to think Canadian food consists of

Picture of a menu labelled at the top as "Canadian steakhouse", featuring such Canadian foods as "pasta bolognese", "burger and sandwich" and "salad"

Photo of the outside of a restaurant called "Ontario Restaurant Café", along a cobblestone street in the old city of Dresden

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Every applied math book about dynamics or regression in short:

Meme image from Parks and Rec of a character dressed as a dictator, with text on it.

text on top: "Solving high dimensional system? SVD."

Text on bottom of image: "Nonlinear dynamics? Believe it or not, linearize and then SVD."

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Out of curiosity, I tried this same setup with `mgcv`, and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Center column: mgcv using standard fit +/- 1.96*SE, right column is using the critical value from the t-dist with n-2 df. (I didn't have the compute time to compare to other methods besides glm.nb)

Plot of CI coverages for glm.nb, mgcv with Wald Intervals, and mgcv with t intervals. T intervals have coverage very close to 95% for all levels of Phi

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

It's great to see a packed house at the #CSEE2025 "Forefront of Statistical Ecology in Canada" symposium! It's a great sign of strength of the statistical ecology community here If you want to join the community and conversation, sign up to the Google Group!

Slide showing info for the Canadian Community of Statistical Ecology. Google group email is ccse@googlegroups.com. Also contains a QR code link for the site: https://groups.google.com/g/ccse-

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

I found the cross-country comparisons of rise and fall in murder rates vs lead blood levels by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones to be some of the most convincing evidence for me www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2...

Graphs of time series of raising and falling violent crime rates in New Zealand, Britain, Canada, and Australia. A second line on each plot shows the rise and fall of concentrations of lead in the blood of preschool children, lagged by 19 years compared to the murder rate.

For each graph, crime rates and lagged blood levels showed very similar patterns of rise and decline across decades

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

By strict standards of replication, the estimated speed of light wasn't replicable based on highly inconsistent CIs, even though the initial estimates were within 1% of the modern value (figure from www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscop...)

Plot of point and confidence interval estimates of speed of light across history from mid 1800s until present. Although all estimates are close to the modern estimate of 299.8 km/s, many of the confidence intervals don't overlap, and exclude the modern estimates.

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 19/07/2024

I love that Google has decided to emphasize how easily its search can be used to cheat on assignments 🤦

Screenshot of Google Search page on the Android with a button that reads "Solve homework with your camera"

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 12/04/2024

Evidence that p-values are easily misinterpreted even with careful instruction part #10945 #stats #StatsEd

A conceptual question asking about interpretation of the p-value for a regression slope. Text says:

"Finding a very small p-value of a slope in a regression model tells us:

A)That the assumptions of the linear regression model are met

B) Most outcomes are close to the estimated regression line

C) That the value of our outcome 𝑦 changes a large amount with 1 unit change in the predictor 𝑥

D) None of the above are true

E) All of the above are true"

Plot showing number of student responses for each of the options for the question in the first image: A) 17% B) 34% C) 14% D) 21% E) 14%

Correct answer marked as D: "None of the above are true"

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Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 03/04/2024

What do these spammers think my research involves? Does anyone need one of these, and if so can you let me know so I can stay away from your study sites?