Martyn Plummer

I think it’s plausible that, under the right conditions, life is common, but intelligent life is rare (it took billions of years on Earth). Without fossil fuels a sustainable industrial revolution might be next to impossible so industrial civilisations are even more rare.

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." - Hannah Arendt

There are a couple of vacancies in Wollongong for Maths/Stats lecturers:

www.uow.edu.au/about/jobs/j...

People have been predicting the end of the world for some time and they’ve all been wrong so far. When the world failed to end in 1844, the Millerite movement called it “The Great Disappointment“. I don’t suppose that sentiment was widely shared.

Yes. Melanoma is not the most common cancer in Australia but the others appear later. So when you restrict the picture to under-50s you get high peaks in Australia but also N Europe. Data from the IARC Global Cancer Observatory gco.iarc.who.int/en

“Smiling group of 14 R-Ladies at R Dev Day, posing together in a meeting room with a whiteboard and chairs in the background.

R Developer Day at University of Warwick brought together R-Ladies from around the world 🌎.

Spaces like this remind us how powerful our global community is when we learn, collaborate and build together.

Thanks to Heather Turner for making this possible 💜

#RDevDay
#rladies

Absolutely unbelievable to see egregious anti-science nonsense being given an airing like this. Well done @lewisgoodall.com for calling it out. “A broad church… freedom of speech” - and that’s the excuse for platforming not just misinformation but disinformation.

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

David Firth holding a wooden tetrahedron in front of a poster displaying his new tetraplots. The proportion of votes for each of four parties is a point inside the volume of a tetrahedron, which is then projected onto the nearest surface and the tetrahedron is unfolded to make a flat display.

At the RSS conference in Edinburgh where @firthstat.bsky.social is presenting his new tetraplots for displaying 4-way results in UK elections. Wooden tetrahedron by @warwickstats.bsky.social woodworker-in-residence Nick Tawn.

Image of a poster to be presented at the Royal Statistical Society conference in Edinburgh, September 2025. The main point is to generalize the idea of a ternary plot to handle 4-part compositions, by showing views through the triangular faces of a tetrahedron. The data shown are vote counts from England, Scotland and Wales in the UK General Election of July 2024.

At next week's RSS conference I'll be presenting a poster (a first for me...it's about time!)

"Tetraplot displays of UK General Election results" shows how to graph GE 2024 vote shares across 4 parties in a useful way.

Full PDF poster at:
github.com/DavidFirth/t...

It can’t give you advice because it doesn’t know anything. It’s a synthetic text generator that responds with a statistically plausible continuation of the context window based on the training data. @infinitescream.bsky.social

Deal to get ChatGPT Plus for whole of UK discussed by Open AI boss and minister Exclusive: Deal that could have cost £2bn was floated at meeting between technology secretary Peter Kyle and Sam Altman

Kyle [secretary of state for science innovation and technology] has been a vocal champion of AI … he had asked ChatGPT for advice on a range of work-related questions, including why British businesses were not adopting AI and what podcasts he should appear on.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

New paper, with P. Basak, A.R. Linero, and C. Maringe, accepted in JASA A&CS

"Understanding Inequalities in Cancer Survival Using Bayesian Machine Learning"

doi.org/10.1080/0162...

#inequalities #cancer #survival #Bayesian #MachineLearning @icon-lshtm.bsky.social @statisticsucl.bsky.social

This explains why Peter Kyle wants the Turing to focus on defense and security research which a) belongs in the public sector and b) is in the national interest.

It's a narrow view of the national interest but it answers the existential question.

The problem with creating a centralised research institute is that you have to answer the question "Why here? Why can't this be done elsewhere?" Caught between industry and the university sector, the Alan Turing Institute is having a hard time answering.

Gesundheit

Screenshot of a message from CRAN stating that "CRAN submissions will be offline from Aug 01, 2025 to Aug 18, 2025" for CRAN team vacation and maintenance work.

#rstats I just submitted a new version of the {heplots} pkg to CRAN and got the message below.

It's August, and the #CRAN maintainers deserve a break, but it seems to me they also deserve a vote of thanks for all the work they do in vetting updates and new packages in R.

If I wanted to do this, I would add NA tags as a separate attribute of the data frame, not try to augment the numeric vector class.

I think that tagged NAs are useful for data management but not necessarily for computation. You could extend the data frame class to allow tagged NAs, preserve them during data manipulation operations, and allow selection and transformation based on the tag.

To some extent, yes. Critics of big tech have identified a pervasive set of cultish beliefs driving the AI industry that they call the #TESCREAL bundle.

www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/

Even if you have hardware and compiler support for NaN payload propagation, you still have to implement the semantics of NA vs NaN vs finite value propagation in all low-level arithmetic operations. Extending these semantics to include tagged NAs is too much complexity, and not guaranteed to work.

NA_real_ in #rstats is implemented on top of IEEE754 arithmetic as NaN with a particular payload (1954). This seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that NaN payloads are propagated. It happens to work - mostly - on the platforms R is mainly used on.

This is a joke from A Fish Called Wanda used to illustrate the stupidity of Otto (Kevin Kline):

"When he learned that your daughter's name is Portia, he said 'Why did they name her after a car?'"

They’re going to switch it on and ask it if there is a God aren’t they?

I’m only half joking. A lot of tech bro behaviour can be explained by my theory that they desperately want to live in the SF world they read about as kids and are just pretending that they are bringing it into being.

Warwick Statistics is hosting the first Winter School in Probabilistic AI, 5-8 Jan 2026, targeted at PhD students, academics, and professionals; and features world-leading researchers speaking about recent advances in AI. www.probai.ac.uk/eve...

YouTube video by Calvin & Habs German tries American Coke

youtube.com/shorts/ycYbM...

Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood: A Nationwide Cohort Study: Annals of Internal Medicine: Vol 0, No 0 Background: Aluminum is used as an adjuvant in nonlive vaccines administered in early childhood. Concerns persist about potential associations between vaccination with aluminum-adsorbed vaccines and i...

Let's say it louder for those at the back: Routine childhood vaccines do not cause autism, a major study in Denmark confirmed Wednesday, countering a myth that has been trumpeted for decades.
www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

GPT increasingly feels like the next evolution of Gladwellian non-fic. Gladwell’s great trick was that you could flatter the reader’s ego by dressing up banalities and oversimplifications in a way that made them feel clever, like they were accessing special wisdom. This is the interactive version.

Your Al Can Think. Let's Make It DO. Applied Generative Al for Business TURING

No it can't