iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A student asked me how to change the default colors of the text in script files in RStudio and I realized I never did this before. There are a ton of different themes under Tools -> General Options -> Appearance They were so pumped about being able to customize their themes

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I backed up an author in a journal review as reviewer 1 by calling out a bad reccomendation by the other reviewer who was saying it was out of scope and other weak criticisms. As a reward for my good karma, I was able to log into the journal website 1st try without resetting my password, incredibly

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Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Guy who thinks linear regression is progressive because the outcome is on the left

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Has anyone out there tried using visual illusions as CAPTCHA to fool AI models? Stuff that would look incorrect to biological visual perception, but not to computers? You'd have to use illusions not already annotated with text explaining what they are supposed to see, but in theory maybe possible?

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Yet another example of "Huh, these results don't look at all like what I expected. I wonder what ... ah yes, my code is rubbish."

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Joshua Raclaw @joshuaraclaw.com · 18/09/2026

Still seeing faculty talk about how they had Chat write a thing and then had students critique what was good or bad about it as if this is a pedagogical innovation for the ages

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

One of my least favorite comments when getting a journal review back is some variation: "I looked at your literature review, and only X references have publication dates in the past 5 years. Update the literature review to include more recent references" Just bean counting by date is annoying

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I have encountered a truly bizarre coding scheme for a survey. People are asked two 6pt scale items for each of 9 stems (concern & expectancy). The total score is calculated by *multiplying* these two together, then averaging those 9 multiplied terms together www.researchgate.net/publication/...

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Is there any way to run Rstudio on an old windows 10 machine (aside from Posit cloud)? I'm teaching a student who has a very old 2014 laptop and looking for a workaround that is free. #R #stats #posit

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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

For $22 million, I could have put together a 6-person heist crew, abducted the competitor, and hit them in the kneecap with a tire iron until they told me their methods. Same effect, but it would have also gainfully employed 6 people, not to mention the benefits to the tire iron manufacturers.

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Grant @syncingsinking.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Now that Bluesky seems to have automatic thread numbering, a short thread on the probability of winning the Monty Hall problem if you stick.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Truly perfect naming of a cafe for Halifax Located conveniently on the Halifax pier Fires no guns (except for the distant noon cannon)

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Guess who put his whole syllabus and course website on a Monday/Wednesday schedule, when I am (in fact) on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule. Scrambling to change every due date before my first class today 🙃

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

New plan: all LLMs shut down for 24 hours twice each month to allow teachers to give at-home assignments.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Gloria Steinem passed away today which is sad, but glad she lived a long life. Here's a cool, well-written psychobiography published on her a few years ago that I liked. She had a pretty interesting life! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is a wonderful philosophy and applies well to peer review requests.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The Quantitative Methods Section of the CPA has awarded our 2025 "Best Research Paper" in the area of quantitative psychology for a Canadian research team to Martinez Gutierrez et al.'s (2025) paper "Multiplicity control in psychological research" #StatsSky doi.org/10.1037/cap0... 1/2

doi.org

APA PsycNet

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

A couple of fun finds at a local estate sale, Fisher's Design of Experiments and a 1928 copy of John Wataon's Ways of Behaviorism for $2 each!

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

without downloading any new pics, what’s it like being in a relationship with you?

Final fantasy 4 scene: part from your past, conquer the darkness within!

Simpsons scene, guy with paddle: Conquering the Darkness within? That's a Paladin

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Daniel Wilson @helsig.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

A triangle following the contours of a circular plot. #MathArt

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Isaiah Bishop @isaiahbishop.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

i love federalism

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The other day my cat stepped on my mouse/keyboard while I had an open google sheet and somehow clicked Gemini's "analyze this" button (which can't be disabled) that in turn drastically changed the whole spreadsheet. I wonder how long before a cat accidentally makes an AI go seriously off the rails

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Hey #stats nerds, a confidence interval question. Say you have one person with 60 repeated measurements; you want an estimate of just that person's "true" score. Could you calculate a confidence interval using traditional frequentist formulas for 60 different people and have it be meaningful?

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Georgia Tomova @georgiatomova.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

every latent class analysis ever

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I have found a great new #stats teaching hack to find new open datasets for teaching. I've been going to the Collabra: Psychology journal website, and typing in an analysis type (e.g., logistic regression) into the search bar. Both quick and high-quality data! online.ucpress.edu/collabra

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

People keep telling me that lectures need to be like short 5min bursts because kids these days have no attention span. If so, someone please explain hbomerguy The long-form lecture isn't dead, lots of people still crave a passionate deep-dive into a topic.

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Kayleigh Donaldson @ceilidhann.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan)

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I have an important announcement. You know the giant pile of miscellaneous wires you keep in a box indefinitely, right? Well, I just used one of them (my router's wireless seems to have busted so using an Ethernet cable). It's not junk, I am now forever vindicated for keeping all those wires.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

I watched this for an embarrassingly long time rooting for the little cube to make it without looking at the timer

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Some thoughts on AI and teaching, looking for input: Asynchronous online courses remain valuable, especially for non-traditional students. However, it is no longer possible to determine if assessment (i.e., grades) is valid for students without synchronous or in-person proctored assessment 1/3

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POTUS @sentientpotato.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

$Two panel comic. Panel 1: Omni Man and Invincible are floating in the sky. Two fighter jets are flying nearby. One is labeled "double" and the other is labeled "float". Omni Man is labeled "Mathematicians". Panel 2: Omni Man / Mathematicians turn to Invincible and say "Look what they need to mimic a fraction"$

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I was once invited as a keynote speaker to British North America Philatelic Society (stamp collecting) despite never collecting a stamp in my life. It was a talk on the psychology of collecting. They mailed me cool stamp-shaped coasters and a thank you letter with vintage stamps on the envelope

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Thomas Lumley @tslumley.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Bayesians, eh

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David Poe @culthero12.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

David Bessis had a great article about how AI is affecting Math. davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-o...

davidbessis.substack.com

The fall of the theorem economy

How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Truly unhinged idea that surely is just based in trying to humiliate people, but at least it has decent psychometrics compared to every mandatory training course I have ever been made to take by my employer.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I have to work now But Rstudio updates always must update

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

The AI doom is strong in university teaching. Just resist. Fight. Keep trying new shit and sometimes something will stick, you'll reach some minority of students. I don't care if I am on the losing side of the AI war on education, I'll get a few students to learn something despite everything.

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James Felton @jimmfelton.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I find the story of Hegelochus unreasonably funny. Imagine dying and the only trace of you millennia later is the time you accidentally said you saw a weasel in a tragic play in front of a packed audience, because people mocked you about it for centuries. (Thread for ease)

iflscience.com

Hegelochus: The Ancient Greek Actor We Only Know About Because He Really, Really Fluffed Up His Line

Around 400 BCE, Hegelochus really messed up his line. We only know about the actor because he was mocked about it for centuries.

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Ersatz Doctor @ersatzdoctor.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

1. You can run Doom on any computer. 2. You can’t run Doom on the brain. C. The brain isn’t a computer.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I know I have complained that researchers don't have a research question in the past, but this is still not really a viable research question: "Are any of these 100 variables associated with Y?"

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coolbutuseless @coolbutuseless.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Introducing {rdoom} - Play Doom in #RStats (in time for #UseR2026 !) github.com/coolbutusele... This is a demonstration that {tigerfb} + {nara} can do realtime interactivity in R! Includes: keyboard & mouse control, audio, cheat modes!

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

The shape of this distribution is kind of fascinating, negative skewness with a large zero inflation but also way fewer 10's than expected. I've always been curious about how the data generation process differs for all those excess zeroes seen often in political charged polling.

A bar plot of "on a scale of 0 to 10 how united is Canada today?" with a shape as described in the post.

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I juat read Ursula Le Guin's book Lathe of Heaven and ... wow, its incredible and prescient in the face of modern technocracy. This quote will live in my head rent free forever: "The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."

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Adam Konig | Play Mischief on steam! 🐀 @konig.games · 01/07/2026

My biggest pet peeve is that there's a ton of scam websites that are "Free QR Code Generator"s then the QR code stops working after a few days and then redirects you to ask you to PAY to re-activate it. I made a page on website for making ACTUALLY FREE QR Codes. Enjoy. konig.games/QRCodes/ #QRCodes

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Sean Mackinnon @seanpmackinnon.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I wish I were more clever, but seeing this machine and the golden goose presentation in the same day feels like I am on the cusp of some economic revelation. If only some economist could explain it to me in such profound clarity as the SoftBank presentation.

A claw machine in an arcade filled with golden eggs.

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