iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Paul Pharoah @paulpharoah.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

#statsky #episky I'm reviewing a paper and a link is provided to a github with the analysis code. There are several R scripts (none annotated) and the main, complex analyses clearly not included in any of them. The data are available "on reasonable request". Is this a red flag? Does it matter?

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Frank Harrell @f2harrell.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Computing tool of the day: I've needed to have an elegant way to stitch together pieces of Quarto books to make a unified html file for teaching. In collaboration with Claude I now have a great yaml-driven tool for this. #RStats

Yaml markup for specifying which sections of which books to extract or exclude, for building a course html presentation file.

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Christos Argyropoulos MD PhD @christosargyrop.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/05/2026

I stand behind this #hatespeech #rstats #clang blog.r-project.org/2019/03/28/use-o… "A summary of the recommendation would be: don’t use C++ to interface with R. If you need to implement some computation in native code, use C (or perhaps Fortran), not C++"

blog.r-project.org

Use of C++ in Packages - The R Blog

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Christos Argyropoulos MD, PhD, FASN 🇺🇸 0kale/acc @christosargyrop.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

And even if you send, I will use a chatbot to rewrite in base R and data.table as God intended

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sducrocq.bsky.social @sducrocq.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Happy 20th Anniversary to #rdatatable! 🎂 Since 2006, DT[i, j, by] has been the gold standard for high-performance data manipulation in R. Speed, efficiency, and elegance! A huge thanks to Matt Dowle, Arun Srinivasan, and all the contributors! @rdatatable.bsky.social 🥂 #rstats #rdatatable

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Adrian Barnett @aidybarnett.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Outstanding work by @alexdgibson.bsky.social to uncover the use of highly dubious data sets from @kaggle.com being used in hundreds of research papers and potentially even informing clinical practice. If you're re-using data, take the time to confirm that it's real. www.nature.com/articles/d41....

nature.com

Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data

The models are designed to predict someone’s risk of diabetes or stroke. A few might already have been used on patients.

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

The special issue of the Australian and New Zealand J. of Statistics commemorating the 25th anniversary of R (the language was developed in NZ) is finally out, with free access for the next 90 days (yes, an irony for an open source language), onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

25 YeaRs: Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics

<em>Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics</em> is an international statistics journal covering statistical theory, methodology, applications and computing.

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Nice! I have my own Vim macros for this kind of thing, but your system is more versatile.

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Here's a quick little project that I hope some will find interesting in misc. ways. I saw the below graph in The Economist, showing pre- and post-data, here 2025. thread 1/

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Gilles Colling @gilles-colling.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

200 treated patients. 800 controls. Five covariates to match on. How do you pair them? Propensity scores collapse those five dimensions into one number and match on that. Clean and well-understood. But you can also solve the pairing directly in the original covariate space. 1/4

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Again, has the big advantage of being written by prominent researchers in the field.

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Great package. I am not a fan of using R6, like this one does and some others, but it has lots of sophisticated options, and it has the huge advantage of being written by some people who have done significant theoretical development of the field.

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Giles @gdeejay.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

I just had Claude build me an #rstats function and raised an error when reviewing the code. Claude responded with "No, the code is right because of X and Y", please run it and get back to me with any specific errors you are concerned about. Turns out Claude was right. ...

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Shannon Pileggi @pipinghotdata.com · 12/03/2026

I am so happy for this announcement!! Heather is such an incredible community partner and deeply knowledgeable of base R. This is great news for R core and the broader R community. 🎉❤️🙌🤩 #rstats

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Christos Argyropoulos MD, PhD, FASN 🇺🇸 0kale/acc @christosargyrop.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

#Gemini is killing me: I asked it to contrast the object oriented systems in #rstats and #perl and the surprising (I know ZERO about OO #rstats) is that the S6 classes are equivalent to Moo or the class feature in #perl (so learn that first I guess), but one should be using S3!!

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Amstat-American Statistical Association @amstatnews.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

While working full-time & raising a child, Grace Wahba earned advanced degrees, completing her PhD at Stanford and becoming the first female faculty member in statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. #womenshistorymonth #statwomen magazine.amstat.org/blog/2026/03... #statssky

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Big Book of R @bigbookofr.com · 07/03/2026

Complex Surveys: A Guide to Analysis Using R by Thomas Lumley #RStats bigbookofr.com/chapters/social%20sc…

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Flávia E. Rius @flaviaerius.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

It is much easier to understand python code for data science if you know a bit of base R than if you only know tidyverse. #rstats #python

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Simon Smart @simonsmart.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

It's surprising that neither R CMD INSTALL nor R CMD check flag having two identically named functions in an #rstats package. It's easy to accidentally duplicate when refactoring code and can lead to much confusion!

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

They may talk about statistical software (" The package now accepts tibbles!") But not statistics.

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

#rstats The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics will be running a special issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the official release of R. (The Univ. of Auckland was the birthplace of R.) They invited various people to contribute articles, including me. 🧵 1/

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Great writeup, should be required reading for students in Data Science and Statistics.

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Aman Bhargava @aman.bh · 09/02/2026

The Indian government released an MCP server that lets you query their survey data using plain English and get back aggregate statistics from national surveys. I explore some of its possibilities and limitations. #data #stats aman.bh/blog/2026/qu...

aman.bh

Querying India's MoSPI Data with Claude and MCP | Aman Bhargava

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released a new tool for LLM-assisted querying of their survey data. I explore some of it's possibilities.

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Startup Ideas @startupideas.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

startup idea: wearable device app for automatic medication adherence with machine learning based reminders

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Daniel Gutierrez @ddgutierrez.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

What’s one data tool or concept you rediscovered in 2025 that surprised you with its usefulness? For me: data.table in R. Lightning-fast joins. Elegant logic. #RStats #DataScience #MachineLearning

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Very disappointing, the FDA has now approved Bayesian methods for clinical trials. Someone put pressure on them, likely the drug industry. 🧵 1/

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john j. kim @jkimpictures.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Around sunset, Outer Sunset 🌞

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Robin Blythe @rbly.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

In all seriousness, it's not til you start reading the utterly bullshit attributions in the papers that cite your work that you realise scientists legitimately cannot read above a grade 6 level #statsky

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

A post in X marveled at the fact that in very high dimensions, all (mean 0) random vectors are approximately orthogonal. I added the well-known fact that that means they are also approximately equidistant. E.g. length-1 vectors are about sqrt(2) apart. 🧵 1/

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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar @mattansb.msbstats.info · 03/12/2025

Logistic regression with 5 million observations. glm() - about 2 hours glm(start = <values found on a tiny subset>) - less than 2 minutes. Almost feels too good... #rstats

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

# RStats. Pop quiz: > x <- matrix(0,nrow=10,ncol=2) > x[c(2,5,9),] <- 1:2 > x What is printed out? Why?

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Big Book of R @bigbookofr.com · 27/11/2025

Applied Machine Learning Using mlr3 in R by Bernd Bischl, Raphael Sonabend, Lars Kotthoff and Michel Lang #RStats bigbookofr.com/chapters/packages.ht…

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Iwanko 🔞 Sensitive content ahead! @rockywanker.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

A friend of mine was hired at a company which uses their own self-hosted AI tools a few weeks ago. Just today they've told me: "Dude, I think I'm only gonna last 2 months here. Their energy bills make it financially insolvent."

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ᴅʀ. ᴍᴏᴡɪɴᴄᴋᴇʟ'ꜱ @drmowinckels.io · 02/10/2025

Just published my new R article: 'Mapply: When You Need to Iterate Over Multiple Inputs'! 🚀 If `sapply` doesn't quite cut it for your multi-variable iterations, `mapply` is your friend. Learn to pair inputs beautifully. #RStats #Mapply drmo.site/bhXeDb

A graphic showing the concept of mapply in R, with multiple input vectors being paired and processed by a function returning a single output vector.

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Big Book of R @bigbookofr.com · 02/10/2025

Time Series Analysis and Its Applications by Robert H. Shumway and David S. Stoffer #RStats bigbookofr.com/chapters/time%20seri…

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Jennifer Davis @jmd5120.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Hey Bike lights It's fall now

Chicago skyline at night from Shedd Aquarium

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David Blanchflower BSc @davidbflower.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Uranus and the Pleiades. 22 September 2025. 🔭 🧪 🎨 #astrophotography #SciArt #photography #StormHour #ThePhotoHour

The Pleiades star cluster above centre. Planet Uranus dot with text label near bottom left corner. Many star dots.

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Daniel Gutierrez @ddgutierrez.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

I tell students: You don’t need to memorize every ML algorithm. But you do need to understand: — loss functions — overfitting — regularization Master the “why,” not just the “how.” #DataScience #MachineLearning #Statistics #AI #RStats

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Daniel Gutierrez @ddgutierrez.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Most companies don’t need deep learning. They need clean joins, honest metrics, and interpretable results. Startups often chase GPU clusters before fixing their CSVs. #DataScience #MachineLearning #AI #RStats

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 17/09/2025

It’s neat to discover that all these #rstats pocket friends and zoom friends I’ve known for years actually *do* exist in real life #PositConf2025

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Norm Matloff (你有冇諗清楚呀?) @matloff.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

A reminder: When debugging some code and it finally runs and produces output, that doesn't mean the code is now debugged. I myself fell victim to this thinking last week. I am updating my qeML package, with one change involving a nice aspect of k-Nearest Neighbors: 🧵 1/

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Jonathan @renewableenergy.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

You can learn more about this project here, only the second of its kind in the United States. grist.org/energy/calif... How this is not being done with much more frequency — in light of our fresh water and drought challenges — is baffling. #energysky #greensky #energytransition

grist.org

California’s first solar-covered canal is now fully online

The 1.6-megawatt pilot system is among a growing number of initiatives to put solar over waterways. The approach could generate gigawatts of power nationwide.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 11/09/2025

So, April of 2024, i gave keynotes at two separate business and data science industry conferences, and told them exactly this was going to happen: That fixing "AI" mistakes was going to lead to hiring more people to do more work, or paying the original employees to spend time doing it themselves.

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