Some good examples of what I’m trying to find: van der Maas & Wagenmakers (2005) measuring chess ability where items = “choose-a-move” board positions; Moral et al. (2019) measuring soil fertility where items = sand/silt/clay content, etc. Others?

Wes Bonifay@wesbonifay.bsky.social · 3d ago

I'm looking for published papers showcasing creative uses of item response theory, including studies with unusual item types (e.g., audio stimuli) and/or those in contexts beyond ed/psych measurement (e.g., using chemical mixtures as "items" to measure exposure burden; Liu et al. (2022)). Any ideas?

Most people read papers like this, which is why captions are critical to engaging with your audience. Captions need to be self-contained, explaining why the figure/plot is meaningful. (Another insight from www.principiae.be/X0100.php).

Angela Collier@acollierastro.bsky.social · 2d ago

Every time I open a paper I just scroll til I hit plots and then I feel like a bad scientist because I will only read the text if the plots interest me. Can't stop won't stop.

Some good examples of what I’m trying to find: van der Maas & Wagenmakers (2005) measuring chess ability where items = “choose-a-move” board positions; Moral et al. (2019) measuring soil fertility where items = sand/silt/clay content, etc. Others?

Wes Bonifay@wesbonifay.bsky.social · 3d ago

I'm looking for published papers showcasing creative uses of item response theory, including studies with unusual item types (e.g., audio stimuli) and/or those in contexts beyond ed/psych measurement (e.g., using chemical mixtures as "items" to measure exposure burden; Liu et al. (2022)). Any ideas?

I'm looking for published papers showcasing creative uses of item response theory, including studies with unusual item types (e.g., audio stimuli) and/or those in contexts beyond ed/psych measurement (e.g., using chemical mixtures as "items" to measure exposure burden; Liu et al. (2022)). Any ideas?

Mephisto, by Joaquín Espalter y Rull, 1872, 📸 by Dan Mullan

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐊𝐨𝐥𝐦𝐨𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐨𝐯 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞, 𝐊𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐚'𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐦, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 [via @sciam.bsky.social] 🧪🥼✖️➕ "Karatsuba’s genius was realizing that you can trade expensive, time-consuming multiplications for cheap, fast additions." www.scientificamerican.com/article/math... #MathSky #complexity

Mathematicians still don’t know the fastest way to multiply numbers

A 23-year-old student overturned an ancient conjecture about one of math’s simplest operations

scientificamerican.com

Modeling by minimum description length

Excited to share a paper recently accepted at Nature Mental Health! 😄 For decades, we've assumed that covariance among psychopathology informs comorbidity. What if we’ve been wrong?

PsyArXivBot@psyarxivbot.bsky.social · last mo.

Covariation among higher-order psychopathology dimensions is driven by nomorbidity, not comorbidity: https://osf.io/3t2cm

I never had a teacher believe in me like this.

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · last mo.

A pilot jumped out of the door of a moving plane to his death, leaving the student he was teaching to fly to land the aircraft by herself. The student said he told her, "You know what you have to do, carry on."

I underestimated Muthén’s marketing budget

I should have been consulted

Stephen Turner@stephenturner.us · 2mo ago

How to give a bad talk www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This article doesn’t address the real hack: choose a starting word with common consonants instead of common vowels. Try CRWTH

Nora Newcombe@noranewcombe.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I've thought for some time that analyzing Wordle play is an interesting challenge for cognitive science. This article starts to scratch the surface. Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/u...

Scientific journal editor here: If you're invited to peer review an article and you can't do it, please just click "no." That tells me "this person can't do it, I should invite someone else." Otherwise the system waits 3 weeks to tell me that you didn't respond and I should invite someone else.

Agent based model or drone footage of Limp Bizkit in Greece?

Handmade lino block print of Claude Shannon that I commissioned from www.etsy.com/shop/minouette

Grant Sanderson@3blue1brown.com · 2mo ago

Suppose you wanted to reinvent the idea of Shannon Entropy for yourself. This puzzle is a good place to start (Full video on YouTube).

If I were an action hero, this is what I’d say to the bad guy before the kill shot.

This semester I taught a new class, Statistical Model Evaluation, that covered frequentist, Bayesian, and information-theoretic philosophies and methods of model evaluation. Each week students had to submit a 1-page reaction to an assigned reading, along with a question to discuss in class

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed throughout this commencement speech at the University of Arizona for his praise of AI. This comes just a week after another commencement speaker who mentioned AI was booed at a school in Florida. Read more: www.404media.co/ucf-ai-comme...

I will never stop talking about this: The lovely and profound "If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known" is from an NYT article about the author accidentally being CC'd on an email where his friends were making fun of him for renting goats.

emceekayvee@emceekayvee.bsky.social · last yr.

It me

Graphic designers: I designed this in PowerPoint but printing company needs a PDF. But export to PDF messed up the kerning (see “ia” in “Williams”). It looks great in pptx, just not after exporting. Any ideas?

Wes Bonifay@wesbonifay.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The circle of life

The circle of life

Classic academic's wikipedia page arc

this graduation speech moment is notable, and her amazed shock at having failed to read the room feels instructive. when you're inside the bubble, you think everybody else is. but everybody isn't.

Me discussing Camper Van Beethoven

ε manning (he/they)@esmanning.bsky.social · 3mo ago

love when I get to blow my linguist friends' minds by pointing out that it's [grilled [cheese sandwich]], not [[grilled cheese] sandwich]

If only psych measurement was as straightforward and practical as physical measurement

This is great! (Paper was helmed by the brilliant @winterstat.bsky.social and two former students from my IRT course.)

Magnus Johansson@pgmj.bsky.social · 4mo ago

A recent tutorial paper by @wesbonifay.bsky.social et al on Bayesian IRT with brms called for the creation of an R package make it easier for researchers to run this type of analysis. While my package is focused on Rasch models, I hope it contributes towards this. #rstats doi.org/10.1016/j.js...

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

If you're attending @ncme38.bsky.social this week, stop by the "Majestic" room on Thursday @ 1:45p to hear about our majestic new project on "Corroborative factor analysis."

If I had any students to advise, I'd start a reading club where we'd talk about the composition of creative prose. I'd have them dissect Nicholson Baker's novella about riding an escalator to buy shoelaces & they'd probably hate it but at least learn that boring topics don't require boring writing