Alexis Karamanos

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding:

Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere.

samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

"The challenge is really coming up with good questions." Guido Imbens, Economic Sciences Prize.

People say this quite often and I'm never sure know what to make of it. What's a good question anyway? One that's answerable? One that isn't? One that makes you ask more questions? (regress much?) One that creates other good things as a side effect that are somehow easier than finding the question?

Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) Companion by Matthew Gregory and Matthew Upson
#RStats
https://bigbookofr.com/chapters/workflow.html#reproducible-analytical-pipelines-(rap)-companion

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

A new edition of the @posit.co AI Newsletter is out! A step change in coding agents' abilities, posit::conf(2026) call for talks, and a demo of a data science agent coming soon to RStudio.

posit.co/blog/2026-02...

A new publication at www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We find that religious markers (esp. beards) can reduce perceived trustworthiness in Turkey.

(That's why you often see me clean shaven ;-)

Surveys are important for miscarriage research, yet questionnaire design and sample characteristics can influence reported miscarriage prevalence

We compared miscarriage reporting across British surveys with @mccompans.bsky.social & @heinivaisanen.bsky.social - take a look at our pre-print here ⬇️

Headline from The Hill reading "How to raise birth rates is the wrong question: Here’s what we should be asking"

One of the most frustrating things about the current US discourse over low birth rates is its laser focus on "how can we raise birth rates?" In this op-ed for @thehill.com, I explain why that's the wrong question and what we should be asking instead. 1/6
thehill.com/opinion/heal...

ChatGPT in RStudio with gptstudio: Better than GitHub Copilot?, Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 10:00 AM | Meetup **Supercharging Your R Workflow with a Native AI Assistant** It’s no surprise that large language models like ChatGPT are helpful for coding. What makes gptstudio stand ou

@r-ladies-stl.bsky.social has two upcoming online events!

1. ChatGPT in RStudio with gptstudio: March 27th at 10am CST
www.meetup.com/rladies-st-l...

2. Maps in R: April 9th at 6pm CST with @dgkeyes.com
www.meetup.com/rladies-st-l...

RSVP on meetup! #rstats

Rare, dangerous side effects of some COVID-19 vaccines explained “Groundbreaking” study uncovers why adenovirus-based shots caused life-threatening blood clots and bleeding in some people

Five years after the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines started, it seems the mystery of why the Astra-Zeneca and J&J vaccines led to a rare but deadly side effect of unusual blood clots and bleeding has finally been solved. 

It's a fascinating case of molecular mimicry that may help make vaccine safer.🧪

This is a very helpful guide to the {dplyr} update

#rstats

How the internet hijacked our health

Recommended listening from @kamranabbasi.bsky.social and @debscohen.bsky.social about Deb's book Bad Influence on how social media is affecting health and driving unnecessary and potentially harmful testing and treatment.

open.spotify.com/episode/6EiB...

ProPublica Event: Inside the Destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development Join ProPublica journalists for a conversation about the dismantling of U.S. foreign aid worldwide.

Even as senior Trump officials cut vital foreign aid programs — in one case celebrating with cake afterward — they had been repeatedly warned that people would die.

Join ProPublica journalists for a conversation about the dismantling of USAID.

📌 RSVP and submit a question:

After years spent documenting state terror, I know it when I see it. And I see it now in the US and Israel | Janine di Giovanni It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned, says war correspondent and author Janine di Giovanni

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Powerful stuff, cogently argued.

plotly Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny by Carson Sievert
#RStats
https://bigbookofr.com/chapters/data%20visualization.html#plotly-interactive-web-based-data-visualization-with-r-plotly-and-shiny

Can ChatGPT compete with emergency medicine specialists? A two-stage assessment of ECG interpretation supported by clinical information - BMC Emergency Medicine BMC Emergency Medicine - The increasing integration of AI-powered large language models into clinical workflows has created new opportunities for augmenting diagnostic decision-making in emergency...

A specialized version of ChatGPT designed to interpret ECGs was found to interpret ECGs with 24% accuracy.

…Meaning it was wrong 76% of the time at the time-sensitive test used to diagnose heart attacks and arrhythmias, among other things.

Defining methodologic and other core competencies for PhD-level training in epidemiology Abstract. In this manuscript, we present the results of a series of workshops convened in conjunction with the 2023 Society for Epidemiologic Research annu

Defining methodologic and other core competencies for PhD-level training in epidemiology
academic.oup.com/aje/article/...

🧵1/ Global health is under attack, and not just by pathogens. Governments are walking away from international law, blocking humanitarian access, and even targeting health workers. We need a principled response, which @tiagocorreia.bsky.social & I set out in an editorial in Eur J Public Health

WTF

An example of how impacts of interventions can differ at individual and population levels, and are conditional on other events. Given a car hits you, the helmet helps. But mandating helmets could lower the # of bikes on the road & thus might increase the chance of getting hit in the first place.

Are the PDFs you create accessible?

We built {pdfcheck}, an R package that checks PDF accessibility and gives you actionable fixes—not just technical error messages.

If you make reports with R, Quarto, or typst, {pdfcheck} is something you might want to use.

See demo: buff.ly/oGBSo70

#RStats

🚀 dashboardr is out!

An #rstats package for building interactive dashboards with tidyverse-style syntax.

Launched with a fun hackathon at @ascor.bsky.social (🍕 included).

📦: favstats.github.io/dashboardr/

Big thanks to the dashboardr team, Digicomlab, and @vivifabrien.bsky.social for the logo 🎨

Using R to extract results from Stata log files – Ben Harrap

Are you a #Stata user? Maybe you work with one?

Have you ever found yourself copy-pasting from the results window?

It's annoying as hell! And terrible practice. So I wrote a blog post on using #rstats to extract results from Stata log files

benharrap.com/post/2026-02...

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and replacing functions!

These look like some very useful updates!

And modestly I am proud of myself that without any substantial causal inference training (on my list this year along with relearning German, learning French and Gen alpha…for now) I intuitively thought of many of these limitations. And some designs (RCTs) to me should only have robustness analyses

Promo graphic for episode 1006 of Public Health On Call titled Public Health and Gambling: Part 1. Additional text reads: How gambling became so ubiquitous and the potential for problems.

Sports betting has exploded in popularity, but experts are becoming increasingly concerned about the public health implications.

@mattdeisenberg.bsky.social and @markmeiselbach.bsky.social discuss how to make online sports gambling safer.

🎧 podcast.publichealth.jhu.edu/1006-public-...

Global and regional cancer burden attributable to modifiable risk factors to inform prevention - Nature Medicine Global cancer estimates across 185 countries show that 7.1 million new cancer cases were attributable to modifiable risk factors in 2022, with smoking, infections and alcohol consumption being the…

Direct link to the study: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#MedSky 🛟

Flyer for a gradual intro to shiny workshop on February 7 at 8:00 AM PST - url to register is in post

I'll be teaching a short intro to Shiny workshop for @rladiesremote.bsky.social on February 17! Registration details are below, or you can register by going here: meetu.ps/e/PQt4g/ypHs... #shiny #rstats #databs

Live Free and Die: US Life Expectancy Has a Problem (But It's Not Seed Oils) We deserve to live until we are old

Terrific read... Another example showing why, if you don't already follow @drjenndowd.bsky.social, you should...