Ben Harrap

Omg perfect!

Forecasting UK consumer price inflation with RaGNAR: Random generalised network autoregressive processes This article forecasts consumer price index (CPI) inflation in the United Kingdom using random generalised network autoregressive (RaGNAR) processes. …

I heard a talk on this paper and I think they update the model monthly

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

+1 for the LLM suggestion

HEY! YOU! ggdibbler 0.6.1 is finally up on CRAN!

harriet-mason.github.io/ggdibbler/in...

You can now pass random variables to any aesthetic in any ggplot geom/stat. If you can express it as a distribution, ggdibbler can plot it. It also works with ggplot extensions, like gganimate. #rstats

%notin% coming soon to an #rstats environment near you 🤩

developer.r-project.org/blosxom.cgi/...

I mean I just don't do it and keep getting asked to do reviews

What are they gonna do, stop asking? 😂

Where did this peer review norm of providing a summary of the research in the review come from?

It should be evident from your feedback that you actually read the paper

Designing a t-shirt – Ben Harrap

I just realised that another blog post of mine had disappeared in my switch to a quarto sites, so I've reuploaded it (thanks github)

Go read about the "Great Australian Statisticians" design I made for the SSA t-shirt competition #statssky

benharrap.com/post/2020-12...

My favourite learning from #ASC2025 was from @robjhyndman.com

The goal of forecasting isn't always to be correct, it can be to influence policy

If you're successful, the forecast is probably wrong now and that's good

Tongs can help avoid cross-contamination of food items (important for those with allergies), but requires someone monitoring them. If someone drops the tongs on the floor and puts them back, you might as well not have them!

In my past life doing serving/catering, tong refreshing was a common task
+

Chief Tong Refresher, I hope that's on your CV

I'm finally doing my #ASC2025 talk, so naturally I'll need to finish the slides today

I never intended to be an academic yet here I am!

Feels like a low chance relative to a 100% chance of touching the tongs

😂

I need an #episky sanity check

Providing tongs to pick up food seems like the less hygienic approach - everybody had to touch the same tongs

Surely you're going to be more likely to spread a virus compared to just grabbing food with your hands

Right?

ANU has been going through exactly this. $1mil+ paid to Nous, plan gets enacted, destroys the mental and sometimes physical wellbeing of staff here.

Same with several other Australian universities

"You see, Christmas is not a holiday. It is an ideological apparatus of family unity and consumer fetishism. The magic of the film—what we enjoy without knowing—is this collision between sweet kitsch and brutal violence. This overlap is not accidental; it is the truth of Christmas under capitalism."

There should be a side hashtag for people like us where we don't have to do the code, we just say whether we could've done it

I think that's about all the energy I've got 😂

Just over 2 weeks until calls for papers close!

I love #rstats but how are you all finding the energy to do all these extra curriculars like the advent of code?

When I'm done with work I have nothing left 😮‍💨

I thought that was a calf for a second

Hey it could always be worse - one of them could be faulty and giving off a strobing effect. Gotta look on the (very) bright side!

🥲

Cool white LED down lights 🤮

ASC 2025

I'm flying to #ASC2025 tomorrow, who else will be there? #statssky

www.asc2025.net

The data talk I did the other day started out as a silly pun title

Then it morphed into some silly slide ideas

Then it morphed into a full-blown talk

Let the silliness take you places!

CSIRO Industry PhD Program: Information for industry Tackle your business challenge. Gain access to top research and development expertise while developing the next generation of researchers.

Putting a general call out to my private sector colleagues - would anyone be interested in supporting an industry PhD?

I would love to bring in students to work on imaging/time series problems, especially in space/remote sensing bridging astronomy and other applications.

I love learning about this kind of stuff, there's so many interesting little things like

"The rev() function provides a reversed version of its argument. If you wish to sort in decreasing order, sort(x, decreasing = TRUE) is marginally (around 10%) faster than rev(sort(x))."

The @therandomsample.bsky.social podcast had a recent episode with @hadley.nz that was great

Announcing surveydown v1.0.0! – surveydown.org We are thrilled to announce the v1.0.0 release of surveydown, a stable release with improvements to YAML settings, page navigation, question creation, and a smoother overall developer experience.

🎉 Announcing surveydown v1.0.0!

surveydown is an #opensource #rstats package for building surveys with #Quarto & #Shiny. This release improves the survey design experience, including:

- Simplified YAML settings
- Auto page navigation
- Previous buttons!

More at surveydown.org/blog/2025-11...