Amelia McNamara

Meredith Broussard kicking off the Women in AI and Data Science conference at the U of M with a talk called Dangerously Biased AI: Using Empathy to Anticipate AI Risks @merbroussard.bsky.social sites.google.com/umn.edu/2026...

Okay this one mentions statistics more implicitly, but I think it counts. John Grant's GMF (this is NOT the radio edit). "And don't forget you could be laughing 65% more of the time You could be laughing 63% more of the time You could be laughing 25% more of the time" youtu.be/ZxJKXUTazJo?...

Obviously no way to know who is actually calling you on the phone but I think I was just in a Siena poll for the first time in my life. Excited to tell my intro stats course about this next class.

Been trying to get "Polls Are Possibility, But Polls Don't Vote" to catch on as a variation. People SHOULD be encouraged by polls in their favour; they should be encouraged and then they should DOUBLE DOWN on the work. We need to learn to use seeming good news as Motivation rather than assurance.

> Back then, making bivariate maps meant blending color schemes in graphics programs, hand-tuning where both variables run high, stitching two classifications together into a single attribute your software could understand. A lot has changed since then. Bivariate maps, 11 years on! #dataviz

Absolutely love this Nightingale article about tiny charts on postage stamps! nightingaledvs.com/tiny-charts/...

i’m convinced “slowing it down” is because they’ve made promises of ai that are notably not coming to fruition and they want to pretend that’s because they’re being careful instead of admitting they got WAY over their skis

If we want to regulate AI, why not start with a simple ban on LLMs using "I"? Easy to build, easy to verify and deflates a hype while still allowing people to use chatbots (so no one can claim we are limiting anything) My latest for @volkskrant.nl in English! www.felienne.nl/2026-10-08/#...

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/o...

ICE has been found to maintain a secret "Agitator Log" database that records interactions with protesters and legal observers in Minneapolis, contradicting agency denials and raising concerns about First Amendment violations.

Software engineering could and should be done with the same care as any other type of engineering. This is a post in honor of Margaret Hamilton (and also a subtweet of all vibe-coders everywhere).

Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, has died.

🚨 New CRAN Task View: Package Development and Maintenance #rstats #cran By Lluís Revilla and Heather Turner @heathrturnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy URL: cran.r-project.org/view=Package...

Introducing Instructure's Surveillance Top 10, featuring Proctorio, Honorlock, YuJa, Turnitin, Piazza, McGraw Hill, Microsoft, Google, Perusall, and Pearson. This is a parody post.

germainekoh.com/works/fair-w...

This is the week in my intro data science course where students learn that runif() is said r-unif not run-if, & they are like "duh" but no one had ever said it out loud before so they didn't know. Def read/watch more about this from @amelia.mn & of course @felienne.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy, links⬇️

WOW this is a big story, don't know how I missed it til now. Not that MTurk was perfect (it was not!) but what are people going to do to get their training data now? Are we thinking we're done training models?! And as this article makes clear, many many workers are going to be affected.

Learn more and register here! sites.google.com/umn.edu/2026... Women in AI and Data Science, October 26.

Several people at work and in my personal life are sick right now. There's a COVID surge. Repeat infections have cumulative impact. Great time to mask up again if you stopped.

This is going to be so good! Wish I was able to be there in person.

I have many complaints about software, but I have to give Zoom kudos for prompting you to update as you are closing the program, not when you are opening it. Other tools should follow suit!

This feels at least adjacent to the sort of nerds I know, so I'll ask-- is anyone else at Vintage Computer Fest Midwest this weekend? Mostly here because my spouse is a hardware nerd, but tagged along as it sounded interesting.

Love 2 find a post where I make reference to "future me" wanting a piece of information, which I then need to reference two years in the future. forum.posit.co/t/tips-for-u...

Fifteen years ago I wrote about my work on the algorithm that helped to place the names on the 9/11 memorial. "In the days and months that I worked on the arrangement algorithm and the placement tool, I found myself frequently speaking these names out loud." blprnt.medium.com/all-the-name...

I do actually wish crop art had a People’s Choice voting box like Christmas trees, wreaths, and some other art things. Related: did you know you can send messages to crop artists? Tell them good job, offer to buy their piece, etc. just talk to the person at the desk outside the room!

Crop art goes hard this year, as we’ve all expected. I did my part with these five contributions. #cropart #seedart #mnstatefair #art

I'm so excited to learn that @merbroussard.bsky.social will be keynoting the Women in AI and Data Science conference this October in Minneapolis! www.linkedin.com/pulse/making... I love that they always seem to get someone AI-critical to kick things off.

I love Minneapolis

but seriously this fast food situation is getting out of control

For years, open source communities relied on visible friction: people got stuck, asked questions in public, and became part of a community. AI is changing that. What happens when newcomers are no longer visible—and neither side knows the other is there? blog.stdlib.io/ai-and-the-i...

Sharing again because @ghoulpus.bsky.social story is just that good. Ya gotta read it!

Pretty sure this is a local graffiti artist's tag, but it *is* kind of calling out for an #rstats package.

A year or so ago this street art would have been nearly void of profound meaning. In 2026 Minneapolis? Intensely poignant and political. We had whistles. They had guns. Minneapolis.

My beloved 1986 Volvo 240, which turned 40 this year (yes, I had a party), is a manual. It may just outlive me.

I am losing my mind. Chat isn’t a search engine. this isn’t normal. framing it as normative is slimy. Tone, vibes all bad.

ICE agents shouldn’t be executing people on the street even if they ARE the target of the warrant

@minedogucu.com is something up with www.learnr4free.com?

A really nice data visualization and story-telling in the scrolling of this Pudding article on women's clothing sizes. They are a mess but this shows you in which ways they are messed up: pudding.cool/2026/02/wome...

I listened to the press conference so you don’t have to: - 15 defendants, all from the Twin Cities. 13 currently in custody - Direct Action MN mentioned - quotes and video from people fedposting on Instagram - lots of very obvious lies, local reporters were skeptical and they cut the Q&A off