iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Stuart Chambers @projectourworld.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Mat Bell’s eye-catching photograph is one of the shortlisted entries for the Australian Geographic nature photographer of the year 2026 . An Adélie penguin to propel itself from the water to the safety of an iceberg. Photograph: Mat Bell/Australian Geographic

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

"a ‚significant' p-value between 0.01 and 0.05 should be interpreted with the expectation that the effect is exaggerated by more than 50% (median 1.56) and that an exact replication has about a one-in-three chance of also being significant." evidenceinthewild.com/p-value-look...

evidenceinthewild.com

The P-Value Got a Lecture. It Needed a Lookup Table.

Ten years after the ASA told us to stop misusing p-values, we're still arguing about thresholds. Erik van Zwet and colleagues did something different: they asked 23,000 clinical trials what a p-value ...

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Ich suche eine neue KollegIn als Co-RedaktorIn der Fachzeitschrift "Ornithologischer Beobachter". Es handelt sich um eine unbefristete 40%-Stelle an der Schweizerischen Vogelwarte Sempach. Bitte bewerben oder weiterleiten! www.ala-schweiz.ch

ala-schweiz.ch

Home – Ala - Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Vogelkunde und Vogelschutz

Ala Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Vogelkunde und Vogelschutz, Ornithologischer Beobachter

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

ala-schweiz.ch

Home – Ala - Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Vogelkunde und Vogelschutz

Ala Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Vogelkunde und Vogelschutz, Ornithologischer Beobachter

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Colin Beale @cmbeale.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Are you looking for a Post-doc related to biodiversity? We might have just the role for you! @anthropocenebio.bsky.social are curently advertising 10 (yes!) post-docs covering natural & social science of biodivesity. Come work with us & share with anyone appropriate! sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/l...

sites.google.com

LCAB Postdoctoral recruitment

The Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity (LCAB) is a major research centre funded by the Leverhulme Trust to increase knowledge of how the relationship between humanity and the natural worl...

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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

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Rachel Mitchell @funeco.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Ecologists! I have received four sets of paper reviews back in the last month, and two had obviously AI generated reviews: @plos.org and @journalofecology.bsky.social. We also have reviews from @journalofecology.bsky.social that I strongly suspect were AI. Our peers are intellectually lazy.

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WWF UK @wwf.org.uk · 25/03/2026

A perfectly timed capture wins @nhm-london.bsky.social #WPOTY Nuveen People’s Choice Award. 📸 🎉 Huge congratulations to photographer Josef Stefan on this incredible capture of an Iberian lynx playing with its prey.

A young Iberian lynx playfully throwing a rodent into the air in a bright sunny scene. Its arm out wide and mouth open in an expressive stance. The foreground shows a dirt path which the Iberian lynx stands on, green foliage is blurred in the background.

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Power is not the ‘probability of obtaining a statistically significant result.’ It is this probability only if the true effect is equal to the alternative hypothesis used for power calculation and if all model assumptions are correct. Giving less power to statistical power doi.org/10.1177/0023...

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Çağlar Akçay @caglarakcay.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

New paper led by @alperyelimlies.bsky.social (1st chapter of his thesis!) in Animal Behaviour: Alper discovered that female Galapagos yellow warblers commonly sing solo songs and duets with their mates but mostly during the non-breeding season. doi.org/10.1016/j.an... #ornithology

a female and a male Galápagos yellow warbler

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Esme Ashe-Jepson @esme-ashe.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Today we set up two insect monitoring stations in the glorious sunshine as part of a Masters thesis project. We will be comparing this with traditional monitoring to improve our understanding of the role of AI to supplement and enhance insect monitoring 🐝🪰🦋💚 @globalchangeeco.bsky.social

Three people with a Bee Friendly Insector remote sensing insect monitoring system in a renaturated quarry.

Two people setting up a Bee Friendly Insector remote sensing insect monitoring system in a renaturated quarry.

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Jani Vastamäki @janivast.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

"The number of birds captured in mist nets plummeted by 40% between 2001 and 2014. Likewise, bird numbers fell by 50% during systematic surveys of birds by sight and sound. The most severe declines occurred among species that feed on insects."

science.org

Birds are vanishing from tropical forests. Is another ‘silent spring’ coming?

As mysterious bird declines crop up in the Amazon and beyond, scientists suspect climate change may be to blame

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

We promote relaxing long-held views of what a statistical interval does, or should, represent and see interpreting confidence or credible intervals as compatibility intervals as a step in this direction. Giving less power to statistical power doi.org/10.1177/0023...

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

041

Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

A successful study should result in useful information about how compatible the data (and background assumptions) are with values large (or small) enough to be deemed practically important. Giving less power to statistical power doi.org/10.1177/0023...

doi.org

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪  You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do! I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail"
Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

ERROR RATES ARE HYPOTHETICAL!! "They seem to bring an air of objectivity and comfort to an otherwise challenging and messy research process; but their roots inhabit the same soil as statistical hypothesis tests that have been criticized for decades"

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Bruce Springsteen @brucespringsteen.net · 28/01/2026

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free

youtu.be

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Philip Amies @philipamies.eurosky.social · 08/07/2025

Good overview of the history, Gosset mentioned, he worked at Guiness and had to publish as Student, hence Student t-test, he was interested in the problems associated with small sample sizes. peerj.com/articles/3544/

peerj.com

The earth is flat (p > 0.05): significance thresholds and the crisis of unreplicable research

The widespread use of ‘statistical significance’ as a license for making a claim of a scientific finding leads to considerable distortion of the scientific process (according to the American Statistic...

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Informationsdienst Wissenschaft - idw @idw-online.de · 13/01/2026

Nightingales are masters of imitation! New research shows: During territorial contests, a male matches a rival’s song in real time by tracking and imitating both, pitch and syllable duration. This shows a remarkable precision in hearing and v... weiterlesen

Nightingales are known for their remarkable vocal flexibility. During their night-time singing duels, they adjust both the pitch and timing of their songs to match those of their rivals. - Copyright © MPI for Biological Intelligence / Susanne Seltmann

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Redefine soil health: Nature conservation needs soil degradation. @jaliedtke.bsky.social has published her first preprint – we are looking forward to comments and discussions! dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

dx.doi.org

Redefine soil health: Nature conservation needs soil degradation

Applied conservation management in terrestrial nature reserves mainly focuses on aboveground species such as plants, insects, or birds. The belowground ecosyste

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Midwest Peoples Republic @ericleitzen.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

I like to think that if the military r&d had instead gone into solar we'd be where we are now by like 1992

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Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Energy transitions can happen faster than we think: In 2000 almost 90% of Denmark's electricity was from fossil fuels. In 2024 less than 10% of Danish electricity was from fossil fuels.

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Reposted by Valentin Amrhein

Winston Lin @linstonwin.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

I like this from @vamrhein.bsky.social et al. I assigned it to my class last semester and tried to explain that p-values measure how compatible (vs. surprising) the data are with the null, given our assumptions. But yeah, tests & CIs are hard to understand! www.blakemcshane.com/Papers/natur...

from Amrhein, Greenland, & McShane ("Retire statistical significance," Nature, 2019)

"For example, the authors above could have written: ‘Like a previous study, our results suggest a 20% increase in risk of new-onset atrial fibrillation in patients given the anti-inflammatory drugs. Nonetheless, a risk difference ranging from a 3% decrease, a small negative association, to a 48% increase, a substantial positive association, is also reasonably compatible with our data, given our assumptions.’ "

from Amrhein, Greenland, & McShane ("Retire statistical significance," Nature, 2019)

"Whatever the statistics show, it is fine to suggest reasons for your results, but discuss a range of potential explanations, not just favoured ones. Inferences should be scientific, and that goes far beyond the merely statistical. Factors such as background evidence, study design, data quality and understanding of underlying mechanisms are often more important than statistical measures such as P values or intervals."

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Martin A. Nuñez @martin-nunez.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

"This is the book we need to give every single new PhD student in our labs." I love reading comments on the book Thanks!!

book cover of a pocket guide to scientific writing and publishing

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Violinist.com @violincommunity.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

How do you cope, when your bow arm starts shaking? How do you prevent that from happening in the first place? It's a fascinating and in-depth read about a topic that affects nearly every violinist at some point. www.violinist.com/blog/Xaver/2...

violinist.com

What I've learned about (my) shaky bow

Has it ever happened to you that you could hardly control your bow in a concert or some other challenging situation? That you tried to fight bow-trembling by gripping the bow harder or even stopping t...

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Sadie J. Ryan (she/her) @sjryan3.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Great to see our new paper "Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change" out in print today in @natclimate.nature.com, which builds on our landscaping project on climate-health attribution a couple of years ago, funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social

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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 06/09/2025

For Trump and his allies, renewable energy is akin to the new Cracker Barrel logo: something they oppose largely because it’s different and seems to be forced upon them. But unlike the logo, there’s no going back on wind and solar. www.pbump.net/o/why-trump-...

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World Conferences on Research Integrity @wcrifoundation.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Could AI slow science? Confronting the production-progress paradox #AI #GenAI #ChatGPT #Claude #Science #WCRI2026 #WCRI www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-s...

aisnakeoil.com

Could AI slow science?

Confronting the production-progress paradox

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Scientific research is broken. This has been going on for decades, and the situation is not improving. It's getting worse." youtu.be/9yPy3DeMUyI?...

youtu.be

Scientific research has big problems, and it's getting worse

YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder

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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Wow. Research findings with p-values marginally less than 0.05 attract 60 to 110% higher Altmetric scores than those with p-values marginally above 0.05. p-hacking means more popular attention! p-hacking FTW!

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British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) @bou.org.uk · 25/07/2025

EARLY VIEW in IBIS Breeding habitat preferences and niche partitioning of insectivorous songbirds in Alpine grasslands | onlinelibrary.wiley.... Yann Rime, Pius Korner, Barbara Helm, Valentin Amrhein, Christoph M. Meier | #ornithology 🪶

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Journal of Cell Biology @jcb.org · 23/07/2025

In a new Perspective article, Josh Morgan discusses how progress in cell biology is hindered by significance testing and the need for a shift to effect size estimation. rupress.org/jcb/article/... #Technology #Reproducibility #CellCycle #CellDivision #Statistics

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Martin Stendel @martinstendel.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Extreme Greenland melting event right now: thawing over 80% of the surface. Seen before only once in the record melt summer 2012. See more at @polarportal.bsky.social!

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American Statistical Association History of Statistics @hos-asa.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

Time for your yearly reminder that “We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons”. #OTD 1948 Douglas Altman b (d 3 June 2018) “One of the most influential medical statisticians of the past 50 years” he led reforms in medical research reliability & reporting. 1/3

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Valentin Amrhein @vamrhein.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

"Conventional regression analysis provides inferences about the data generator, not the assumed target population" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Some Ways to Make Regression Modeling More Helpful Than Misleading

Click on the article title to read more.

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Christie Aschwanden @cragcrest.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

"Bak-Coleman ‬and others say the reformers should have seen that their claims and concerns could be weaponized by antiscience movements, and done more to prevent that." I often write about sci reform & I'm genuinely curious, how do you "prevent that"? www.science.org/content/arti...

science.org

Science’s reform movement should have seen Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ coming, critics say

Efforts to improve the rigor of research may have unwittingly handed the administration a way to attack science

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Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Science-wide replication crisis? "The executive order should be a wake-up call for science reformers to communicate more carefully."

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