Michael Plank

We'd be in a better place if university leaders would constantly beat this drum. Teaching critical thinking makes for better neighbors and citizens, while creating knowledge for knowledge's sake has driven massive economic gains, often in unpredictable ways. Interfering with this is folly.

Thanks Tyler Cassidy for leading the charge on this, the excellent team of co-authors, and to @matrix-inst.bsky.social for hosting us.

A Nonparametric Approach to Practical Identifiability of Nonlinear Mixed Effects Models - Bulletin of Mathematical Biology Mathematical modelling is a widely used approach to understand and interpret clinical trial data. This modelling typically involves fitting mechanistic mathematical models to data from individual tria...

Well it turns out if you know something about the distributions of x and y, you *can* (sometimes) separately estimate their population means.

We explored some biological applications of this idea here:
doi.org/10.1007/s115...

Now suppose you don’t just have one measurement of x+y but many, clustered around 100 but with some variation.

How does this help? Surely x=y=50 is just as likely as x=10 and y=90?

Suppose you know that x+y=100 and want to know what x and y are. You’re stuck right – there’s a whole range of possibilities for two numbers that sum to 100 (in maths we call this non-identifiability).

Go on tell us how many life minutes you are losing each year

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We're probably getting pretty close to 700 science jobs lost over this term of government, directly linked to reforms/cuts. And believe me: the country wasn't overflowing with them to start with.

Introducing CAPphrase (Comparative and Absolute Probability phrase dataset), an open access dataset containing over 150,000 probability-based language judgements: adamkucharski.github.io/CAPphrase/

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.

It does not.

It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.

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There's some amazing work here - an incredible breadth of projects from drug discovery & clinical trials, to avian influenza surveillance, TB control, and community-led initiatives for drinking water safety. Very proud to have contributed in a small way to this
www.teniwha.com/news/ebook

Bayesian joint modelling using @mc-stan.org of wastewater and hospital admissions in the US led by @kaitejohnson9.bsky.social and others at the US CDC

Join us for the launch event! We are excited to invite you to the official launch of the Global Society for Infectious Disease Dynamics (GSIDD) on February 26th, 2026.This launch marks an important milestone for our global communi...

Launch of the Global Society of Infectious Disease Dynamics. 🎉

2 online webinars on Thursday 26th.
Do join to see what it's all about, and get involved in the community as it kicks off!

www.gsidd.org/post/join-us...

Ah the animation's not working, maybe this will work
images.thespinoff.co.nz/1/2020/03/Co...

You might be interested in this by the excellent @siouxsiew.bsky.social and @xtotl.bsky.social (not for vaccines but similar idea)

It drives me crazy that most people think that COVID-19 vaccines don't reduce transmission. They don't bring Reff <1, but the difference between spreading an infection to 2 people vs 1 person is huge at the scale of the population.

There's some amazing work here - an incredible breadth of projects from drug discovery & clinical trials, to avian influenza surveillance, TB control, and community-led initiatives for drinking water safety. Very proud to have contributed in a small way to this
www.teniwha.com/news/ebook

Except literally every data analysis or model I've ever asked AI to build has contained at least one error: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Common response: "But someone just needs to give AI detailed instructions..."

But who is the "someone" in that sentence? And how did they get their expertise?

The last part abt how measles disrupts immunity vs other infections is, imo, underappreciated (& mechanism was recently clarified). It's part of why measles vaccination was seen to help beyond just reducing measles complications - not getting measles reduces severity of subsequent infections too.

Great talk on composable infectious disease modelling. Making real-time outbreak modelling more principled and flexible has been a long-standing challenge, and Sam has been leading the charge on solving it. With a growing group of people keen on this it feels like we're finally getting somewhere.

What could possibly go wrong?

"With user-pleasing AI agents getting faster at tasks – and potentially subject to less user scrutiny – there’s more need for statistical thinking than ever"

I think news stories like this have been so frequent over the last six years that it's now "common knowledge" that covid ages your internal organs.

But, it's simply not true.

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Rakiura is a beautiful place - enjoy!

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.

Inference for Within- and Between-Partnership Transmission Rates for HIV Infection HIV transmission within serodiscordant couples remains a significant public health challenge, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Estimating the rate of such infection, alongside the rates of introduc...

New Preprint! We look at HIV transmission outside of and within stable partnerships. It turns out that the pair model can have many useful results derived analytically in closed form, and the general numerical methodology should be useful in other contexts.

arxiv.org/abs/2602.04638

Trump’s $12B bet — Project Vault — on which minerals will be of future technological importance aims to provide certainty to industry.

But does it risk locking us in to the status quo, when materials discovery is the one field I can say will genuinely be disrupted by quantum computing and AI… 🤔

Visiting academic to address spread of misinformation For Carl Bergstrom, misinformation is like a living organism — it can travel across networks and spread through populations like pathogens. The...

Landing in Dunedin Aotearoa in about 90 minutes for the start of a trip that represents the culmination of a dream I’ve had since I was ten years old.

Petition to replace electric heaters with in-house servers that can, in cold weather, be put at the disposal of tech giants for reasonable rates. Free heating and less power demand - win win!

But where are the Lego(TM) bricks in the visual abstract?