Today’s poem is called ‘Word Crunching’.

Just saw this new paper by Brauer on how linear models of mean effect can be very misleading for ordinal data link.springer.com/article/10.1...

When the Mean is Misleading: a Guide to Ordered Regression for Meaningfully Modeling Ordinal Outcomes - Journal of Quantitative Criminology

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - We demonstrate the utility of ordered regression models for analyzing ordinal outcomes frequently encountered in criminology, comparing their predictive...

link.springer.com

Now available on the OSF as part of a growing collection of preregistration resources, the new EEG & ERP Methods template guides researchers through every stage of ERP study planning. In our Q&A, two of its creators share how the template can help researchers at all stages:

Introducing the EEG and ERP Methods Template: Q&A with Gisela Govaart and Antonio Schettino

Interview with Gisela Govaart and Antonio Schettino, developers of the new ERP preregistration template on the Open Science Framework (OSF).

cos.io

We're thrilled to open registration for the Utrecht Replication Games. The event will be at the at the University of Utrecht on June 4th. Psych, public health, pol sci and econ studies will be reproduced! Register here: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Politics London discussing driverless taxis casually referring to “jaywalking pedestrians”. Jaywalking is not a thing in UK law. Transport for London and Government had better not be asleep at the wheel on this.

if you're an older person who finds words like mogg and maxxing annoying, just starting using them. people over the age of 30 have the superpower to end trends by simply adopting them

“Staff members at the United States’s premier infectious-disease research institute have been instructed to remove the words “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” from the institute’s web pages, according to e-mails Nature has obtained.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Exclusive: Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation

Staff members have been instructed to scrub this topic and ‘biodefense’ from the agency’s website.

nature.com

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so let's talk about sex. Eel sex! Well...we can't, really. We don't know exactly where, or how, eels get busy. It's a 2000+ year old puzzle. It's not like we haven't tried. But the sex life of eels is a mystery smothered in secret sauce. 1/5 🗃️🧪

Maria is one of hundreds of children, who — like Liam Ramos — have been held at a Texas detention facility where parents say children languish as they’re served contaminated food, receive little education and struggle to obtain basic medical care. Here's our attempt at telling their stories. 2/

Children trapped in Texas immigration facility recount nightmares, inedible food, no school

A photo of Liam Conejo Ramos, a scared 5-year-old, drew attention to a detention center in Dilley, Texas. Advocates say his experience reflects what hundreds of children have endured out of public vie...

nbcnews.com

I wrote a blog for the Meta-Research Center expressing my infinite frustration about not getting data. What else is new, you might think? Well, I added an extra layer of annoyance directed at the journals who do NOTHING to enforce promised data sharing. metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/2/...

Firmly believe this would serve multiple needs.

Wouldn’t have made it out of the VEEP writers room

I was a sensitive kid. I loved cats. I had OCD, undiagnosed. When I was 9, a fraternity brother tortured a cat to death in my hometown. The details even now are beyond imagination. archive.is/xdmUL I was traumatized for years from reading the news story. The torturer? Now the head of the NRA.

I just wrote a short blog post on effect sizes for simple mediation. Not a topic usually write about but it was prompted by something I read that sent me to check the literature and down a bit of a rabbit hole. psychologicalstatistics.blogspot.com

What can history teach us about what happens when a populist strongman with an idiosyncratic taste for low interest rates undermines central bank independence?

The teenager told officers he was a U.S. citizen, but an officer broke the car’s driver’s side window and detained him. In a video, the boy can be heard telling an officer that he is a citizen, to which the officer replies, “Get out of the car” and “I don’t care.” www.oregonlive.com/portland/202...

High school senior, a U.S. citizen, detained by ICE in Oregon

The 17-year-old was held more than five hours Friday in an ICE facility, his brother said.

oregonlive.com

Paper in Language and Cognition with @marktorrance.bsky.social and @seriousstats.bsky.social We show that semantic contrast shapes timing of pre-planning in speech and writing. doi.org/10.1017/lang... If you're into how context shapes how we plan language, check it out!

We've got funded PhD places in Psychology available at Swansea - a chance to work on social issues with members of our great team (including me!) www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate...

Psychology: Fully funded PhD Studentship in ESRC Wales Graduate School for the Social Sciences (WGSSS) PhD Psychology pathway (RS896) - Swansea University

We offer a wide range of funded and fully funded research scholarships in all subject areas. Explore your options and apply now.

swansea.ac.uk

It's reported that the US government is going to announce they've found the cause of autism (Spoliers: They almost certainly haven't even found one new potential cause). Paracetemol (Tylenol) during pregnancy is the supposed culprit. This seems unlikely to put it mildly. (1)

Trump: "When you have a network, and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump... They're not allowed to do that."

Monarez agrees that vaccines are safe and effective, and outlines her worries about an anti-vax world. "I believe that preventable diseases would return, and our children will be harmed by things they do not need to be harmed by." She affirms that vaccines are a major public health advancement.

I really miss when the stats blogs I read had light-hearted examples like "here is the concept of a multi-variate outlier explained through beer" rather than "here is another example of a logical fallacy being shared by the head of a national health agency"

Return-on-investment was $60 - $475 for every $1 invested in COVID vaccines in their first year, making them one of the most cost-effective public health measures in history. buff.ly/lfdINel #medsky #pedsky 🛟😷🧪💸

as editor, I'm actually signing the petition myself :) == Adopt Registered Reports at Psychological Methods - Sign the Petition! chng.it/wszLWM4KPX == e.g., look forward to exploring options for preregistration for the journal @apajournals.bsky.social @akmontoya.bsky.social

Sign the Petition

Adopt Registered Reports at Psychological Methods

chng.it

When do we actually think about what we want to say and what words to use? Interestingly our mind does a lot of this work while we're writing text. In fact, we demonstrated (psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...) that even young writers often don't stop before starting a new sentence. Way to multitask!

Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... ) 1/2

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Trump on RFK Jr., the CDC, and vaccines (a translation). He seems to be saying that he was shown data about COVID19 vaccines being safe and effective, but that the pharma companies didn’t show those amazing data to anyone else, like RFK Jr. He thinks this is why there is a “mess” at CDC.

I took this picture myself at the CDC protest today. These are among the hundreds of bullet holes in CDC headquarters windows, visible from the street. I heard today that the admin has no urgent plan to fix these windows. Imagine being a CDC employee going to work under these conditions

Everyone is different but here are some things I think are good general advice. >

Paper with Jens Roeser and Mark Torrance: Semantic contrast ahead: contrast guides pre-planning in complex noun-phrase production | in Language and Cognition | www.cambridge.org/core/journal...