Luna Fazio

The AI Summit is today! We look forward to celebrating the opening of ELLIS Institute Finland and hearing from stellar speakers in AI research, business and government. Tune in to the livestream areena.yle.fi/1-76514739 starting at 10:00 EET. Check out the program here: aisummit.fi
@ellis.eu

First page of Opinion piece: "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism"

The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say.

Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social

Did we ever settle whether masks work against COVID19? It seemed like a very important scientific question to determine whether that particular cluster of proteins follows the same laws of physics that others do 🙃

The Medical Evidence Project We find bad research that affects health and life

I had a lovely catch up chat with @jamesheathers.bsky.social at the weekend. I am thoroughly inspired by the work he and team are doing at the Medical Evidence Project. They act on tip offs for fraudulent and/or inaccurate science used to shape medical practice. Know any? medicalevidenceproject.org

I definitely think the local experience can vary a lot, certainly across native vs non-native English speaking crowds. No one in my current environment is a native speaker and it's quite normal to see open ChatGPT tabs being used to help translate/rephrase/check grammar/etc.

Very cool (from Ehm-Gneiting-Jordan-Krüger, JRSSB 2016): for mean estimation, all consistent scoring rules can be obtained as conic combinations of 'extremal' consistent scoring rules, with an explicit structure. Similar results hold for quantiles (and perhaps other tasks as well!).

I appreciate @bmj.com follows a formal process, but just how much evidence do they need before adding an Expression of Concern.
Numerous PubPeer comments for stem cell for heart disease paper - which had huge media attention hailing it as a medical breakthrough.
pubpeer.com/publications...

I am excited to share that I am looking for a #postdoc with an interest in causal machine learning to join my lab at TU Dortmund University and RC Trust. #hiring #causality #ML #AI

📅 03.12.25
Group: rc-trust.ai/groups/causa...
Details: tinyurl.com/4622p6at

Multiverse analysis! 👁️👁️

Introduction to Bayesian Statistics in R & brms - YouTube The course offers a straightforward and practical approach to applied statistics using Bayesian inference for ecologists.

You can now find a recording of my course "Introduction to Bayesian Statistics in R & brms" on youtube.

Slides & code available here: github.com/benjamin-ros...

#Rstats

Please Avoid detectCores() in your R Packages The detectCores() function of the parallel package is probably one of the most used functions when it comes to setting the number of parallel workers to use in R. In this blog post, I’ll try to explai...

The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛

As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available

Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...

Now I'm also looking for a research software engineer to implement a pile of research results to R packages loo, posterior, bayesplot, projpred, priorsense, brms or/and Python packages ArviZ, Bambi and Kulprit. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact info at users.aalto.fi/~ave/)

A "methods primer" article in the journal "BMJ Medicine", titled "Factors associated with: problems of using exploratory multivariable regression to identify causal risk factors"

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

The Origin of the Research University Universities have existed for more than a thousand years — and for almost all of that time, they weren’t centers of research. What changed in 19th century Germany?

"Universities have existed for more than a thousand years — and for almost all of that time, they weren’t centers of research. What changed in 19th century Germany?" asteriskmag.substack.com/p/the-origin...

New blogpost on my concerns about Wellcome LEAP new $50m program on autism/microbiome links. deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-le...
#autism #microbiome #biomarkers #diagnostic

“Multiverse analyses require thorough, theory-based model selection. Otherwise, they become a ‘dangerous tool’ that drowns valid models in misspecified ones, needlessly eroding trust in science.”

A plea for thoughtful models by @kauspurg.bsky.social

#MetaSci

There is a very nice intro from the lovely people at @coderefinery.org. I'm linking directly to the photography analogy they use to explain staging vs commiting because that was an "I finally get it 🤯" moment for me:

coderefinery.github.io/git-intro/br...

FAIRness differed mainly by repository, with GitHub and OSF showing lower median scores than PsychArchives, Zenodo, and Figshare

How FAIR is shared data in psychology?

We analyzed 11,384 datasets (2013–2024): They're findable, but less reusable!

What relates most to differences in FAIRness? #Repository choice.

👉 Preprint: doi.org/10.23668/psy...

@mariogollwitzer.bsky.social @kaisassenberg.bsky.social #metascience #SciSci

Write code to make being human easier. Rip code out if it makes being human harder. Write code to make caring for each other easier. Rip it out if it makes caring for each other harder.

Empathy driven development has literally never failed me. It’s done me better than everything else combined

New DP @i4replication.bsky.social: Meta-analysis on green nudges correcting for publication bias. "Behavioral interventions on households and individuals are unlikely to deliver material climate benefits." www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

Elucidating some common biases in randomized controlled trials using directed acyclic graphs Although the ideal randomized clinical trial is the gold standard for causal inference, real randomized trials often suffer from imperfections that may hamper causal effect estimation. Stating the estimand of interest can help reduce confusion about what is being estimated, but it is often difficult to determine what is and is not identifiable given a trial’s specific imperfections. We demonstrate how directed acyclic graphs can be used to elucidate the consequences of common imperfections, such as noncompliance, unblinding, and drop-out, for the identification of the intention-to-treat effect, the total treatment effect and the physiological treatment effect. We assert that the physiological treatment effect is not identifiable outside a trial with perfect compliance and no dropout, where blinding is perfectly maintained

Table 1 showing the Identifiability of target estimands depending on whether there is blinding, full compliance, and no drop-out

An example DAG from the paper. Fig. 4: A blinded trial with noncompliance. U are unobserved confounders, Z is treatment assignment, C is compliance, X is the realized treatment, S is the subject's physical and mental health status, Xself and Xcln are the treatment that the participant and the clinician believed the participant received, Y is the outcome.

Just finished reading this *excellent* article by Gabriel et al. which discusses which effects can be identified in randomized controlled trials. With DAGs!>

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Took part yesterday in @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social's Replication Games, it was such a nice experience! People were lovely and the work was a very fun challenge.

Thanks to @i4replication.bsky.social and @janmarcus.de for organizing this, it was absolutely worth enduring the ride from Dortmund. 😄

🚨I4R is looking to hire postdoc fellows in public health and computer science!

The postdoc will join a team of researchers and help mass reproduce studies in leading public health journals or develop AI replicator agents.

Info 👇

I4R Replication Games coming to Münster! @i4replication.bsky.social @aufdroeseler.bsky.social @fialalenka.bsky.social