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Rex "garbage in" Douglass

@rexdouglass.bsky.social
1.5K followers 5K following 135 posts

Applied Scientist in Industry. Previously UCSD. Princeton PhD. Follow me for recreational methods trash talk. www.rexdouglass.com

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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Worst Day So Far SITREP - Authoritarian Consolidation Last Update Jan 24, 7:11 PM · LLM Dec 1, 2025–Jan 23, 2026 (54d searched)
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
Worst Day So Far SITREP - Authoritarian Consolidation Last Update Jan 23, 11:22 PM LLM Dec 1, 2025–Jan 23, 2026 (54d searched)
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Today is the public launch of Worst Day So Far I built it to solve a simple problem that I faced, and I suspect many of you face as well. Please check it out and let me know what you think, and what would make it more useful to you.
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
WorstDaySoFar.com Daily summary and tracking of US mass rights violations and democratic collapse Disappearances, warrantless detentions, dragnets, political prosecutions, and 250+ other types of events Fully automated and community funded
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
🟢 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 — 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 (𝗥𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗲 / 𝗔𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻) → rexdouglass.com 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝟭‑𝗶𝗻‑𝟭,𝟬𝟬𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝟭𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬+ 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼? You 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸. #ComputerVision #ActiveLearning #DatasetCuration #MLOps #VideoAnalytics #Manufacturing #AppliedScience
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
🟢 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 — 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 · Remote / Austin 🎞️ 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀 tinyurl.com/yxr7k5f8 🚧 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 Completely unsupervised segmentation + labeling of parts, tools, and people in manufacturing. I demo it on a random “How It’s Made” fire-extinguisher video. 🧰 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 DINO · SAM-2 · Gemini · YOLO
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
🟢 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 — 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 · Remote / Austin 🎞️ 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀 tinyurl.com/yxr7k5f8 🚧 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 Completely unsupervised segmentation + labeling of parts, tools, and people in manufacturing. I demo it on a random “How It’s Made” fire-extinguisher video. 🧰 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 DINO · SAM-2 · Gemini · YOLO
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
Help! ─ 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 open to work ─ Remote/Austin → www.rexdouglass.com With new tools, I've been cooking: ▸ Machine-vision pipelines — RIOS Intelligent Machines ▸ Information-extraction pipelines — Microsoft ▸ Interactive SMS surveys — Pantheon Insights
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
Help! ─ 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 open to work ─ Remote/Austin → www.rexdouglass.com With new tools, I've been cooking: ▸ Machine-vision pipelines — RIOS Intelligent Machines ▸ Information-extraction pipelines — Microsoft ▸ Interactive SMS surveys — Pantheon Insights
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
Some ML Engineer at YouTube must handle just kids home for the holidays unsubscribing their parents from all the right wing channels.
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
90% of machine learning is data cleaning.
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
Who turned America's military against Americans? I'm tracking 313+ instances of support/opposition to the use of armed forces in domestic law enforcement in a new dataset: "Public Positions on Militarization of Domestic Law Enforcement in the U.S." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
docs.google.com
Public Positions on Militarization of Domestic Law Enforcement in the U.S.
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Public Positions on Militarization of Domestic Law Enforcement in the U.S. t.co/P5HmsHF1fA
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Just the direct material costs for each additional year of war to Ukraine are about $111.7B or just over half their entire GDP burned per year 🚩$50B (25% of prewar GDP) to wartime defense spending over peace time levels 🚩$61.7B (30.8%) in direct destruction of things/sectors of the economy by Russia
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
This is absolutely nuts: 🚩30% of Ukraine's population is either internally displaced, a refugee outside of the country, or under Russian occupation. 🚩About 14% of the population's homes have been destroyed. Each additional year of war destroys about another 3%.
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
Each additional year of war in Ukraine implies an additional: 7,953 Civilians Directly Killed 12,822 Civilians Directly Injured
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
The bargaining model of war only has a few parameters. I'm often annoyed that the cost of fighting receives less serious measurement than military weapons/strategy. Then I remembered I pay $700 a month for LLMs, so here's the first in a series on Ukraine's costs from fighting.
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
Recently had a debate about two-way fixed effects and how it pretends to magically solve causal inference problems by just changing to a different DV than the one we actually care about. Here's that explained visually. Here's raw annual city temperatures:
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
hahahahahaha
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Posit @posit.co · 03/03/2025
We are delighted to announce Reticulate 1.41! You can now simply declare your dependencies using `py_require()`, and Reticulate will handle the rest. This seamless experience is powered by uv, an extremely fast #Python package manager written in Rust. Learn more: posit.co/blog/reticul... #RStats
The reticulate hex plus the uv logo
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Data Rescue Project #DataRescue @datarescueproject.org · 06/02/2025
Big Shout Out to Andrew Heiss at Georgia State: an API for grabbing the USAID data: foreignassistance-data.andrewheiss.com USAID greenbook: foreignassistance.andrewheiss.com/greenbook.html
foreignassistance-data.andrewheiss.com
Datasette: 2025-02-03_foreign-assistance
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
There's been some confusion about whether the new DeepSeek-R1 open source model includes a political propaganda/censorship layer baked in. It does. Here's what it does in its own words and the experiments to reproduce.
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Robert (Bob) Kubinec @rmkubinec.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
Yes, I talk about this issue in my blog post: www.robertkubinec.com/post/fixed_e... Stata has similar behavior. It's a very big deal with two-way FEs.
robertkubinec.com
What Panel Data Is Really All About – Robert Kubinec
In this post I talk about my recent publication with Jonathan Kropko about panel data. We de-mistify panel data, expose some serious weaknesses in common models like two-way fixed effects (2-way FE), ...
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Nate Breznau @breznaunate.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Only 6% of papers using SOEP data share their reproduction workflows. We need #openscience now @janmarcus.de onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Replication code availability over time and across fields: Evidence from the German Socio‐Economic Panel
Providing replication code is an inexpensive way to facilitate reproducibility. However, little is known about the extent of replication code provision. Therefore, we examine the availability of repl....
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Alexander Lex @alex-lex.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
UpSet won the #ieeevis InfoVis 10-year test of time award 🎉. Thanks to @ngehlenborg.bsky.social @henstr.bsky.social Romain Vuillemot, and Hanspeter Pfister for being an awesome team to work with on this. I wrote up my reflections on what made UpSet successful: vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2024/10...
vdl.sci.utah.edu
Reflections on UpSet
This blog post was triggered by UpSet winning the 10-year Test of Time Award at IEEE VIS. In this post, I reflect on how UpSet came about, and what made it successful.
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Nils Weidmann @nilsweidmann.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
And make sure to check out our demo application: huggingface.co/spaces/ciass...
huggingface.co
Protest Segments - a Hugging Face Space by ciass
Discover amazing ML apps made by the community
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Nils Weidmann @nilsweidmann.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Finally out in @polanalysis.bsky.social (w/ @stefan-scholz.bsky.social, @zacharyst.bsky.social, @keremoglu.bsky.social and Bastian Goldlücke): "Improving Computer Vision Interpretability: Transparent Two-Level Classification for Complex Scenes" Available #OpenAccess at doi.org/10.1017/pan....
doi.org
Improving Computer Vision Interpretability: Transparent Two-Level Classification for Complex Scenes | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core
Improving Computer Vision Interpretability: Transparent Two-Level Classification for Complex Scenes
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 06/12/2024
Ah, I found what I was looking for! From Imai et al.'s "Unpacking the Black Box of Causality" (2011). This is coming from the angle of two experiments in which you identify A -> B and B -> C and why you cannot infer the average causal mediation effect from that.
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 15/09/2023
🧵 I'll talk up a recent paper I loved working on. We show why meaningful replications need to be based on deeper theoretical understanding & stronger empirical foundations. It's a theory paper like our other metascientific work. 🧪 #metasci #philsci #stats royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of the article that says:

Royal Society Open Science
The logical structure of experiments lays the foundation for a theory of reproducibility
Erkan O. Buzbas, Berna Devezer and Bert Baumgaertner
Published:15 March 2023Abstract
The scientific reform movement has proposed openness as a potential remedy to the putative reproducibility or replication crisis. However, the conceptual relationship among openness, replication experiments and results reproducibility has been obscure. We analyse the logical structure of experiments, define the mathematical notion of idealized experiment and use this notion to advance a theory of reproducibility. Idealized experiments clearly delineate the concepts of replication and results reproducibility, and capture key differences with precision, allowing us to study the relationship among them. We show how results reproducibility varies as a function of the elements of an idealized experiment, the true data-generating mechanism, and the closeness of the replication experiment to an original experiment. We clarify how openness of experiments is related to designing informative replication experiments and to obtaining reproducible results. With formal backing and ...
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 05/12/2024
New post on the 100% Christmas Interval -- after almost 8 years, it's time that we finally talk about CIs. www.the100.ci/2024/12/05/w...
the100.ci
Why you are not allowed to say that your 95% confidence interval contains the true parameter with a probability of 95%
A shibboleth is a custom, such as a choice of phrasing, that distinguishes one group of people from another. The term goes back to the Hebrew Bible, in which the inhabitants of Gilead identify members...
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Robert Aboukhalil @robert.bio · 04/12/2024
“We don’t value software, data, and methods in the same way we value papers, even though those resources empower millions of scientists” 💯 www.statnews.com/sponsor/2024...
statnews.com
New report highlights the scientific impact of open source software
Two of the scientists who won this year’s Nobel Prize for cracking the code of proteins’ intricate structures relied, in part, on a series of computing
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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Looking forward to reading this! "The Landscape of Causal Discovery Data: Grounding Causal Discovery in Real-World Applications" arxiv.org/abs/2412.01953 #stats #mlsky #blueskai 📈📉
     Causal discovery aims to automatically uncover causal relationships from data, a capability with significant potential across many scientific disciplines. However, its real-world applications remain limited. Current methods often rely on unrealistic assumptions and are evaluated only on simple synthetic toy datasets, often with inadequate evaluation metrics. In this paper, we substantiate these claims by performing a systematic review of the recent causal discovery literature. We present applications in biology, neuroscience, and Earth sciences - fields where causal discovery holds promise for addressing key challenges. We highlight available simulated and real-world datasets from these domains and discuss common assumption violations that have spurred the development of new methods. Our goal is to encourage the community to adopt better evaluation practices by utilizing realistic datasets and more adequate metrics.
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Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
On OOD: arxiv.org/abs/2211.16158 and I especially love this one: openreview.net/pdf?id=XCS_z... For more optimistic reads on uncertainty, most stuff by Ian Osband on uncertainty for (Deep) RL scholar.google.ca/citations?us...
arxiv.org
Out-Of-Distribution Detection Is Not All You Need
The usage of deep neural networks in safety-critical systems is limited by our ability to guarantee their correct behavior. Runtime monitors are components aiming to identify unsafe predictions and di...
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Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
arxiv.org/pdf/2409.02628 For problems with ensemble methods proceedings.mlr.press/v162/lotfi22... For issues with ML metrics (and, for drama, this reply iclr-blogposts.github.io/2024/blog/cl...) This lab has a collection of works www.vanderschaar-lab.com/uncertainty-... (pretty biased of course)
arxiv.org
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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Our JSS article is out! And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned. www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Lab Experiment for Kids #3 Steel Wool and 9v Battery Ok seriously, I need more experiment suggestions.
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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Have you seen this? www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1... (not proximal, but looks cool nonetheless)
taylorfrancis.com
Bayesian Nonparametrics for Causal Inference and Missing Data | Michae
Bayesian Nonparametrics for Causal Inference and Missing Data provides an overview of flexible Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) methods for modeling joint or
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Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Looks like this might be worth a careful read: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
From LATE to ATE: A Bayesian approach
We develop a Bayesian model that produces a posterior distribution of the marginal treatment effect (MTE) function. The method provides researchers wi…
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Jennifer Tackett @jnfrltackett.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Preregistration is a floor, not a ceiling: Use it to specify initial analyses with the understanding that you can and should go further when you see unexpected patterns in the data. Gelman & Brown journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
“…we systematically examined articles in four top psychology journals (N = 956) and found that 21% included open-ended data coded by humans. However, only about one-third of those articles reported sufficient details to replicate or evaluate the validity of the coding process”
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Step 1: I show you a cheap-ish lab experiment for kids. Step 2: You give me ideas for what we should try next.
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Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
And another post on causal inference and social media and its effect on mental health. DAGs make a prominent appearance. As always, feedback welcome (especially if you think I am wrong). sjwild.github.io/blog/2024/11...
sjwild.github.io
Causal inference, social media, and mental health, part 3
Stephen Wild’s personal blog about statistics, data science, and the like.
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
I am running my statistical rethinking course again starting in January. But this time just for Leipzig locals, so I can work with a smaller group this year and track individual progress better. I think that will help me tune the material, espeically homework, better. Materials still open however.
github.com
GitHub - rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2025
Contribute to rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2025 development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Simon Willison @simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy · 29/11/2024
Amazing demo by Vaibhav Srivastav of structured data extraction running on an LLM that executes entirely in the browser (Chrome only for the moment since it uses WebGPU). simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/29/struc…
simonwillison.net
Structured Generation w/ SmolLM2 running in browser & WebGPU
Extraordinary demo by Vaibhav Srivastav. Here's Hugging Face's [SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct](https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct) running directly in a web browser (using WebGPU, so requires Chrome [for the moment](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status)) demonstrating structured text extraction, converting a text …
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Rex "garbage in" Douglass @rexdouglass.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Pro Tip: Uninformative priors don't look anything like you expect in the sample space of the actual outcome. Don't just pick priors in the blind, simulate the full null model with just priors, and verify it makes predictions like you expected in your head.
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Sohee Yang @soheeyang.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
🚨 New Paper 🚨 Can LLMs perform latent multi-hop reasoning without exploiting shortcuts? We find the answer is yes – they can recall and compose facts not seen together in training or guessing the answer, but success greatly depends on the type of the bridge entity (80% for country, 6% for year)! 1/N
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klaudia jaźwińska @klaudia.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
I have a new piece out with @aisvarya17.bsky.social in @columjournreview.bsky.social in which we test how OpenAI's new search feature surfaces and attributes news content. Our findings were not promising for news publishers (1/9) www.cjr.org/tow_center/h...
cjr.org
How ChatGPT (Mis)represents Publisher Content
ChatGPT search — which is positioned as a competitor to search engines like Google and Bing — launched with a press release from OpenAI touting claims that the company had “collaborated extensively wi...
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eLife @elife.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
2/ To kick off the thread, here are 22 persuasive communication devices that you should watch out for when writing or reading a research article. buff.ly/3Z9Mb5C
buff.ly
Point of View: Beware ‘persuasive communication devices’ when writing and reading scientific articles
Authors should be open about the limitations of their work and not overstate its importance.
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
How does Approximate Bayesian Computation *ABC) work? @rabaath.bsky.social has a classic nice simple intro the ABC using the problem of infering the number of socks in a sample of laundry. There's a movie and a page with all the code. www.sumsar.net/blog/2015/07...
sumsar.net
Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman: The Movie
This is a screencast of my UseR! 2015 presentation: Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman. Based on the original blog post it is a quick’n’dirty …
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