Martyn Plummer

Congratulations to Professor Giuseppe Cannizzaro on receiving a 2026 Philip Leverhulme Prize! 🎉 Read the full announcement: www.leverhulme.ac.uk/news/2026PLP

This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them?

This is millenarian, apocalyptic thinking! At the very least please understand your beliefs pattern match exactly to doomsday cults! Consider that you might be susceptible to these modes of thinking because of your upbringing or hard wiring

AI is not going to cure your cancer. AI has made some things we previously considered very hard very easy. This is undeniable. It's a logical fallacy to assume it will make all "hard" problems easy. Problems can be "hard" in different ways.

If you don't know what folic acid does when added to flour, do look it up, and marvel at the fact Restore has decided to campaign against it.

JAGS 5.0.0 is now available for macOS This is a guest post by Matt Denwood. After a longer-than-anticipated delay, the macOS installer for JAGS 5.0.0 is now available via SourceForge. There are some big changes for how the official binaries of JAGS 5.x are installed on macOS, which is the topic…

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day. Today we celebrate the life of a man who saved billions by not believing a computer. May we all learn this valuable lesson.

Just a reminder, Professor James Orr, Reform UK head of policy, teaches 'ethics' to undergraduates at Cambridge University youtu.be/aXut3s90rUI

📣 We are recruiting! A 26-month postdoctoral position at Warwick as part of the “Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence” hub on the mathematical foundations of AI. 🔗 Further details available here: warwick-careers.tal.... Closing date: Sunday 6th September 2026 at 11:55pm (UK Time)

We invite #RStats users to contribute to a fund dedicated to helping the family of Tomáš Kalibera following his untimely death in April. Find out more and donate here: www.r-project.org/foundation/k...

Come and work with us! If you have a PhD in Statistics (or related subject) and are looking to develop a teaching focused career in academia then please get in touch. We have a very strong teaching team here.

What's new in JAGS 5.0.0 part 2: Reproducibility martynplummer.wordpress.com/2026/08/04/w...

R-universe now provides binaries and check results for Windows-ARM64 of all CRAN and BIOC packages: contributor.r-project.org/windows-arm64/

Registration is now open for this workshop! website: sites.google.com/view/newcast... registration: webstore.ncl.ac.uk/conferences-...

Emily Wilson showing the world what an academic peer review sounds/reads like. This is pure Reviewer 2 energy. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ju...

Here’s what the guys who “would have” perfectly controlled COVID delivered when given an opportunity to prove their real world mettle and competence.

Norm Matloff (1948-2026) @matloff.bsky.social I was made aware of the post below made by his daughter. We lost another friend and valued long-time contributor the #Rstats community, gone far too soon, and sure to be missed. His memory will be a blessing.

😂

It is seriously alarming how many of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people are just screamingly mentally unwell in deeply toxic, dangerous ways.

“I’m here to tell you that there’s something very valuable in struggle. That there’s something very valuable in friction. Friction is good.”

Happy Father's Dad! www.smbc-comics.com/comic/number...

The 2026 laureates are Brian Ripley, Martin Maechler, Kurt Hornik, Peter Dalgaard, and Luke Tierney who have made the longest sustained contribution to #RStats. Half of the $1m prize money is awarded to the laureates and half to the rest of the Core Team.

The 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026

Warwick Statistics is recruiting a Tutor. This is a one year fixed-term role for the academic year 26-27. Closing Deadline: Thursday 9th July 2026 at 11:55pm (UK Time) warwick-careers.tal....

this flight safety card is all of us

With friends at the University of Warwick (in particular, Rocco Caprio and @adriencorenflos.bsky.social), we've recently arXived some work (arxiv.org/abs/2605.30253) on a method for approximate inference known as "Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference", or "CAVI" for short. Let me explain:

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes

Super excited to get this at my door today! Ursula Laa and my book on exploring high-d data and models is in print! Book website is www.routledge.com/Interactivel... if interested I think my 30% discount code might work for you - msg me. Time to update dicook.github.io/mulgar_book/ too! #rstats

martynplummer.wordpress.com/2026/05/04/j...

And, with error bars, no less

Going beyond the spherical cow approximation. The paper we all needed. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 ♾️ 🐄

Me, when I call a credible interval a confidence interval

#rstats RIP, John Fox @yihui.org just published this lovely tribute to John Fox and his work yihui.org/en/2026/02/j...

I think there is not enough appreciation to how good this FT visualization is the original is like this 👇

Anything that deviates from normal is a conspiracy, including when things are precisely normal. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/curse-2 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Next month the Cambridge Philosophical Society is hosting an event to celebrate David MacKay and his work on the tenth anniversary of his passing. The organizers are soliciting notes sharing how his work has impacted people -- you can submit at docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F....

Offering you everything cheaper, or for nothing, costs you SO MUCH. It’s a really expensive deal. You don’t win. Not in the end.

“We don’t have trustworthy news sources or socially responsible media at all any more. But on the plus side, a machine that lies and makes us all more ignorant and furious saves me up to £3 a week. Bargain.”

*Environmental Modelling meets Infectious Diseases: from Mathematics to Applications* Upcoming workshop in Warwick Stats, supported CRiSM, LMS and RSS. We aim to promote the transfer of ideas between the environmental modelling and infectious disease modelling communities. http://go.warwick.ac...