18 Associate Editors resign from Statistics and Computing editorial board: Problems with commercial scholarly publishing, and what does this all mean? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/07/10/1...

Th resigning editors say the publisher’s decision to become fully open access is “irreconcilable with our vision of science.” According to the journal’s homepage, all submissions from July 1 that end up in the journal will be subject to a $2,990 article processing charge (APC).

‘The exploitation still remains’: Stats journal associate editors resign over $3,000 publishing charge

Eighteen associate editors of the journal Statistics and Computing have announced they will resign after Springer Nature announced the journal would require a fee to publish.  In a July 8 stat…

retractionwatch.com

I have just resigned from the board of "Statistics and Computing", along with 17 other Associate Editors. This was a difficult decision: this great journal has published many tremendous articles under the leadership of EiC Ajay Jasra, and before him David Hand, Gilles Celeux, and Mark Girolami.

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

Reposting a very exciting job offer (post-doc) from Pierre Jacob's account on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/pierre...

Nice piece on our recent paper, led by the always amazing @phschlenker.bsky.social

CNRS Sciences humaines & sociales@cnrsshs.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The waggle dance of #bees is recognized as a remarkable communication system, but it is usually thought to have properties that are wholly distinct from human #language. 🐝 A new study revises this verdict : 👉 www.inshs.cnrs.fr/en/cnrsinfo/...

We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...

I was told the Wave model in linguistics had not been formalised. Here is an attempt at it. Note that many things remain to be done, check the discussion for that. The method/model I propose, WaST, can be used on any cognacy dataset. I'll put the code on git soon. arxiv.org/abs/2604.08220

WaST: a formalisation of the Wave model with associated statistical inference and applications

We propose a mathematical formalisation of the ``wave model'' originally developed in historical linguistics but with further applications in human sciences. This model assumes new traits appear in a population and spread to nearby populations depending on their closeness. It is mostly used to describe joint evolution of closely related populations, for example of several dialects. These situations of permanent contact are not accurately represented by its competitors based on tree structures. We built a fully Bayesian generative model where innovation spread along a fixed graph and disappear according to a death process. We then develop a Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs sampler to sample from the posterior distribution on the graph. We test our method on simulated datasets as well as on several real dataset.

arxiv.org

Our chapter on the tree model (with @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @robinryder.bsky.social ) is at last published online: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Family Tree Model

The family tree remains the main metaphor for describing the evolutionary history and relationships of languages. Languages, like biological species, evolve following processes such as descent with m...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

I only knew Chris Sims' work, and I wish I had got to meet him. But to the extent that we know something of each other through what we put out in the world, here is my personal biased favourite of his: Why Econometrics Should Always and Everywhere Be Bayesian sims.princeton.edu/yftp/EmetSoc...

"Quand les bars-tabacs ferment : l’érosion du lien social local et la progression du vote d’extrême droite en France" www.cepremap.fr/2026/01/quan... file:///Users/arthurcharpentier/Downloads/Figure_1-Note.png

What a pre-conference workshop on Bayesian statistical methods—a powerful toolkit for our community! 📊 Many thanks to Daniel Redhead and Ramona Roller for guiding us through STRAND and to Michael Chimento for the introduction to STbayes. And thank you to all participants for their energy! 🙌

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪
 You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do! I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

So cool! Mostly fine until 1300, understood a fair bit of 1200, and close to nothing in 1100

Colin Gorrie@colingorrie.bsky.social · 6mo ago

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

Congratulations to Dr Antoine Luciano, who defended his PhD on "Contributions to Bayesian Simulation-Based Inference"! I had a wonderful time supervising Antoine's PhD (jointly with Christian Robert), it's always emotional to reach the end.

Congratulations to Dr Jinyuan Zhang, who defended his PhD in Edinburgh today! I was happy to be the external examiner. Jinyuan worked on Hidden Markov Models for Stylometry, to attribute authorship in texts with several authors. The thesis was supervised by Gordon Ross.

This etymology is wild! #TIL The English word “average”, originally “custom duty” or “loss in transported goods”, comes from the French “avarie” (meaning “damage to a ship or cargo”) from the Italian “avaria” (same meaning), …

Congratulations to Dr Roan Talbut, who successfully defended their PhD on "Tropical Geometry for Phylogenetic Statistics"! It was a pleasure to read the thesis and examine the viva. I learned a lot!

I'm happy to join the board of Statistics and Computing as Associate Editor! link.springer.com/journal/1122... I'll be in great company, with lots of fantastic colleagues. And congratulations to my old friend and fellow bird enthusiast @pierrealquier.bsky.social who has also just joined as AE!

Statistics and Computing

Statistics and Computing is a bi-monthly refereed journal publishing papers at the intersection of statistical and computing sciences. Addresses the use of ...

link.springer.com

Still think this was one of the best power moves of all time www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛 As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...

Please Avoid detectCores() in your R Packages

The detectCores() function of the parallel package is probably one of the most used functions when it comes to setting the number of parallel workers to use in R. In this blog post, I’ll try to explai...

jottr.org

New article in collaboration with @chrisbuckley.bsky.social , @thomaspellard.bsky.social @robinryder.bsky.social on the phylogeny of Kra-Dai languages and of the looms used by their speakers: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core

Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies - Volume 7

cambridge.org

We’re hiring! Join Imperial's Department of Mathematics as an Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Stats or Math Finance. We have several posts available, so apply by 30 Nov 2025! imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-... @imperialmaths.bsky.social

Absolutely crazy that Harvard had to resort to this. PhD students are society's future experts. What happens when even elite universities can no longer afford to train them?

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · 10mo ago

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

Applications are invited for Chapman Fellow in Mathematics (Statistics Section) at the Department of Mathematics. Closing date: 11 November 2025 www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...

Jane Goodall was my first childhood hero, as I loved animals as a kid and was inspired by her story. I still remember the National Geographic specials about her. RIP.

We are hiring! We are inviting applications for the Chapman Fellowship in Statistics at Imperial College London. This is a kind of super-postdoc: 3 years contract, excellent working conditions, and candidates are expected to propose an independent research plan. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...

Proposals for contributed talks & posters are now being accepted for the 2026 ISBA World Meeting! The world meeting will take place in Nagoya, Japan between 28 June and 3 July, 2026. Proposals may be submitted here: forms.gle/dVTUrdEuVF6g...

The newest section of ISBA has been formed to promote Bayesian methods in the social sciences! Find out more 👇

Adrian Raftery@adrianraftery.bsky.social · 11mo ago

The new Bayesian Social Sciences section of @isba-bayesian.bsky.social has just been created: bss-isba.github.io. The committee is myself as chair, @robinryder.bsky.social, chair elect from 2027, @nialfriel.bsky.social, program chair, @monjalexander.bsky.social, Treasurer, EJWagenmakers, Secretary.