News

1. If you’re interested in the Box-Cox power transformation . . . (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
2. Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
3. A slew of improvements to NUTS (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
4. “We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.” (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
5. StanCon 2026 registration and abstract submission are now open (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
6. 25,000 lives saved per ship sunk, $100,000 per citation, a probability of 10^-90 of a decisive vote . . . Is there a through line from B.S. numbers in junk science to B.S. numbers coming from the government? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
7. Survey Statistics: divine probabilities (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
8. “it has been argued that current chatbots may pose a risk of amplifying delusional thinking in vulnerable users, due to their tendency to sycophantic and overly validating behaviour” (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
9. More on school reform, this time New Orleans (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
10. My new class this spring: POLS 4280, Rationalizing the World: The Hopes and Disappointments of American Social Science from 1900 to the Present (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
11. The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable (www.theatlantic.com)
12. Yes, Some Children May Have Died From COVID Shots (www.theatlantic.com)
13. The life of the artist “is a constant–and constantly losing–battle to keep at bay, on one side, the permanent shortfall of physical and mental abilities in the context of the perfection that art strives to be, and, on the other side, the inevitable arrival of silence and death.” (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
14. TWiV 1277: Vaccine talk with Jake Scott (www.microbe.tv)
15. This guy hates sociology. (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
16. An idea for getting approximately calibrated 50% subjective probability ranges (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
17. TWiV 1276: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
18. The Vaccine Guardrails Are Gone (www.theatlantic.com)
19. The Sapolsky Sanction (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
20. When the numbers don’t look right, check them! (Mississippi education update) (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
21. From Bayesian inference to LLMs (Steve Bronder’s 2025 CppCon talk) (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
22. Gerd Gigerenzer on the legacy of Daniel Kahneman (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
23. Net migration in Pacific island countries (freerangestats.info)
24. Survey Statistics: probability samples vs epsem samples vs SRS samples (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
25. Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in a remake of The Big Clock (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
26. America Refuses to Go Bald (www.theatlantic.com)
27. Effective sample size depends on the quantity (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
28. How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
29. Sermet Pekin’s open-source project that discovers blogs through recursive network exploration (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
30. TWiV 1275: An amazing sequence and a gutsy therapy (www.microbe.tv)
31. What’s it like to be the child of a white-collar criminal? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
32. Visual summaries of population in Pacific islands (freerangestats.info)
33. TWiV 1274: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
34. Flagging when the prior distribution is informative (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
35. You’re on Ozempic? How Quaint. (www.theatlantic.com)
36. Larry Summers, Ken Starr, Jeffrey Epstein, and everyone else (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
37. Effective sample size (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
38. The three funniest items on the Kroger recall list (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
39. The purpose of science vs. the purpose of scientists (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
40. A War on Facts About Thanksgiving Dinner (www.theatlantic.com)
41. Survey Statistics: quantity vs quality (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
42. Problems with the so-called gender equality paradox (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
43. Immune 98: T cells on the brain (www.microbe.tv)
44. Some thoughts on empirical distributions of z-scores (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
45. Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right? (www.theatlantic.com)
46. Who has the lowest Erdos-Bacon-Epstein number? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
47. The signal-to-noise ratio in statistics (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
48. TWiV 1273: EBV and lupus have not escaped our notice (www.microbe.tv)
49. “The Limits of Ethical AI” (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
50. TWiV 1272: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
51. Who wants no kid vax law? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
52. Do Childhood Vaccines Cause Tornadoes? (www.theatlantic.com)
53. Pour One Out for Weed Seltzer (www.theatlantic.com)
54. “What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have?” Two different statistical measurement challenges arise from this one question on the General Social Survey. (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
55. The CDC’s Website Is Anti-Vaccine Now (www.theatlantic.com)
56. Three meta-principles of statistics: the information principle, the methodological attribution problem, and different applications demand different philosophies (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
57. StatRetro: The twitter feed that spits out our old blog posts, one at a time, every 8 hours (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
58. RFK Jr.’s Miasma Theory of Health Is Spreading (www.theatlantic.com)
59. Whoa-zempic! (www.theatlantic.com)
60. This guy’s mad about fake research, and he should be. Research incompetence, research fraud, and the promotion of fraudulent or incompetent work . . . these are not victimless crimes. (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
61. Survey Statistics: sampling the sample (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
62. Under what sort of systematic reporting errors will science be self-correcting, or not? And do gardening programs reduce obesity? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
63. America Has a Baby-Formula Problem—Again (www.theatlantic.com)
64. The Aristocrats! (Found poetry in the email archive) (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
65. A Borgesian blog idea (and nothing to do with forking paths) (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
66. Sociology of science: What does it take for erroneous or fraudulent claims to take hold? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
67. TWiV 1271: Hokies go viral II (www.microbe.tv)
68. The density of fraud (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
69. RFK Jr.’s Cheer Squad Is Getting Restless (www.theatlantic.com)
70. TWiV 1270: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
71. The fifth anniversary of a viral histogram (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
72. How is it that this problem, with its 21 data points, is so much easier to handle with 1 predictor than with 16 predictors? (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
73. The Democrats were lucky that the election was last week and not next week. (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
74. The value of close reading: Larry Summers edition (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
75. Noted economist likes to talk about demographics but he doesn’t know the actual facts. (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
76. America’s Best Pasta Is Slipping Away (www.theatlantic.com)
77. Who Would Want to Kill 314 Ostriches? (www.theatlantic.com)
78. The Patches That Want to Fix Your Sleep, Sex, and Focus (www.theatlantic.com)
79. Immune Booster 19: Virus-immune Tug-of-war with Kristian Andersen (www.microbe.tv)
80. TWiV 1269: The smell of influenza in the morning (www.microbe.tv)
81. Distribution of p-values under the null hypothesis for discrete data (freerangestats.info)
82. TWiV 1268: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
83. The Epidemiologists Are Running for Office (www.theatlantic.com)
84. Trump’s Ozempic Deal Has a Major Flaw (www.theatlantic.com)
85. Americans on Food Stamps Have No Good Options (www.theatlantic.com)
86. The Inflammation Gap (www.theatlantic.com)
87. In Defense of ‘Groupthink’ (www.theatlantic.com)
88. TWiV 1267: A cancer vaccine and an mpox treatment (www.microbe.tv)
89. TWiV 1266: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
90. America’s Grocery Lifeline Is Fraying (www.theatlantic.com)
91. The Obesity-Drug Revolution Is Stalling (www.theatlantic.com)
92. Immune 97: Bystander B cells go bananas (www.microbe.tv)
93. Trump Needs the UN in Gaza (www.theatlantic.com)
94. TWiV 1265: mRNA vaccines make cancer treatment great again (www.microbe.tv)
95. TWiV 1264: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
96. TWiV 1263: Dementia vaccine? (www.microbe.tv)
97. TWiV 1262: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin (www.microbe.tv)
98. Inequality and homicide, within-country and between country (freerangestats.info)
99. Immune Booster 18: From Stars to cells with Bali Pulendran (www.microbe.tv)