Martin Modrák

After quite a long time sitting as a development package epidist is now on CRAN. It extends brms with a framework for epidemiological extensions.

Man sharing larger parts of childcare. Beating kids much less accepted. Cystic fibrosis treatment (as just one example of many medical breakthroughs).

Thanks to Ciara Ní Bhroin for writing this piece on the DRCC consent ad row - props to @aidanobrien.bsky.social who gets a mention www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

The TeX Live Utility release notes are still undefeated.

Some notable examples of long-standing errors in science from Douglas Allchin’s new article: “When is science ‘self-correcting’?”: doi.org/10.1016/j.sh... Few quotes follow…

5 journals in probability and statistics decided to close temporarily their submission system, due to the crazy increase in the number of submissions 😮 Annales de l'Institut Poincaré B, Bernouilli, Electronic Communications in Probability, Electronic Journal of Probability and ESAIM: P&S.

I will be looking for a PhD student in Bayesian statistics (in collaboration with Paul Bürkner), located in Prague. Forward to students if you have somebody who could be interested. www.martinmodrak.cz/grammo-call/

After 12,000+ user interactions, we're releasing the first major update of Synthometricon (formerly SynthNet, with @anniria.bsky.social and @ruben.the100.ci ) 🧵 Try it here search.synth-science.org

I recently moved to TU Darmstadt (Germany) and am currently hiring PhD student through ELISS. https://ellis.eu/news/ellis-phd-program-call-for-applications-2026 If you interested, please apply and choose me as a potential advisor. Topics include Continual/Distributed/Federated/Active/Transparent […]

Currently, a diagram is making the rounds that is claimed to show a significant reduction in Russian disinformation bot activity after Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers. There is no evidence that this plot shows real data. I suspect that this image is AI-generated.

Well. This is a thing. A few weeks ago, I announced my new publication in American Psychologist on LinkedIn and didn't do it here. This was clearly a mistake, as some of Bluesky has decided to pile on some... Critique of a student article talking about my work in context. I have some things to say🧵

🧪 probably a long shot, but: has anyone heard of a two-headed trout specimen named Cuthbert the Great? the specimen allegedly went to the AMNH in 1940 but the museum has no record of it. trying to track down Cuthbert. www.nytimes.com/1944/08/13/a...

i have a new theory of Social Media Bad. a lot of ink has been spilled about the addictive qualities of twitterlike social media, including many allegations of developer use of "dark patterns" and self conscious "engagement maximizing", but i'd like to propose something a little more mundane.

because, as long as you actually care about having the conversation, which i do, *the rational response* is to start multitasking. do part of a chore, until you get a notification, or you check the app. write another reply, and then back to the chore. all day long. because that's how long it takes.

Can we switch off diseases? siRNA drugs are, in my view and @jacobtref.bsky.social’s too, one of the most exciting developments in medicine. So we decided to do an episode!

BREAKING NEWS: “Do geese see God” is a palindrome

Happy Stanislav Petrov day! He saved the world from nuclear annihilation on this day in 1983. My freshman year in college would have been so much worse without his courage.🧵

“Why shouldn’t I custom-generate all of my child’s media?” Because the point of children’s literature, music, art, and movies is not to optimize leisure time, it is to provide your children with cultural, emotional, societal, and epistemic touch points via which they can relate to the wider world.

Thoughts and prayers for research data managers everywhere. You are not alone. We will get through this together techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelbl...

Your life saving clinical trail could be TERMINATED by the Trump administration. We scraped through the data and found that 50% of all clinical trials are at risk of being cancelled. It's time to talk about it and what you can do to stop this. 🧵 🧪

New in the saga of our causal model of human growth 🚼🧬📈at AJBA: can we reconstruct growth trajectories when kids’ ages are uncertain & all we have is cross-sectional data? Turns out, YES! 🎉 Accurate estimates, with exciting (?!) implications for bioarchaeology and beyond. doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.70358

Consequences of the flood of AI manuscripts: "An early-career researcher at an unbranded institution loses the one mechanism that ever let them be read on merit — anonymous review of the work itself, however badly it functioned in practice.

More diagnostic tests don't always = better or reduced antibiotic prescribing. Well, not CRP in primary care anyway! #IDSky #ClinMicro @jac-amr.bsky.social academic.oup.com/jacamr/artic...

www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/11...

Need new examples for teaching confounding and reverse causality to my undergrads. Send any published statistical crimes my way please.

@dsquareddigest.bsky.social "13 Theses on AI and regulation" are exceptionally good. My favorite set of thoughts I've read on this topic so far.

Happy to see others emphasizing traceability (Nachvollziehbarkeit) over simple reproducibility. Let’s make fetch happen!

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

Inspired by a @f2harrell.bsky.social comment, I did some #rstats simulations about how big a sample needs to be for the central limit theorem to kick in and the sample mean be normally distributed for inference purposes. Yes, with skewed data the answer is "lots". freerangestats.info/blog/2026/09...

5,000-year-old drainage system found at #LimanTepe #Archaeology #Europe #History #Science #Turkey

I will be looking for a PhD student in Bayesian statistics (in collaboration with Paul Bürkner), located in Prague. Forward to students if you have somebody who could be interested. www.martinmodrak.cz/grammo-call/

Okay before I do write my screed about cluster analysis, please send me your favorite *positive* examples that illustrate the utility of the method!

The road to IKEA is paved with good intentions.

I do wonder what David Hilbert would think about all this. He was accused of trying to automate mathematics, in the 1920s! The "Hilbert program" failed in an exact sense, because Gödel, but it succeeded by making formal proof systems like Lean possible. And Lean makes the AI-sausage-machine work.

i'm using my solarizeddocx which i made way back when because the default RMarkdown MS Word output looked bad github.com/tjmahr/solar...

You can now read this invaluable book on methods in philosophy of science open-access. Find me in Chapter 16!

Had a Zoom meeting earlier today where a lot of great exchanges were happening in the chat, so we wanted to save the log for later. Zoom exports a plain text file, so I made a tool to convert that into something that's more convenient to interact with. Sharing in case anyone else finds it useful!

lmao what the fuck do you mean it's unlikely but you can't rule it out. do you not know what you're training your models on? are you guys unaware of what's going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?

... and that's where Registered Revisions comes in The Registered Revisions Meta Trial Pilot Report is OUT NOW!! osf.io/preprints/me... But new(ish) policy involves developing a new(ish) multi-headed trial design, workflows, infrastructure, piloting, mistakes, and a super team. And it's all here.

Multiverse analysis, abdication of responsibility and manufacturing of doubt: I have written on some downsides I see with multiverse analysis (which I like in principle): arxiv.org/abs/2607.14623 I was inspired/provoked to write it by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci (thanks!)