Julian Wolfson

a man in a suit and tie is making a funny face while looking at the camera . ALT: a man in a suit and tie is making a funny face while looking at the camera .

Celery?

Graphic featuring a photo of award winner Leif Verace and the title of his paper, "A Marginal Approach to Longitudinal Function-on-Function Regression"

So proud that UMN Biostat & Health Data Science's own Leif Verace received the John van Ryzin Award for best student paper at ENAR. Congrats Leif (and advisor/co-author Dr. Erjia Cui)!

I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was lucky

powerful detailed account of ICE captivity

"To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me...Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there"

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

“How bad can it be to have an anti-vaccine zealot leading our health agencies?” 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

MINNESOTA

NIH Awards Funding: $718 M
Jobs Supported : 7,992
Economic activity supported: $ 1.74 B

www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...

Welcome to The Good Place! (ok, maybe not an ideal reference)

unhcrthemes: UNHCR 'ggplot2' Theme and Colour Palettes A 'ggplot2' theme and color palettes following the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Data Visualization Guidelines recommendations.

🚀 {unhcrthemes} 0.6.3 is out!

The latest version of our R package for creating UNHCR-styled charts is now on CRAN. 🎨📊

🔗 Check it out: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

(1/3)

I kind of like it as is; a nice clock that just so happens to be a clever reference

There are post-doc openings for the @minnpop.bsky.social Training Program in Population Health Science. Apply by the end of January if you're interested and eligible! And spread the word please!
pop.umn.edu/training/pos...

Receiving a "Model Release" (the Zoolander kind, not the glm kind) form from NCI definitely wasn't on my bingo card for today.

Shiny Source Code Explained: Busy Indicators - Hypebright Curious how Shiny busy indicators work? Take a closer look at the source code behind spinner overlays and pulsing banners, and find out!

Another edition of Shiny Source Code Explained ✨🤓 And this time it is all about the code behind the new busy indicators that were added in Shiny 1.9 (July 2024)!

hypebright.nl/en/shiny-en/...

Enjoy!

#rshiny #rstats

Quarto 1.6 – Quarto Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. There are also a couple of breaking changes that will af...

Quarto 1.6 is out! 🎉 Download it here: quarto.org/docs/download/

Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. Blog post: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

Have you asked your local barista?

Diagram of multiple imputation produced by ChatGPT, consisting of meaningless shapes, arrows, and incomprehensible text.

ChatGPT "explains" multiple imputation 🧐

After completing a half marathon, this running duo aims to continue pushing boundaries together Michael Fuller and Mahesh Mathew are finding purpose on Twin Cities running paths together.

Feel-good story? Check.
Public health connection? Check.
Cute dog? Check.
Awesome person doing inspiring things? Check and check.

www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/ne...

Key features of ‘tidyprompt’ are: tidy prompting: Quickly and elegantly construct prompts for LLMs, using piping syntax (inspired by the ‘tidyverse’). Wrap a base prompt in prompt wraps to influence how the LLM handles the prompt. A library of pre-built prompt wraps is included, but you can also write your own. structured output: Extract structured output from the LLM’s response, and validate it. Automatic retries with feedback to the LLM, if the output is not as expected. reasoning modes: Make your LLM answer in a specific mode, such as chain-of-thought or ReAct (Reasoning and Acting) modes. function calling: Give your LLM the ability to autonomously call R functions (‘tools’). With this, the LLM can retrieve information or take other actions. ‘tidyprompt’ also supports R code generation and evaluation, allowing LLMs to run R code. compatible with all LLM providers: Usable with any LLM provider that supports chat completion. Use included LLM providers such as Ollama (local PC/on your own server), OpenAI, OpenRouter (offering various providers, including Anthropic), Mistral, Groq, XAI (Grok), or Google Gemini. Or easily write your own hook for any other LLM provider.

The {tidyprompt} #RStats 📦 *under development* is designed for prompting your #LLMs “the tidy way.” It includes function calling, so you “can define your own R functions and give the LLM the ability to call them.”
By Luka Koning & Tjark Van de Merwe #GenAI
tjarkvandemerwe.github.io/tidyprompt/

Sven
#skyhounds #greyhound #lurcher

A Biostatistician Pursues Causality and Algorithmic Fairness A Q&A with Daniel Malinsky, assistant professor of biostatistics.

The Columbia public health school published this Q&A about my work on causality & algorithmic fairness. Read on to learn how the IMF's imposed austerity policies post-2009 financial crisis led me down a path toward studying causal inference*

*not among the intended effects

shorturl.at/KkeWu

Interesting but not surprising. The next frontier is leveraging this kind of daily activity pattern data to improve health and well-being rather than harm it.

For anyone curious, I've never written a browser extension before, and I only know enough Javascript to be dangerous in Shiny/Quarto. I took a screenshot of a bioRxiv page and pasted into Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and asked it to build one for me. Worked with minimal follow up prompts. ~5 minutes in total.

A screen recording of the RStudio IDE. After highlighting some code, a dialog box pops up with a selection of keywords; after selecting one called "cli", some erroring code is rewritten. Then, after highlighting a whole function and selecting a new keyword "roxygen", roxygen documentation is drafted on-the-fly.

I've been working a new #rstats package called pal🤖

Pals bring a library of LLM prompts into your RStudio/Positron sessions, editing code directly at the press of a keyboard shortcut.

Read more: simonpcouch.github.io/pal/

This seems pretty cool

A bingo card for (bio)stat researchers! I’m dangerously close to a black-out…

What's the statute of limitations on backlogged random thoughts and opinions that didn't get posted at The Other Site? Asking for a friend...

Screenshot of Wikipedia entry on passion fruit

I'm going to blame my dad, who's from South Africa...

I was about to post something to the effect of “in North America we call this a passion fruit” but glad I googled and discovered that granadilla and passion fruit are slightly different #themoreyouknow

Careers Required qualifications:Applicants must have a PhD in biostatistics, statistics, or a closely related field, by the start of appointment and a strong interest in collaborative research with biomedical investigators across the health sciences.

Trying again with a working link:

We’ve just posted a new Contract Assistant Professor position at UMN Biostat & Health Data Science! Happy to discuss with anyone interested.

#biostatistics #healthdatascience #academicjobs

hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/365...

Thanks for the heads up! Didn’t notice since I’m automatically logged in.

a man in a suit and tie is talking to another man and says " is that something you might be interested in ? " ALT: a man in a suit and tie is talking to another man and says " is that something you might be interested in ? "

I have a great job for you where you can look at other people’s messy code and make suggestions for improvement that they may or may not adopt…