Miles Moore

Our new pre-print is up on BioRxiv Ecology - goal was to better estimate how trait evolution impacts population dynamics & community composition. We (me, postdoc Ruben Hermann) used a Joint Species Distribution Models (HMSC) fit to simulated & empirical eco-evo data.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

writing is thinking (code edition)

Just because an LLM can produce a report with various figures & charts doesn't mean it is good at statistics.

Because good statistics is not about producing code.

It's about deep knowledge of study design & conduct. In my opinion, 95% of all data science problems come from poor questions & design.

Automating inferential modeling with AI is absolutely a step in the wrong direction. Rstats, by way of abstracting away a lot of the dirty details of a model, has already created *some* bad statistical habits among scientists. Adding another layer btw scientist and their data is not a net benefit

Interested in simulating the kind of data that you might commonly find in evolutionary and ecological studies?

Then we have the R package for you - squidSim!!

Check our new preprint:
ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

This only happens to you once

German classified ad: 1 skeptisher Hamster zu verkaufen 20€ Art: Hamster Beschreibung: Er guckt einen skeptisch an, als würde man nichts richtig machen. Es macht mich wahnsinnig, ich kann diesen vorwurfsvollen Blick nicht länger ertragen. Sein Name ist Olaf.

Was reminded of this classic today - we are all Olaf when reading the scientific literature

Figure 5. Time series showing cumulative number of cases averted at each time caused by the intervention calculated using our method (single-world) and a standard method. Shaded regions denote 90% confidence intervals. Note that there is more variation in the middle of the epidemic, so it may seem as though the number of cases averted is large during those times. (Online version in colour.)

Are we doing simulations wrong? This paper convinced me we are. doi.org/10.1098/rstb... Usually we run 2 sets of "worlds" w and w-out intervention. Gives large uncertainties that include negative (harm) effects of interventions that are actually always positive (beneficial)!

Thank you! Very excited and grateful to be in a position to do so

I just submitted my first ever first author paper! Whoop! So cool

Betteridge's law of headlines? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteri...

before and after today’s glacier collapse that buried 90% of blatten, switzerland

Tweet: Stats twitter: “All statistical methods fail horribly without telling you and you shouldn’t trust any research ever. fml.” Data science twitter: “Here are NINE SIMPLE WAYS to convert your data into ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS using POWERFUL AI. Number 3 will astound you!! I’m on a boat”

Among my favorites, from @cameronpat.bsky.social

Knud Andreassen Baade, Norwegian (1808-1879), Norges vestkyst (On the West Coast of Norway), 1852, oil on canvas, Historisches Museum Bamberg, Germany

Are you excited about the elegant philosophy of Bayesian inference, but struggling to see how it can be applied beyond the idealized examples in introductory texts and tutorials? Over the past few months I’ve released a series of demonstrative analysis that might help. 👇

GitHub - benjamin-rosenbaum/bayesian-intro: Introduction to Bayesian statistics Introduction to Bayesian statistics. Contribute to benjamin-rosenbaum/bayesian-intro development by creating an account on GitHub.

I completely re-worked my course "Introduction to Bayesian statistics with brms" and taught it for the 1st time this week. It is meant as a tutorial for ecologists, but should be general enough for other sciences as well
github.com/benjamin-ros...
#stats #Rstats #brms #Stan #Bayesian

I have been using Python a lot more recently and just use plotnine for visualization 99% of the time. Seaborn isn’t bad though!

Science Communication as a Moral Imperative We need to do a much better job of encouraging scientists to be stronger communicators, and share the wonders of science, and the important…

We need to see science as a social compact where it serves the larger world, not our own interests.

As a first step, scientists must communicate to the larger world much better.

I wrote an essay about this in 2016, which still holds today.

globalecoguy.org/science-comm...

Foundations and future directions for causal inference in ecological research, forthcoming w/ @katherinesiegel.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/4mm57zzd.
We wrote it based on our experience teaching causal inference to ecologists w/ some stuff we wish other papers had reviewed to share w/ the students
1/n

You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Than any computer could ever be. You know why? Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

You’re a living human being. And a computer is just a machine. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Human beings are far more wonderful than machines. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Mister Rogers never misses

New timeline, same problems, same solution

A Graphical Catalog of Threats to Validity: Linking Social... : Epidemiology lenging, but these skills are often glossed over in training. Campbell and Stanley’s framework for causal inference has been extraordinarily influential in social science training programs but has rec...

Threats to validity (with helpful DAGs)

journals.lww.com/epidem/fullt...

On The Tardiness Of Coworkers And How To Exploit It - Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology In this groundbreaking research, we determine the optimum amount of time to show up late to a meeting by arbitrarily assigning numbers to things

A little late to the party here, but just read a fascinating (totally real) paper on applied gaussian processes. Titled "On the tardiness of coworkers and how to exploit it": jabde.com/2023/02/12/c...

Happy Winter Solstice! … a lenticular cloud over the #Pyrenees

The moon, viewed through a home telescope

This evening's moon, viewed through the home telescope

Looking forward to catch up on a whole bunch of #ecology research at the #ESAus2024 conference in Naarm (Melbourne) this week! 🤗 Come check out my talk on the importance of #spatialscale in species distribution modelling on Wednesday (room 106 at 4pm!) There will be photos of #corals🪸

A careful dose of ignorance — a story of how my not reading two papers, many years ago, was vital to my career's path. waynemaddison.wordpress.com/2024/12/05/a...

Excited to share our new paper out in Science! We combined simulations, experiments, and field data to show how dispersal simultaneously stabilizes species and genetic diversity, which results in persistent eco-evo dynamics. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Small multiple line chart showing how snowpack in CO compares to recent years.

❄️ I wanted a different view of how state-wide snowpack in Colorado is progressing compared to previous years.

Plugging into NRCS data (updated daily!), I created an interactive chart that compares this year vs. the median + each season since 2013-14.

📈 www.datawrapper.de/_/WPaJE/?v=5

YouTube video by Berlin Epidemiological Methods Colloquium BEMC NOV 2024 - William Lowe - Collider bias (complimentary)

The organisers have sensibly kept this hidden as long as possible, but here's the talk.

youtu.be/m56YEkkWYzI

CW dad jokes, tendentious claims, Monty Hall problem.

Best watched at zero speed, while doing something actually productive instead.