iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Simine Vazire living up to expectations as editor of Psych Science.

Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Hand wash in the hotel sink with the hotel's hand soap is the way. Keeps the running clothes bearable for a couple of days. :⁠-⁠)

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This stands out to me because I so often see academics give the opposite advice—save that for the next article or next book. It’s true that each piece of writing needs to be focused right to do its own work and not have readers lose their path on the journey you want to take them on. But in all the

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Or no, wait, this was the follow-up to the Nobel work.

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

See article above! Led to a Nobel prize awarded to the Moser couple. It uses clustering as part of the machinery for the topological analysis, so clustering proved useful.b

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Yes, I've never seen a clustering analysis used well in an area I understand! 😂

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

And clustering is only the 0-dimensional version of higher-dimensional topological data analysis. I think the canonical example that *that* is useful is to understand the firing rate of the neurons responsible for spatial sense in rats. These topological algorithms use clustering!

nature.com

Toroidal topology of population activity in grid cells - Nature

Simultaneous recordings from hundreds of grid cells in rats, combined with topological data analysis, show that network activity in grid cells resides on a toroidal manifold that is invariant across e...

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Cluster analysis is misused badly, but surely the point of finding clusters is sensible? Especially in high dimensions: If we have thousands of variables (genomics, say), points can form clusters without us knowing from any plot.

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Marc Veldhoen @marcveld.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Switzerland's Federal Government is Replacing Microsoft on 3,000 Computers This is the pilot phase, with 3,000 workstations moving away from Microsoft 365. The federal administration has over 54,000 computers. itsfoss.com/news/swi... 1/2

itsfoss.com

Switzerland's Federal Government is Replacing Microsoft on 3,000 Computers

This is the pilot phase, with 3,000 workstations moving away from Microsoft 365. The federal administration has over 54,000 computers.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 17/08/2026

This data centre features a 9.2 gigawatt fossil fuel power station Annually it'll pump out around 30 MTCO2-e. Same as - 8 coal plants - 9.2 million cars - Destroying 20 million hectares of forest - Half a percent of America's total national emissions drawdown.org/carbon-in-co...

Grid Investment
High Voltage Transmission
76SkV Transmission Lines
$4.2 Billion
Grid Investment
New Power
10 OW capacity
Including 9.2 OW of
Natural Gas Generation
as part of the U.S.-Japan Strategk: Trade aru3
Investrnent Agrement
$33 Billion
Gas Generation Invesment

a graphic showing the equivaelent emissions for various compariosn

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

To my ears, this is legalese for "you can't blame the ai for writing something unlawful", because you must hold editorial responsibility for your content. Would be interested to hear an explanation of this!

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

It seems more lax? "This obligation shall not apply where the use [is authorised to counter crime] or where the AI-generated content has undergone a process of human review or editorial control and where a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for the publication of the content."

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Excellent! Do you give permission to modify and reuse?

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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.

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Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · 06/08/2026

The title is a little pointed, but I am very serious here. Academics, medical researchers, and other organisations should not collect data on birth sex. It is rarely relevant, and it almost always leads to privacy violations for transgender people. Please share. I would like people to read this one.

blog.djnavarro.net

Separating sex and gender is statistical malpractice – Notes from a data witch

Statisticians and academics in Australia should ignore the terrible advice of most LGBTIQA+ organisations and read this post instead. The 2020 ABS standard is almost never the correct way to collect d...

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt.

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

This is just the counterexample though. The Fable transcript might reveal insight. Like, Fable is not the strongest brute-forcer, so I would guess it did something clever.

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

My current intuitive understanding of distillation which may have been totally falsified in papers I haven't read (and I haven't read much.):

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

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Robert Gieseke (Openclimatedata) @openclimatedata.net · 13/07/2026

If you haven't seen this yet, this chapter might be of interest. bsky.app/profile/njr0...

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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Trump approved disaster aid requests from six red states last week. Two days later, he rejected aid requests from four blue states. Not only is he punishing states who didn’t vote for him, he’s playing politics with people’s lives. Despicable.

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Göktuğ Kayaalp @igoktugk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Let me do a little thread on writing software. I'm no expert, just a curious nerd who's tried many.

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Mickaël CANOUIL, Ph.D. @mickael.canouil.fr · 21/06/2026

Every line, star, and gradient in this chart was drawn in Typst, with Gribouille plotting its own star history. Achieve publication-quality graphics with a single toolchain, no external plotting tools needed. Gribouille 0.4.0 soon. Full source ships with the announcement. #Typst #DataViz

Midnight-sky line chart of Gribouille's cumulative GitHub stars per day from April to June 2026, titled "Gribouille, a Rising Star". A luminous gold step trail rises from zero across a long flat run labelled "Quietly built in private", lifts at a gold dashed marker labelled "Made public 17th of May", then climbs through dashed release markers (v0.1.0 onward) to a final amber spike of 178 stars, annotated "+99 in a day". The y axis counts stars in steps of 25; the x axis spans months.

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Noam Ross @noamross.net · 17/03/2026

I must complete the required security training. To do so, I must use the learning platform. The learning platform requires signing up for the new credential system. There is a training to sign up for the new credential system.

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Voilà: Francis Gagnon @chezvoila.com · 08/06/2026

Colour is so complex and yet it's often the first thing that people want to use to encode information. I see it as a last resort and with limited use. 📊

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Did the reviewers suggest some other method? It seems many people think rowwise deletion is less suspect, since it doesn't "make data up" or something. 🤷‍♂️

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Ben Recht's blog is always worth reading, at least if you like historical essays about science with epistemological implications.

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Sholto David @sholtodavid.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Today I'm posting a new blog about an astonishing scientific own goal. Hundreds of papers have reported using a totally wrong antibody to investigate the tumor suppressor p16. This mistake has happened because scientists have muddled the names of two proteins. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/02/m...

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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

New: Hackers have been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI support chatbot to change the email associated with the account they want to steal. Shockingly easy, terrible flaw associated with offloading support to AI: www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

404media.co

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI.

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em @foremphasis.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

yep

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I've thought along the same lines. I make a package and put it on GitHub, but won't submit to CRAN unless I know I will support it long-term. This makes me wary of all sorts of new academic tools written with LLMs ...

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Nick Brown @steamtraen.eu · 29/05/2026

This is a really interesting thread. As someone who wrote his first computer program in 1975, my view is: If you have some cool code, just give it away as-is, CC-0. Only make a formal package (in whatever ecosystem) if you are prepared to commit to it like a child, including 18 years of support.

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John Sakaluk @johnsakaluk.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

A small 🧵 about frustrations and opportunities w/ open-source research software for the social sciences: Came across a new paper in a top methods journal, explaining/demo'ing a new R package. Sounded v. cool, so was excited to dig in. What I found was largely a mess...

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Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · 22/05/2026

My family always listened to CBS World News Roundup at 6pm in the 1970s. Then I was a reporter for CBS Ithaca affiliate WHCU in 1985-87. Pay and status were below print and TV, but radio was cool, and CBS was the most serious network. Tonight CBS radio ends service (to 700 stations) after 99 years.

Me at the news desk in the WHCU offices, 1985-7.

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Chris Kenny, PhD @chriskenny.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

If you do record linkage in #rstats, I'd love your feedback on irelink: Fast Probabilistic Record Linkage. It is a port of Python's splink package, rewritten with a clean, pipeable R interface. All of the magic happens in a database backend (default is DuckDB) so it's incredibly fast.

Find duplicate records within a single dataset. The bundled fake_20 dataset provides a small example for experimentation. irelink pushes data into a SQL database for efficient pair generation, so you need a DBI connection. Here we use an in-memory DuckDB instance.

An il_spec describes the linkage model: which fields to compare, how to compare them, and which blocking rules to apply. Blocking rules restrict which record pairs are generated. Only pairs that share a surname or first name are scored, keeping computation manageable. il_estimate_u() estimates parameters for non-matching pairs via random sampling, and il_estimate_em() refines the match-weight parameters using Expectation-Maximization.
spec <- il_spec() |>
il_compare(first_name, cl_jaro_winkler(0.9, 0.7)) |>
il_compare(surname, cl_jaro_winkler(0.9, 0.7)) |>
il_compare(dob, cl_exact()) |>
il_block_on(surname) |>
il_block_on(first_name)

model <- il_model(df, spec = spec, con = con)
model <- il_estimate_u(model)
model <- il_estimate_em(model, block_on(surname))

predict() scores all candidate pairs and returns those above the match-probability threshold. The returned match_weight is the evidence-only log2 Bayes factor; total_match_weight adds the prior odds used to compute match_probability. il_cluster() groups the matched pairs into deduplicated entities.

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Good teachers don't just raise the achievement of students they teach. They also shape the teachers of tomorrow. Standard estimates of teacher impact ignore these intergenerational spillovers. Thread on new work led by @danilok.bsky.social. Paper: osf.io/preprints/so... 1/10

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

New collider bias example just dropped

INSTITUTE FOR PERFORMANCE NEUROLOGY: Among elite young chess players, the kids with lower IQs were the stronger players. Chess is considered one of the most "intellectual" games in the world. But IQ didn't predict who was good at it. Swipe to see the research.

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Posit @posit.co · 11/05/2026

Quarto 1.9 brings Typst even closer to LaTeX parity with 📖 Typst Books, ✍️ margins for figures, tables, and citations via the Marginalia package, and 🛜 new typst-gather tool for reliable, offline rendering. Details here: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Uventet stor oppgradering å skifte Launcher. Niagara her.

Skjermdump av Niagara Launcher til Android

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Roar Stovner @roarstovner.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

And Timothy Gowers is one er the public academics who's not full of hyperbole, he is careful and reasoned. Haven't seen his arguments about this, though.

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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Robotics models often struggle outside controlled environments. Ours is built to work in real ones. Today we're launching MolmoAct 2, which can assist with a host of chores & lab tasks, plus the MolmoAct 2-Bimanual YAM dataset—the largest open robotics dataset of its kind. 🧵

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