Wes Bonifay (@wesbonifay) — Bluesky Profile

3 hours ago

AI-generated stained glass portrait of William of Ockham for some reason even though an actual stained glass portrait of William of Ockham exists and is the main photo on the Wikipedia page for Ockham's razor

Actual stained glass portrait of William of Ockham, created by human artist Lawrence Lee without engineering a single prompt

That which can be depicted with a simple photograph need not be generated with a complex prompt

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1 day ago

I really enjoyed @andreawulf.bsky.social’s biography of Alexander von Humboldt

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6 days ago

Lessons for human science measurement from the quantification of earthquake size It remains controversial whether the human sciences can quantify the phenomena they study. The feasibility of quantification is usually assessed by id…

Now out: How did earthquakes come to have a (quantitative) size? How can we quantify without experimental control? @cristianlarph.bsky.social and I answer both questions and show their implications for human science measurement.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#philsci #histsci #seismology

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1 week ago

MAGIC TRICK GONE WRONG #son YouTube video by Derek Lipp

Why would you believe me? Why would you??

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1 week ago

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

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1 week ago

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

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1 week ago

Costco Connection magazine just published a full article about why and how to stop your car

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1 week ago

Harold Jeffreys Harold Jeffreys, an English geologist, was born Apr. 22, 1891. Jeffreys was perhaps the leading geophysicist of the early 20th century, and in 1924,

Interesting story about legendary Bayesian Sir Harold Jeffreys refusing to update his prior

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2 weeks ago

where do you think the term occam’s razor comes from? i suspect it originates from the Oceanic Coastal and Continental Alliiance of Magistrates (OCCAM), an ancient global court system that was founded in what we understand to be the 14th century, but what they know to be the 32nd. they were feared t

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3 weeks ago

The 1PL estimates a common discrimination parameter but fixes var(theta) = 1. The Rasch model fixes common discrimination = 1 but estimates var(theta).

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1 month ago

I enjoyed the Super Bowl halftime show but it would be nice if next year the halftime show was a plain black screen for fifteen minutes, giving football fans a quiet moment to contemplate their own mortality

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1 month ago

Headline from British Vogue I Ate Nothing But Sardines For 3
Days - Here's How My Skin Changed with a photo of a sardine

Only British Vogue has the courage to publish true science as it was practiced in the 18th century Transactions of the Royal Society

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1 month ago

I love to read about a big number freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/20...

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1 month ago

Due date for proposals was Feb 1, but if you submit a proposal by Feb 15, we will add it to the stack. Please share this announcement!

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1 month ago

From Murkowski (1997), The History of Classical and Frequentist Theories of Probability: "What is the probability of throwing “heads” on the single toss of a coin? If we have no reason to think otherwise, heads or tails are equally probable; and since heads or tails exhausts the possible set of events or outcomes (when some smart aleck in the back row asks what happens if the coin gets lodged in a crack in the floor and hence lands on its side, and someone else giggles that it is a trick coin, we shall exercise our prerogative as teacher to tell them to shut up), the probability of throwing a head equals one-half."

Exercise your prerogative as teacher

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1 month ago

Scientists should invent a Good Day clock that counts down to everything being fine

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1 month ago

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1 month ago

It is my thesis that the operation of the living individual
and the operation of some of the newer communication
machines are precisely parallel. Both of them have sensory
receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in
both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting
information from the outer world at low energy levels, and
for making it available in the operation of the individual or
of the machine. In both cases these external messages are
not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers
of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further
stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine
this performance is made to be effective on the outer world.
In both of them, their performed action on the outer world,
and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the
central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is
ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play
the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society.

This is true whether we consider human beings alone, or
in conjunction with types of automata which participate in a
two-way relation with the world about them. In this, our
view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held
by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government. Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions. Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from

$above, and none return. The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism. I wish to devote this book to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings; for in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. It is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is an almost equal degradation to assign him a purely repetitive task in a factory, which demands less than a millionth of his brain capacity. It is simpler to organize a factory or galley which uses individual human beings for a trivial fraction of their worth than it is to provide a world in which they can grow to their full stature. Those who suffer from a power complex find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions. I say, that this easy path to power is in fact not only a rejection of everything that I consider to be of moral worth in the human race, but also a rejection of our now very tenuous opportunities for a considerable period of human survival.$

Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.

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1 month ago

Identification and Scaling of Latent Variables in Ordinal Factor Analysis | Psychometrika | Cambridge Core Identification and Scaling of Latent Variables in Ordinal Factor Analysis

Researchers often treat ordinal variables as continuous. What if we could mimic this in an ordinal factor analysis/IRT model? We propose new identification constraints so that the latent variable goes from 1 to (# of ordered categories), with connections to treating ordinal variables as continuous.

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1 month ago

Scene from Sorry, Baby. A judge says “on your questionnaire, you wrote—“

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1 month ago

Spelt A word-farming game.

This is my personal favorite: www.tidy.games/spelt/

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1 month ago

Call for Papers: Psychometrika Special Issue - Psychometric Society Data Intensive Methods in Psychometrics

Excited to share a new call for papers for a special issue in Psychometrika focused on Data Intensive Methods in Psychometrics that I'll be guest editing with @kyliegorney.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social, @leonievogelsmeier.bsky.social, and Ben Domingue: www.psychometricsociety.org/post/call-sp...

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1 month ago

Foundations of Item Response Theory This workshop from Wes Bonifay focuses on the foundations and application of item response theory, particularly as applied to binary items.

Enroll in my new workshop to realize your dream of learning IRT

#quantpsych #psychometrics #psychsky #statssky

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2 months ago

Nori the Shiba Inu basking in the sun fully unaware of AI

Nori the Shiba Inu basking in the sun dreaming of anything but AI

When you know nothing about AI

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2 months ago

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2 months ago

I didn’t even know what pineapple really tasted like until I bought some from a vendor on the beach in Costa Rica, and his 10 year old son cut it up for me using a full size machete

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3 months ago

Call for Papers: Psychometrika Special Issue - Psychometric Society Variable Selection for Complex Psychometric Data

Consider submitting a proposal to the (open access) Psychometrika special issue on Variable Selection for Complex Psychometric Data, with a proposal deadline of Jan 15. Full details:

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2 months ago

Marginalian Editions #1 | Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where…

Learn more about it here: www.themarginalian.org/2025/04/24/m...

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2 months ago

My first read of 2026 will be this biography of Willard Gibbs by poet Muriel Rukeyser (published by @mariapopova.bsky.social)

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2 months ago

Asking for a friend

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