Ben Bolker

Hi all! I'm looking for people to try out my new collaborative writing platform. Think: Overleaf or GDocs for Mkdown LaTeX HTML Typst Quarto Free, open source, and full-featured. Many editors, chat, comments, track changes, history, AI, mobile, templates, etc Would ❤️ any feedback! librepaper.org

If you fit models with glmmTMB(), gratia 📦 has gained support for these model objects, including glmmTMB's nascent capability for fitting penalized spline terms using mgcv's s() You'll need the GitHub versions of both gratia & glmmTMB to try this out #RStats #statistics github.com/glmmTMB/glmm...

Please RT: Do you use math to address interesting biological problems? Join us at Vanderbilt BioSci! We are conducting an open-rank TT search in Theoretical Biology: apply.interfolio.com/194619. We are a friendly and collaborative department with interests spanning a range of biological disciplines!

Stats explorations w/ Claude remind me of "a 4-wheel drive vehicle just gets you stuck in deeper mud". Going down rabbit holes I would previously have avoided ... surprisingly (to me) small/complicated differences between LRT & Wald for coverage/type-1 error ... bbolker.github.io/bbmisc/wald_...

can someone point me to the (somewhat recent?) skeet along the lines of "I fitted <super-fancy model>, now I'm going to boil it all down to a simple linear slope _post hoc_ and make that hypothesis test my main conclusion <sarcastic>" ? (The original skeet was wittier and more eloquent ...)

What's new in JAGS 5.0.0 part 1: Initial Values martynplummer.wordpress.com/2026/08/03/w...

**V. loosely scoped question** talked to a student about connections between Bayes & freq, e.g.: empirical Bayes [state-space, mixed models, penalized splines]; regularization/regularizing priors; sampling vs optimization (Monte Carlo EM/MCMC vs MLE/MAP). Suggest books/blog posts/papers on this ...?

#rstats question: Is the mean of the BLUPs from a multilevel model unbiased? I have a couple clarification statements below.

The #GLLVMs in R with @vdveenb.bsky.social is almost full - last chance to join us next week! Thanks for spreading the word! www.physalia-courses.org/courses-work...

I found this surprisingly thoughtful and balanced: r-statistics.co/R-vs-Julia.h... (although some of the labeling on Figure 2 is a little confusing)

Hmm, Kobo daily deals is offering _Brave New World_ and _The Stranger_ as YA books ... ? I know these are often on high school reading lists, but seems weird. (Not sure CS Lewis would be happy being listed adjacent to Huxley and Camus ...??)

AI, Comparative Advantage, and the Next Decade of Ecological Research. Food for thought @jdrakephd.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/ele.... #ecopubs

This is such a good article. Make sure you read the whole thing—I’m excited to learn about stoplights (or rather, go-lights)!

new diamond open-access Journal of Statistical Ecology launched 🎉🎉🎉 jse.centre-mersenne.org @fredbarraquand.bsky.social @oaggimenez.bsky.social @marieaugermethe.bsky.social @vianeylb.bsky.social (apologies to any Bsky editors I missed)

#RStats challenge and potential community project: * Create a minimal package 'dumpsterfire' that triggers as many 'R CMD check' issues as possible! Fun, but could also become a excellent resource for illustrating and understanding package check issues Here's a start: github.com/HenrikBengts...

today in "base R functions I didn't know about after 20 years": modifyList() (it was added in 2006 github.com/r-devel/r-sv... )

This is art. gillescolling.com/texanshootR/

Thinking about how this might go Listener: My chains aren't converging Andrew: Your model is bad Aki: Your parameterization is bad Richard: The Buddha teaches us that numerical integration is suffering

Do you know a good framework to document data analysis choices? Ex: dropping obs, recoding a var, tuning pars, model + test statistics, etc. Ideally human-readable so people don't have to read my entire codebase. Low-maintenance+ machine-readable for bonus points! #RStats #PyData

Ok Bluesky hive mind - please tell me what this figure represents. On the ceiling of one of the galleries in the Doria Pamphilij in Rome c C18th. At first glance I thought it was a musical instrument. Maybe architecture?

That fireside chat with Jay Bhattacharya: a view from across the pond - “In his answers to difficult questions, Bhattacharya revealed himself as someone who gets very uncomfortable when confronted with inconsistencies in his behaviour or views.”

I have been really impressed with @beaconbio.bsky.social, and find myself using it more and more. Excellent resource to replace ProMED.

RIP Tomáš Kalibera. #rstats lost a huge contributor today. Condolences to his young family. stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-...

Post Doc position alert! Come work with us on the evolution of cannibalism. Full job description in link below. Salary starts at $58k plus benefits. (Please help spread the word) emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Did you know you (yes, YOU!) can contribute to base R? Base R is the foundation of everything #RStats. If you’ve ever found a bug or thought of an improvement, you can help shape the language. Join @ellakaye.co.uk on the Posit Data Science Lab tomorrow to learn how to get started! pos.it/dslab

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

🎉🎉🎉

@vdveenb.bsky.social where is the best venue for asking `gllvm` questions? Wanted to see if I could use the devel version to fit a multitype model equivalent to the following MCMCglmm specification (i.e. two different 'rows' grouping variables, each with random slopes) @idworkin.bsky.social ...