Rich Morris

I'm a mid-career researcher insofar as my research career is mid

I'm trying to find examples of replicable mistakes by Chat GPT. I seem to recall there was a thread on here about common causal inference mistakes made by AI. Does anyone have a tip? #causalsky

Mental health interventions are now digital but over 50% of the variance in effectiveness for stress is due to differences in design and features. Expert design is needed and throwing everything at the wall is not helpful: www.jmir.org/2025/1/e71253/

We are responding to this call for evidence: ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet... Do you have concrete examples of the added value of #Rstats in the public or private sectors? Include the most important factors (risk, lock-in, security, innovation...) to assess the added value. Thanks!

Does anyone else just surf LinkedIn hoping to find a job using R, Quarto, or Shiny? #rstats

America is great when kids can't play soccer because the secret police may steal their parents

"Either politics throws open the doors, or it won’t be long before they’re kicked in by angry citizens as they smash every last stick of furniture and walk out with the chandelier of power" -this was released two years before Jan 6th open.spotify.com/track/4Sw9Xa...

protip for Gen Z working with older colleagues: if discussing data or studies which occurred entirely after the year 2000, you can refer to them as *21st Century*. It will sound futuristic and sci-fi to anyone who grew up on Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon (i.e., Gen X, Boomers) - very impressive!

We constantly empower people that have no interest in the truth whatsoever and I struggle to understand what can be done about that.

New blog post: You can outsource the grunt work to an LLM, not expertise brodrigues.co/posts/2025-0...

Add this to my reading list: “For “random intercept” models, adding the group-level averages of all included variables as regressors (or a variety of equivalent procedures such as group-wise centering) relieves the bias otherwise induced by this regularization”

Spoke to Jen a few weeks ago because I am also trying to pivot out of academia. Can confirm Jen is a great person to help you focus on what’s important (to anyone else who is in a similar situation). She would be a great asset to any community building enterprise

After two weeks, I'm finally done! In this post, I explain different approaches for solving linear regression in R: directly, using QR, singular value and Cholesky decompositions, and do some benchmarking for comparison with in-built approaches. thomvolker.github.io/blog/2506_re...

A lawsuit in Rockland County, NY, alleges election irregularities in the 2024 Presidential and Senate races. The plaintiffs claim statistical anomalies and uncounted votes. But do these claims hold up? I analyzed the data and I don't think they do: christophertkenny.com/posts/2025-0...

Lord save me! Where do people get the idea the y-axis must always include zero, and every panel in a collection of panels must have the same y-axis scale? These a fine “rules of thumb” but they are not stone commandments handed down by the #dataviz gods!!! #rstats

The quarto-preprint extension v0.16 (github.com/mvuorre/quar...) now enables full-width content in two-column #quartopub #typst documents (and more!; via github.com/christopherk...). Hope this makes Quarto a bit more useful for writing well-typeset reproducible #rstats manuscripts 💙

When your past is questionable—revise it! #CalvinandHobbes #FakeHistory

Bluesky snark at its finest. Just learnt so much from the linked responses. The debate is alive! :-)

Trying to keep an open mind only to end up confirming my prejudices

Just had a terrible experience at BMC Public Health. According to @springernature.com Australian universities can publish in their OA journals for free, so you might *think* an OA journal such as BMC Public Health would be covered... you would be wrong. Over $5000 wrong!

The UCLA stats group do fantastic work explaining things. This tutorial on SEM in R is gold: stats.oarc.ucla.edu/r/seminars/r...

I should really read the fcuking paper before butting in on expert discussion here!

Spent more time exploring {scales} for #ggplot2. I found the `label_dictionary()` function to be useful for relabeling the values of a discrete scale using a lookup table: scales.r-lib.org/reference/la... Here's what I came up with, using some NCAA basketball data from the #rstats {hoopR} package👇

Reporting observational research: www.auajournals.org/doi/full/10.... Some simple guidelines and good recommendations for language in intro, method and discussion.

stringr::str_wrap(width = ...) is fantastic! Works for facet headings as well: facet_wrap(~str_wrap(myfacet, width = 10)

The founder of scikit-learn: "Without causal thinking, machine learning is not enough for optimal clinical decisions." 🧵 1/ #CausalSky

In psychology, an operational definition specifies how a variable or concept is to be measured and defined within a particular study. How does this compare to a statistical estimand, which also defines what a study aims to estimate? I know they aren't the same but they seem quite similar #StatsSky

Well I feel like a fool. I’ve been saying NFTs and crypto serve no fundamental purpose. And I totally didn’t entertain the use case of bribing the US President. So embarrassing