Rohan Alexander

Fall's here

The Toronto Population Network is holding a conference on 6 November at Hart House at UofT. Keynote from @ridhikashyap.bsky.social! If you're in Toronto come along and help us build the community of demographers and population researchers here! Registration: www.eventbrite.com/e/toronto-po...

This is wonderful. Congratulations on the launch!

IDK if maybe not statistical enough for your students, but The Effect and Mixtape are both good in the social sciences: theeffectbook.net
mixtape.scunning.com

There is one week left to apply to join us at Rutgers! We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Sociology as part of a cluster of new hires in data science and AI.

Applications are due next Wednesday, 10/15.

Yeah it's sad that pedagogy innovation this fall basically means "I brought back in-person exams".

October baseball and the jays won!

Screenshot showing Senate saying he died on 28 Feb and the reps saying he died on 27 Feb.

Hilariously the senate and the reps disagree on when Richard Hartley Smith Abbott died! And you people wonder why I have data trust issues.

Updated Australian Hansard data (1998-2025) thanks to the incredible work of Lindsay Katz!
zenodo.org/records/1729...

Screenshot of Hansard, with "Mr Feeney interjecting" highlighted

Sure you might be a pedant, but are you a "finds mistakes in Hansard" level of pedant? (Feeney wasn't in parliament on this day). Lindsay Katz FTW!

A list of four academic workshops under the heading “Workshops.” The sessions include: “Give Effective Academic Presentations” on Monday, October 6, from 4:00–5:30 pm; “Build Academic Confidence and Overcome Imposterism” on Thursday, October 9, from 12:00–1:15 pm; “Manage Procrastination” on Monday, October 20, from 12:00–1:15 pm; and “Tame Perfectionism” on Thursday, October 23, from 1:00–2:15 pm. Each workshop title is a blue, underlined link.

"Overcome Imposterism" "Manage Procrastination" "Tame Perfectionism". Real "tag yourself" moment in terms of which workshop you sign up to.

Rowing is very much the best sport!

Photo of a book with the following quote circled: “Learning to speak !Kung was a laborious task. No !Kung-English speaker was available, so one had to work with two interpreters. Onesi-mus Mbombo translated my questions from English to Setswana, and Gakekgoshe Isak (the son of Headman Isak and a fluent !Kung speaker) from Setswana to !Kung. The answer came back like a broken telephone from Kung to Setswana and Setswana to English. This cumbersome system spurred me on to learn! Kung quickly, but in fact during the early months I learned more Setswana than !Kung. By March 1964 I could use Setswana in interviews and to elicit more !Kung vocabulary. The !Kung word can be described as an explosion of sound surrounded by a vowel. The bundle of clicks, fricatives, and glottal stops that begins most words makes !Kung a difficult language to record, let alone learn to speak; and the difficulty is compounded by the extremely rapid-fire delivery of !Kung speakers. Nevertheless, month by month my facility progressed until it was possible to dispense with the services of the English-Setswana interpreter a year into the fieldwork.”

Data scientists: “OMG we had to learn a new programming language for this project”
Anthropologists: “We literally learnt two languages”

Some nice examples for data science ethics classes: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/asked-to-do-...

OMG it's @statisticalsam.bsky.social on BlueSky!

New faculty website profile!

This is super nice. (although “the universe” == the US in this case ;) ). Had been looking for something like this to use to code some Hansard speech and looking forward to trying your ensemble approach. Thanks for setting out the approach so clearly.

That's incredible. I had no idea.

Fears the expanded Home Guarantee Scheme will send property prices into overdrive Sarah Ferguson presents Australia's premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis...

I was against this policy 20 years ago - rohanalexander.com/blog/blog-20... - and I remain against it.
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10...
(Sadly, I don't have a photo of the print original, although I'm sure Mum does.)

Two more days to submit! 🚨 Please share if you can! 🙏 #CDSM2025

This was really interesting. Thanks for writing/sharing it. The history bit was fascinating.

Oilers 50/50 raffle has paid $81M to company owned by hockey group over 4 years, documents reveal Financial statements show percentage of ticket sales available for charity has declined since raffle moved online

When you buy an Edmonton Oilers 50/50 ticket, how much money ends up with charity? Check out our investigation to find the answer.

zurl.co/5aL6i

#abpoli #hockey

Two children watching Margin Call.

How early is too early for children to watch Margin Call?

Wow! Congratulations!

Episode #30 - Owen Wareham is a Fluorescent Runner Owen Wareham is a runner who sees success in doing the little things, even talking about how a morning run can give him the little bit of courage he needs for his day ahead.

My friend was on a podcast talking about his running! fluorescentrunner.substack.com/p/episode-30...

And now there are two on the ice!

Going to be upset if William Sealy Gosset doesn’t get a guernsey.

Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education Ana Elisa Lopez-Miranda, Tiffany Timbers, Rohan Alexander Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted in just a few years from novelty to ubiquity, raising fundamental questions for data science education. Tasks once used to teach coding, writing, and problem-solving can now be completed by LLMs, forcing educators to reconsider both pedagogy and assessment. To understand how instructors are adapting, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 42 instructors from 33 institutions in 10 countries in June and July 2025. Our qualitative analysis reveals a pragmatic mix of optimism and concern. Many respondents view LLMs as inevitable classroom tools -- comparable to calculators or Wikipedia -- while others worry about de-skilling, misplaced confidence, and uneven integration across institutions. Around 58 per cent have already introduced demonstrations, guided activities, or make extensive use of LLMs in their courses, though most expect change to remain slow and uneven. That said, 31 per cent have not used LLMs to teach students and do not plan to. We highlight some instructional innovations, including AI-aware assessments, reflective use of LLMs as tutors, and course-specific chatbots. By sharing these perspectives, we aim to help data science educators adapt collectively to ensure curricula keep pace with technological change.

Preprint of “Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education” available: arxiv.org/abs/2509.12283

By Ana Elisa Lopez-Miranda (an exceptional undergrad!), @tiffanytimbers.bsky.social, and me.

Comments appreciated!

If all the world were a monorepo The R ecosystem and the case for extreme empathy in software maintenance

Really insightful post from Julie Tibshirani (spotted in LinkedIn, can't find on Bsky) reflecting on #rstats 's unique governance structure and what can be learned for other languages

jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the...

Only just getting to this. So interesting. Thanks for sharing it.