Rob Davies

Whoa: young scholar searching Florence libraries for how the ancient Ptolemy informed Galileo found a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest with marginalia in what looks a lot like Galileo's own hand. Like a frozen moment of torch passing, when a carefully tended fire from antiquity ignited something new.

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

It starts with memes and ends with learning #rstats

Decline in body mass in adult (left) and nestling great tits. In the nestling plot, the purple line represents all nestling and the green line those that recruited to the population as breeders. Their different slope suggest an increase in the strength of selection on nestling mass something confirmed in the MS by analysing the temporal trends in selection differentials (see link for further information)

We have published a new pre-print showing a decline in great tit adult and nestling mass of around 1 gram in 47 y. [rate of approx. -0.040 Hadanes] With @ellafcole.bsky.social, @devisatarkar.bsky.social, Sam. Crofts, @mcmahok.bsky.social & @sheldonbirds.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

> To those who [...] use fear and intimidation to help sell the agenda of the big tech CEOs who [...] use coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us[...]: I not only scold you, I shun you. That goes double if I once admired and respected you.

ratfactor.com/tech-nope2

Inclusion of Retracted Studies in Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Interventions This systematic review and meta-analysis identifies reports of systematic reviews that included retracted studies in their meta-analyses, and assesses the impact of these retracted studies on the resu...

A pleasingly meta-meta-analysis with a very displeasing outcome: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

This sounds fantastic

Image shows the green stalks and open white bells of snow drops

Snowdrops blooming in a garden up by Nether Houses on the road out of Ulverston, #cumbria

Which is to say: thanks for posting this photo!

It’s the oddest thing: I don’t know you (Hi), and I don’t know the authors of the book I think you’re sharing the image to show (Oathbreakers? — which looks really interesting), but I did once know Paul really well (he wrote the history of Mexico). I mean, what are the odds?

Part of this scene was the Vienna Circle, the group of philosophers who advocated for logical positivsm - which I can't meaningfully summarise even when I don't have a character limit. Suffice to say: this included many socialists like Neurath and Carnap, and some non-socialists like Gödel.

Ich koude wynne a gold medal at the olympics yf ther was an olympic sport called worryinge about everyethinge all the tyme

List of CDC information that appears to have been taken down so far:
1. CDC Atlas
2. CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System
3. HRSA Target
4. Language removed for LGBT work
5. CDC Social Vulnerability Index

Data previously released are now being disappeared.
bsky.app/profile/joel...

Moby Dick has some of the best sentences in the English language, fight me

What’s a multiverse good for anyway? Julia M. Rohrer, Jessica Hullman, and Andrew Gelman Multiverse analysis has become a fairly popular approach, as indicated by the present special issue on the matter. Here, we take one step back and ask why one would conduct a multiverse analysis in the first place. We discuss various ways in which a multiverse may be employed – as a tool for reflection and critique, as a persuasive tool, as a serious inferential tool – as well as potential problems that arise depending on the specific purpose. For example, it fails as a persuasive tool when researchers disagree about which variations should be included in the analysis, and it fails as a serious inferential tool when the included analyses do not target a coherent estimand. Then, we take yet another step back and ask what the multiverse discourse has been good for and whether any broader lessons can be drawn. Ultimately, we conclude that the multiverse does remain a valuable tool; however, we urge against taking it too seriously.

New preprint! So, what's a multiverse analysis good for anyway?>

With @jessicahullman.bsky.social and @statmodeling.bsky.social

juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

Just say the word: it would be great to collaborate!

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

That is terrible: I’m so sorry this happened

GitHub - richarddmorey/decline_bias: Repository for Morey (2026) manuscript "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox" Repository for Morey (2026) manuscript "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox" - GitHub - richarddmorey/decline_bias: Repository for Morey (2026) manuscript...

This manuscript is a first DRAFT. I have not submitted it to any journal yet. I thought I'd get comments from the community first. The Github repository can be found here: github.com/richarddmore...

Don’t let transparency damage science Stephan Lewandowsky and Dorothy Bishop explain how the research community should protect its members from harassment, while encouraging the openness that has become essential to science.

🧪 It's been 10 years since Dorothy Bishop and I published a commentary in Nature about the risks of transparency. doi.org/10.1038/529459a


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You really, but really, need to read the alt text.

For our Search & Discovery class I'm 👀 for a pithy piece (article or podcast) that comprehensively + critically chronicles the decline of web search — SEO, link rot, AI summaries + ☠️ of click-through, AI slop, etc — but of course, thanks to search's brokenness, I can't find what I'm 👀 for! 😫

“There’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

― Octavia E. Butler, A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: An Essay

One of my most cherished classes is my 18th century novels course where the primary learning objective is "learn how read long novels." We did a "couch to 5k" approach to attention span and note-taking.

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Lyric Video)

This new Springsteen song is actually a banger

An image reading the statement "The Future is Diamond" alongside the logo of the Open Journals Collective.

We've officially launched! With our new #DiamondOpenAccess investment campaign to help libraries build a sustainable, community‑led future for scholarly publishing & support journals flipping away from costly subscription models. Read the Press release here drive.google.com/file/d/10Hgf...

Does the Use of Crowdsourced Listeners Yield Different Speech Intelligibility Results Than In-Person Listeners for Typically Developing Children? Purpose: We examined the performance of crowdsourced listeners compared with in-person listeners on the measurement of speech intelligibility for...

if you want to know how to compute marginal means from a mixed effects model in brms using rvars, then have I got a supplemental materials document for you pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/...

For a weekly seminar class, I'm looking for pairings of psych popularization with scholarly take-downs of the underlying research. I want students to see examples of how shoddy research gets hyped.

All my #rstats ebooks are now in the quarto format, and hosted on Quarto Pub. Their old bookdown links will all be dead by the weekend.

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