Cristiano Varin

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...

Poster, and #rstats package for drawing tetraplots, are at github.com/DavidFirth/t...

A statement from the Royal Statistical Society on the dismissal of the Commissioner of Labor Statis

Following the dismissal of Erika McEntarfer as US Commissioner of Labor Statistics, we've released a statement of concern.

At a time of global economic uncertainty, we stress the importance of the independence of statistical institutions and the protection of the integrity of official statistics.

Cover of the book "Three Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the lost empire of cool" by James Kaplan with a cool nightime picture of a dressed-to-the-nines Miles Davis smoking under a streetlight.

Last book I read was the eminently enjoyable "Three Shades of Blue" by James Kaplan. Been years since I read a Miles biography sonice to get back to all this--with superb related context about all this jazz.

And #chicago folks: This Friday Fitzgeralds in Forest Park has a 'Kind of Blue' tribute.

Lalo Schifrin (June 21, 1932 – June 26, 2025)

My first jazz listening! was among my dad's records, the only jazz in his collection. Blue 7 still gives me the shivers today

Consistent and Scalable Composite Likelihood Estimation of Probit Models with Crossed Random Effects Abstract. Estimation of crossed random effects models commonly requires computational costs that grow faster than linearly in the sample size N, often as f

I am very happy to share our new paper "Consistent and Scalable Composite Likelihood Estimation of Probit Models with Crossed Random Effects" with Ruggero Bellio, Swarnadip Ghosh and Art Owen. Thrilled that the paper will be published in the prestigious Biometrika academic.oup.com/biomet/artic...

"Il nostro paese, negli ultimi anni, ha fatto grandi passi avanti, peccato che tutti gli altri vanno in macchina."

Ah, muoiono più donne? Ma dai!

Ever wondered why some charts are more effective and engaging than others?

I’ll be going through all the theory, evidence and principles behind compelling data storytelling from this Wednesday.

Free to watch for anyone who is interested: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-fundam...

On this date. Richard Feynman born 1918 in New York.

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

A graph with rodent names on the y-axis, where the labels are all on one line

A graph with rodent names on the y-axis, where the longer labels are spread over two lines

R code used to generate the graph with the labels spread over two lines msleep |> filter(order == "Soricomorpha") |> ggplot(aes(x = sleep_total, y = name)) + geom_point() + scale_y_discrete(labels = function(x) str_wrap(x, width = 18)) + theme_bw()

One of my favourite #ggplot tricks is wrapping long axis labels so they don't take up so much space on your chart

Image 1 - Without wrapping
Image 2 - With wrapping
Image 3 - Code

#rstats

Miles Davis, backstage at Shrine Auditorium, 1950

lol who did this

Libertà!

#rstats folks: If you have a habit of updating your library after an R upgrade by copying the old one and run update.packages().

--> DON'T DO THAT <--

Especially not with 4.5.0. You will overwrite base packages with ones from a previous version and as these are not on CRAN, things go bad.