About half of US adults reported no alcohol in the past month in the 2024 NSDUH. Among adults with usable data, the heaviest-drinking tenth reported 71% of all drinks, averaging 20/week. The "average" adult, about 3 drinks/week, is hard to find. Read more: mmuntasir.substack.com/p/who-drinks...

Who Drinks America’s Alcohol?

In the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, nearly half of adults reported no drinking in the past month. Among adults with usable data, the heaviest tenth reported 71 percent of all drinks.

mmuntasir.substack.com

I’m recruiting a PhD student to come work with me at UT San Antonio. I have 3 years of support, so this would be good for someone with a masters degree. If you’re interested in working on Bayesian methods in demographic research, spatial analysis, and using AI tools for social science research

My first R package! brfssdata puts 40 years of CDC BRFSS microdata (1985–2024) in R: download-once caching and DuckDB queries. install.packages("brfssdata") muntasirmasum.github.io/brfssdata/ #rstats #epidemiology #publichealth #demography @ualbanycihs.bsky.social

Access CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Data | Muntasir Masum

Just in time for the Fall 2026 semester, I am excited to share that my first R package is on CRAN! "brfssdata: Access CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Data" BRFSS is one of the largest...

linkedin.com

Latest version of Positron can open xlsx files in the data viewer(!) and it has a dropdown menu now for previewing different formats of #QuartoPub documents And—most importantly, but also from a few weeks ago, so less new—the plots panel can pick up dimensions from chunk options!!!! #rstats

Did you know you can search for R packages by what they do, as opposed to just their names? Look! 👉🏼 rwarehouse.netlify.app @kylieainslie.bsky.social made The Warehouse for just this purpose. Send it to a new R programmer today ❤️ because it's the resource we all wish we'd had at some point #rstats

Go make, absorb, or solve something with your brain and your heart today. Do a puzzle. Take apart an electrical device that you may not be able to reassemble. Paint or draw! Read a story or poem to someone. Bake a cheesecake. Journal with a pretty pen! Sing a song. Deep clean the fridge. ✨

Featured on What's New in R this week: ✅ The {realtalk} package for accessing US price indexes in R ✅ A deep dive into atmospheric light simulation for 3D visualizations ✅ {FakeDataR}, a package for generating synthetic data to safely share with AI assistants Read more: buff.ly/sTOfyrH #rstats

The data community is really a mutual admiration society ❤️ and I like it that way. Today on the Hangout, Martin Frigaard recommended @cghlewis.bsky.social's newsletter! I subscribe, and I think you should, too!! It's called RDM Weekly: rdmweekly.substack.com

RDM Weekly | Substack

A weekly roundup of research data management resources, curated by Crystal Lewis. Click to read RDM Weekly, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

rdmweekly.substack.com

New paper out in @jamanetworkopen.com In 2022, there were 905,159 more deaths in the US than we'd expect if Americans had death rates of other high-income countries. That difference has nearly tripled since 1999. COVID played a role but gap was widening well before 2020. tinyurl.com/y4ecvfrs

Causes of Excess Deaths in the US Compared With Other High-Income Countries

This cross-sectional study examines excess mortality in the US compared with other high-income countries from 1999 to 2022 and investigates causes of death accounting for the disparity.

tinyurl.com

Day 23 #30DayChartChallenge — Seasons Kyoto’s cherry blossom record (812–2024) shows spring arriving earlier, shifting full bloom from mid-April to a record-early March 26 in 2021. Data: sakura_bloom GitHub + JMA Tools: R + ggplot2 #RStats #CherryBlossom #Phenology #ClimateChange

Four small Quarto extensions to sharpen your Reveal.js slides: animated list fragments, step-by-step code annotations, auto-repeating headings, and keyboard-driven tabsets. Each one fixes a single friction point. 🎯 mickael.canouil.fr/posts/2026-0... #Quarto #QuartoPub #SlideCrafting #RevealJS

Quarto Reveal.js extensions to sharpen your slides – Mickaël CANOUIL

A short tour of small Quarto extensions that make Reveal.js presentations tidier and more interactive. Coordinated list fragments, animated code annotations, cascading headings, and keyboard-friendly ...

mickael.canouil.fr

Wrapping up my Spring semester on #statistics and #rstats by discussing all things #Data #Visualization in #R @ualbanycihs.bsky.social Built an interactive #Quarto presentation: muntasirmasum.github.io/epi553-data-... I welcome any feedback to improve and learn.

Happy to answer questions.

UAlbany College of Integrated Health Sciences@ualbanycihs.bsky.social · 7mo ago

In the Epidemiology Master of Public Health (MPH) program at UAlbany, you’ll gain the scientific knowledge and analytical skills you need to promote health and help to prevent and control disease and injury. You can complete your degree either on campus or online: www.albany.edu/cihs/program...

Maintaining an academic CV using a Word doc is not convenient and format-agnostic. I built a reproducible academic CV using #Quarto + #Typst and put together a template: muntasirmasum.github.io/quarto-typst... Big thanks to Dr. Andrew Heiss for pointing me to the right sources. #AcademicCV

New open tutorial: Publication-ready tables in R using gtsummary + flextable, with real NHIS survey data. Covers Table 1, weighted vs. unweighted, regression tables, Word export, and more. 🔗 muntasirmasum.github.io/table-tutorial/ #RStats #PublicHealth #Epidemiology #OpenScience #gtsummary

I’m excited to share a new County Health Explorer, an interactive R #Shiny application for #mapping and analyzing public health data across U.S. counties. lnkd.in/dbMHnVid The app integrates two national datasets: County Health Rankings & Roadmaps and CDC Code is on GitHub at lnkd.in/dmY5NJYD

I rounded up a few Claude Skills for #RStats users. Huge thanks to the creators who developed them. They share Skills for everything from tidyverse code to brand.yml files to learning while using AI. Hope the list is useful, and please let me know what I missed! 🧡 rworks.dev/posts/claude...

A Few Claude Skills for R Users – R Works

The community has come together to create some great Claude Skills that you can try out today.

rworks.dev

I’ve now posted the National YRBS data, 2015-2023, here. I’ll add the state and district data soon. www.datalumos.org/datalumos/pr...

Joel Mittleman@joeljm.bsky.social · 2y ago

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey has monitored the wellbeing of America’s high school students since 1991. Since 2015, it’s been a vital source of data on LGBQ youth. In 2023, it provided the first ever nationally representative sample of transgender teens. As of this morning, it’s gone.

I have a 99.8% snapshot of all zipped files from CDC Vital Statistics Online as of today. Documentation pdfs too. The one missing file was cut off part way 🤷‍♂️ will try again from time to time. Anyone needs anything reach out

At a point of potential transformation of America's public health policies, @mmather.bsky.social @prbdata.bsky.social on @thebrianlehrershow.bsky.social @wnyc.org speaks on the last hundred years of mortality shifts in the US. #Demography www.wnyc.org/story/100-ye...

100 Years of 100 Things: US Mortality Causes | The Brian Lehrer Show | WNYC

As the centennial series continues with a look at the shifts in U.S. mortality statistics over the past 100 years.

wnyc.org

I've turned my intro to R workshop into a free open-access book: The R Workshop 🌟 Perfect for R beginners, with more chapters coming soon! Check it out: www.r-workshop.org Prefer live instruction? Join my 2-day virtual workshop Jan 15-16 via Instats. Details: instats.org/seminar/intr... #rstats

Ever saw an impressive chart and wondered how to recreate it? Our latest guide shows how to replicate a New York Times chart on US mortgage rates, using geom_ribbon() to highlight gaps, add annotations, and geom_textpath() to label lines. Check it out: https://buff.ly/4g0XW5a #rstats #DataViz

🚀 Exciting update for #rstats enthusiasts! Our engineers have powered-up R deployments on Connect Cloud. Shiny Apps & Quarto Docs now deploy and reload in just seconds! 🔗 Sign up for free to experience the speed: connect.posit.cloud And please help us spread the word—repost to share the news!

I've been working with a variety of #LLM / #GenAI interfaces in #Python, but I haven't found one that does exactly what I need in a streamlined way. The new chatlas package from Posit may be just that. It supports multiple providers, structured data outputs, and more! posit-dev.github.io/...

New methodological research in Demography. This study has been in the works for 5+ years! The paper demonstrates how population researchers can use more efficient web/mail approaches to conduct national surveys that replicate estimates from more costly FTF approaches. doi.org/10.1215/0070...

If you teach epidemiology and might be interested in using my textbook (EPIDEMIOLOGY BY DESIGN) -- I will send you ALL MY TEACHING MATERIALS (lecture slides; practice problems; exercises; exams + keys; sample syllabi...). Just ask! And also www.epidemiologybydesign.com