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Ben Schneider

@bschneidr.bsky.social

Stats, surveys, R, and dogs. www.practicalsignificance.com

317 Posts927 Follower696 Folgt
Carrie Kisicki@cmkisicki.bsky.social · last wk.

remember you DO have free will 🫵 you CAN take a little bike ride to see the birds 🐥

baby yellow crowned night heron, it is brown with lighter brown stripes on its feathers and an orange eye, and sitting up in a tree shaded by leaves. not all its feathers are fully grown in yet. photographed at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in DCadult yellow crowned night heron seen from below. she has a light gray body with blue gray wings, a black beak, and a black face with a white tripe down the middle. Her eye is orange-brown and she has two black feathers coming off the back of her head like streamers. her feathers are kind of mussed near her belly suggesting she is growing them back from a brood patch (when birds remove feathers to create a warmer spot on their belly to incubate eggs!) photographed at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in DC
Coalition for Smarter Growth@betterdcregion.bsky.social · 2w ago

🚲🚨Bike adventure alert! Last weekend, @cmkisicki.bsky.social hopped on her bike + Metro to Kenilworth Gardens for the Lotus and Water Lily Festival🪷 The park is one of DC’s many gems accessible by transit + trail, and it was full of life during the festival. What’s your latest DC bike adventure?

You have free will! You can take a little bike ride to look and birds and lotus blossoms.
Ben Schneider @bschneidr.bsky.social · last mo.

New blog post on the energy balancing weighting method that was introduced this week in the Times/Siena poll. www.practicalsignificance.com/posts/energy...

Energy Balancing Weights for Surveys – Practical Significance

Some thoughts on the energy balancing weighting method mentioned in this week’s Times/Siena Poll methodology report.

practicalsignificance.com

Ben Schneider @bschneidr.bsky.social · last mo.

Interesting changes happening in the NYT/Siena poll. It’s been said that what you weight on matters more than how you do the weighting, but this is a nice example of a newer weighting method letting you weight on more things. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/u...

rOpenSci@ropensci.org · last mo.

🎉 We've just moved @ropensci.org on Bluesky to a fully independent account! We were previously bridged from our Mastodon account via Bridgy Fed. Same community, same content, fresh start. Give us a follow if you haven't already! 🦋 #RStats

Hansi Lo Wang (he/him)@hansilowang.bsky.social · 2mo ago

4. ICYMI: A wonky policy change by the Trump administration may spell the end of a wide swath of data from the Census Bureau, including key statistics used for redistricting, policymaking and research www.npr.org/2026/06/12/n...

A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the Census Bureau

New public data for redistricting and other uses may be reduced as Trump officials limit the ways the Census Bureau can protect people's privacy when it releases statistics.

npr.org

Hadley Wickham@hadley.nz · 2mo ago

Ask a bare LLM to multiply two big numbers and it'll confidently get it wrong. But ask an LLM on the web and it gets it right. What's the difference? In my latest post, I dig further into the harness, what it can do and why it matters: open.substack.com/pub/tidydesi...

Your LLM can’t math (and that’s ok)

Last week we precisely defined an agent: an LLM, in a harness, that calls tools repeatedly in a loop. This week we'll fix a few deliberate simplifications and explore the consequences of the harness i...

open.substack.com

Mara Averick@dataandme.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm alive *AND* I wrote a blog post?! Unheard of! Much 💖 to @abbycabs.dev, and @grafana.bsky.social's David Allen and Amanda Wagner whose FOSDEM talk's were a huge source of inspo!

stdlib@stdlib.io · 2mo ago

For years, open source communities relied on visible friction: people got stuck, asked questions in public, and became part of a community. AI is changing that. What happens when newcomers are no longer visible—and neither side knows the other is there? blog.stdlib.io/ai-and-the-i...

Noah Greifer@noahgreifer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New version of #Rstats {fwb} is out! {fwb} implements the fractional weighted bootstrap, aka the Bayesian bootstrap, which is an alternative to the traditional bootstrap that draws a set of weights for each bootstrap replication instead of sampling with replacement from the original sample.

Fractional Weighted Bootstrap

An implementation of the fractional weighted bootstrap to be used as a drop-in for functions in the boot package. The fractional weighted bootstrap (also known as the Bayesian bootstrap) involves draw...

ngreifer.github.io

Egon Willigh☮gen 🟥@egonw.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 2mo ago

congrats to @rOpenSci! https://rogue-scholar.org/records/hac49-exn84 https://doi.org/10.59350/cz2sy-c7z69

15 Years of rOpenSci, and We're Just Getting Started 🎉

Digging through our memory box, we came across a conversation from which we tried to piece together when it all began with rOpenSci. On July 13, 2011, an email was sent with the idea of a shared blog, a clever domain name, and a way to connect R package developers who cared about open science. The name "rOpenSci" appear in that email.

rogue-scholar.org

Ben Schneider @bschneidr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Very interesting new open-access stats paper on an extension of the classic Fay-Herriot model used to borrow strength across many estimates. Uses BART rather than GLMM to model variation across areas: academic.oup.com/jssam/advanc...

BART-FH: Flexible Nonlinear Modeling for Small Area Estimation

Abstract. The Fay-Herriot model has been the workhorse of area-level small area estimation. This model links direct survey estimates to area-level covariat

academic.oup.com

Josiah@josiah.rs · 3mo ago

» arrow-extendr « now supports geoarrow 🌏 Use geoarrow types from anywhere in your 🦀 Rust-powered R packages 🐇📦 👈🏼 Centroid using geoarrow + extendr 👉🏼 called from R compared to {sf} #rust #rstats

use anyhow::bail; use arrow_extendr::FromArrowRobj; use extendr_api::prelude::*; use geo_traits::{CoordTrait, PointTrait}; use geoarrow::array::{GeoArrowArrayAccessor, PointArray}; #[extendr] fn geoarrow_centroid(x: Robj) -> anyhow::Result<Doubles> { let res = PointArray::from_arrow_robj(&x)?; let (sum_x, sum_y, n) = res.iter_values().filter_map(|xi| xi.ok()).fold( (0.0_f64, 0.0_f64, 0usize), |(sx, sy, n), v| { let (x, y) = v.coord().unwrap().x_y(); (sx + x, sy + y, n + 1) }, ); if n == 0 { bail!("cannot compute centroid of empty array"); } let res = [sum_x / n as f64, sum_y / n as f64] .map(Rfloat::from) .into_iter() .collect::<Doubles>(); Ok(res) }library(wk) library(geoarrow) devtools::load_all() #> ℹ Loading extendrtest pnts <- wk::xy(rnorm(100, -180, 180), runif(100, -90, 90)) x <- geoarrow::as_geoarrow_array(pnts) geoarrow_centroid(x) #> [1] -182.711392 -2.806439 sf::st_as_sfc(pnts) |> sf::st_combine() |> sf::st_centroid() #> Geometry set for 1 feature #> Geometry type: POINT #> Dimension: XY #> Bounding box: xmin: -182.7114 ymin: -2.806439 xmax: -182.7114 ymax: -2.806439 #> CRS: NA #> POINT (-182.7114 -2.806439)
Conrad Hackett@conradhackett.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Congratulations to the data wizards at @ourworldindata.org who created this elegant tool so you can adjust fertility, mortality & migration rates for any country to see the impact on population sizes & age structures. This is really, really great!! Check it out!! Excellent tool, terrific write up.

Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · 3mo ago

How will populations across the world change in the 21st century? 🔧 Explore for yourself with our new interactive tool!

An image of the new interactive population simulation tool from Our World in Data, showing South Korea.
samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 3mo ago

tough to overstate how quickly science funding in New Zealand has been blown to pieces - on Friday the NZ govt straight up disbanded the Marsden fund (our version of the NSF) it'll be replaced by a 'transition fund' with less money and zero information, as of yet, about what it will support #nzpol

New transition fund provides continuity while backing bold ideas Published: 14 May 2026 A streamlined Transition Research Fund has been announced for 2027, aligning science funding with national priorities and supporting a focus on outcomes that benefit New Zealand. The fund was developed on advice from the newly established science funding decision-maker, Research Funding New Zealand. This new fund brings investigator-led research into a single fund with three funding mechanisms: Talent Development supports future research leaders to build capability, test ideas and establish independent careers. Projects enable bold, innovative research with strong potential to deliver meaningful benefits for New Zealand. Programmes support ambitious, collaborative research tackling complex challenges and delivering transformational outcomes over a longer term. It supports research from early discovery through to larger scale programmes with a focus on delivering impact for New Zealand, in line with national priorities for science, innovation and technology. The Prime Minister's Science, Innovation and Technology Advisory Council recommended the following four priority areas for public investment: Primary industries and the bioeconomy. Technology for prosperity. Environmental sustainability and resilience. Healthy people and a thriving society. Priorities will be confirmed in the Science, Investment Plan expected to be released mid-2026. The Transition Research Fund brings contestable funding which would have otherwise been delivered through future rounds of the Marsden and Endeavour funds into a single investigator-led research fund. It will open for applications later this year. The total first year investment in the Transition Research Fund in 2027 will be up to $84.4 million. The Transition Research Fund will invest up to $300 million over five years in total. Final funding decisions will be made by Research Funding New Zealand, with all funded projects showing clea…