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These Strange Times

This was meant to be a post about the kitchen projects I worked on during the early days of quarantine. (I know, I know, you’re mostly here for the kitchen.) Look, I did do some shit…  But it is almost impossible to talk about “quarantine projects” without sounding a little flippant about covid. Especially because […]



  • On Kicking Ass
  • Stories about Telling Stories

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Drinking Beer & Building Shit: The Deck Stairs

If there ever was a summer in my life that I’d want to be on a roll with building shit, this would have been the one, obviously. Was I? Absolutely not.  I’ve never been able to fully articulate the difference between when I’m “on” and “off” as it relates to building. Sometimes–through fate, or alcohol, […]




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On Kicking Ass and Using the Right Measuring Stick

Not only is it that time of year again (the one where we reflect on all the things we’ve done, and all the things we hope to do, while simultaneously being bombarded with “new year, new you” messaging, which is all just bullshit trying to get people to buy whatever weight-loss program/tea/diet crap is hip […]



  • On Kicking Ass
  • Stories about Telling Stories

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On the Art of Not Living a Careful Life

I started off the year by writing about measuring sticks. The metaphorical kind, not actual tape measures (although I’ve written plenty about those too.) And while I used bodies and physical aesthetics as an example, that is really just one of many ways Other People’s Measuring Sticks™ show up in our lives.  The way people […]



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Drinking Beer & Building Shit: Donkey Shelters

First, a warning: Sad farm shit ahead.  About this time last year, I walked out to the barn one morning and found the older of my two donkeys, Doc, laying unresponsive on the ground. He was alive, but barely. The vet lives just down the road and was able to make it out to us […]




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SCCMPod-442 Continuous Prediction of Mortality in the PICU: A Recurrent Neural Network Model in a Single-Center Dataset

As a proof of concept, a recurrent neural network (RNN) model was developed using electronic medical record (EMR) data capable of continuously assessing a child's risk of mortality throughout an ICU stay as a proxy measure of illness severity.




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Operator "A" (Water) (Employment Opportunity & Training Opportunity) EX21-973




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910 Welcome to Dongle Town

Let’s talk about photo road trips, dongles, an exercise in spotting humanity, smartphones closing in on us, astrophotography and big satellite constellations. Plus: Where is TFTTF really located on the spectrum of photography podcasts? Topics: [OTHER] Welcome to Dongle Town : Chris has figured out an interesting way to vlog from his car with a … Continue reading "910 Welcome to Dongle Town"

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911 All Things Interesting In Photography

The James Web Telescope is arguably the best camera.. not on the planet though. Chris looks at zoomable content, at being there and how that’s different from the limited senses that we can capture with our photography. Also: another quick look at DALL-E and what it has to do with pizza. Topics: [PHOTO, SPACE] IR: … Continue reading "911 All Things Interesting In Photography"

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914 The Willingness to Lie

Chris is back from the Eastern Europe Photo Road Trip Scouting Tour (EEPRTST ????) and if you haven’t watched his vlog about the tour, what are you waiting for? Today’s episode includes the re-issue of 1 Hour 1000 Pics – Supercharge your Lightroom Workflow, some deep philosophical (and very meta) questions about deep fakes, a … Continue reading "914 The Willingness to Lie"

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921 Video Editing Game Changer

Chris’ main workstation is still out, but a replacement is getting closer, in form of a fan-less compact laptop that will outperform the previous iMac Pro by a decent margin. This is mainly possible thanks to your support! Topics: [PHOTO] Flat Lenses Are Here : Flat lenses are finally becoming a reality. Just not in … Continue reading "921 Video Editing Game Changer"

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924 You’re Hoarding It Wrong

Topics: [COOL] Register Now: Eastern European Photo Road Trip : The 10-day Eastern European Photo Road Trip from Berlin via Dresden/Prague/Vienna/Budapest to Transylvania is now officially open for registration! The dates are: Tour 1 (Berlin to Transylvania) Sep 2-11 2023 and Tour 2 (Transylvania to Berlin) Sep 14-23 2023. If you’re interested, send Chris a … Continue reading "924 You’re Hoarding It Wrong"

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926 Digitizing 88-Year-Old Photos, AI Protests, Relaunches

On this episode: JUST RELEASED: the third edition of The Film Photography Handbook. JUST RELAUNCHED: chrismarquardt.com (now offers information about my services in training, consulting, production, and photography as well as some references to past work). COMING UP: The 10-day Eastern Europe photo road trip in Sep 2023 for amateur and professional photographers to visit … Continue reading "926 Digitizing 88-Year-Old Photos, AI Protests, Relaunches"

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She wants to know what are best practices on flagging bad responses and cleaning survey data and detecting bad responses. Any suggestions from the tidyverse or crunch.io?

A colleague who works in a field that uses a lot of survey research asks: Can you recommend papers about detecting bad survey responses? We have some such methods where I work, but I’m curious what the Census Bureau and … Continue reading




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Where have all the count words gone? In defense of “fewer” and “among”

This is cranky linguist Bob. The lack of count markers is starting to bug me. To wit… Usage of “fewer” vs. “less” The prescriptive rule in English is that “fewer” applies to groups of countable objects whereas “less” applies to … Continue reading




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“Things are Getting So Politically Polarized We Can’t Measure How Politically Polarized Things are Getting”

Sociologist Claude Fischer writes: Polarization has been less a matter of Americans becoming extremists—most remain centrists or oblivious to politics—but more that politically engaged Americans have increasingly aligned their views, values, and even their practices, from where they live to … Continue reading




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Here is the Data Sharing Statement, in its entirety, for van Dyck CH, Swanson CJ, Aisen P, et al. Trial of Lecanemab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2212948.

Data-share this, pal: As the man said, you have no obligation to share any of your data and I have no obligation to believe anything you say.




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Here is the Data Sharing Statement, in its entirety, for Goodwin GM, Aaronson ST, Alvarez O, et al. Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2206443.

As forwarded to us by Max Shepsi: I’m starting to see a pattern here!




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Columbia Surgery Prof Fake Data Update . . . (yes, he’s still being promoted on the university webpage)

Someone pointed me to this news article with the delightful url, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/science/sam-yoon-columbia-cancer-surgeon-5-more-retractions.html: Columbia Cancer Surgeon Notches 5 More Retractions for Suspicious Data The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and … Continue reading




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“It’s a very short jump from believing kale smoothies are a cure for cancer to denying the Holocaust happened.”

Campos quotes a comment from a thread on RFK Jr. and his running mate: It’s a very short jump from believing kale smoothies are a cure for cancer to denying the Holocaust happened. He points to this link: The physiologist … Continue reading




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Carroll/Langer: Credulous, scientist-as-hero reporting from a podcaster who should know better

tl;dr. To the extent that healing is important, I think it’s important not to overstate evidence for speculative claims about what works. Individual and societal resources are limited. If you want to say something like, “Sure, this is pie-in-the-sky research, … Continue reading




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Supporting Bayesian modeling workflows with iterative filtering for multiverse analysis

Anna Riha, Nikolas Siccha, Antti Oulasvirta, and Aki Vehtari write: When building statistical models for Bayesian data analysis tasks, required and optional iterative adjustments and different modelling choices can give rise to numerous candidate models. In particular, checks and evaluations … Continue reading




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3M misconduct regarding knowledge of “forever chemicals”: As is so often the case, the problem was in open sight for a long time before anything was done

Horrifying story here from Sharon Lerner how chemical products company 3M (which has successfully branded itself as the cuddly people behind Post-it notes) polluted the world’s water supply and covered it up for decades. It features several issues we’ve discussed … Continue reading




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Flatiron Institute hiring: postdocs, joint faculty, and permanent research positions

This is Bob. We’re hiring It’s that time of year again and we’re hiring at all levels at the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM) at Flatiron Institute (the in-house research arm of Simons Foundation). As they are listed, job ads … Continue reading




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This one might possibly be interesting.

Bert Gunter points to this news article by Jeffrey Brainard that reports: Careful scientists know to acknowledge uncertainty in the findings and conclusions of their papers. But in one leading journal, the frequency of hedging words such as “might” and … Continue reading




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“Reduce likelihood of a tick bite by 73.6 times”? Forking paths on the Appalachian Trail.

Shira writes: As an Appalachian Trail hiker, I always treat my clothes with permethrin. I’m a big fan of Sawyer products, but this claim caught my eye: Reduce likelihood of a tick bite by 73.6 times by treating shoes and … Continue reading




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NYT catches up to Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

A colleague pointed to this news article, “Do People in ‘Blue Zones’ Actually Live Longer?”, and wrote that I might find it blog-worthy. I replied that, yeah, the topic is blog-worthy enough that it’s already appeared on the blog, with … Continue reading




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A question for Nate Cohn at the New York Times regarding a claim about adjusting polls using recalled past vote

A colleague writes: Have you seen this article by Nate Cohn at the New York Times? A few things in it seemed weird. For one, he writes: The tendency for recall vote to overstate the winner of the last election … Continue reading




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Stan Playground: Run Stan on the web, play with your program and data at will, and no need to download anything on your computer

Just in time for Halloween, we have a scarily effective implementation of Stan on the web, full of a veritable haunted house of delicious treats. Brian Ward, Jeff Soules, and Jeremy Magland write: Stan Playground is a new open-source, browser-based … Continue reading




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“Trivia question for you. I kept temperature records for 100 days one year in Boston, starting August 15th (day “0”). What would you guess is the correlation between day# and temp? r=???”

Shane Frederick writes: Trivia question for you. I kept temperature records for 100 days one year in Boston, starting August 15th (day “0”). What would you guess is the correlation between day# and temp? r=??? Shane sends me this kind … Continue reading




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Calibration is sometimes sufficient for trusting predictions. What does this tell us when human experts use model predictions?

This is Jessica. I got through a long string of deadlines and invited talks and now I’m back to thinking about calibration and decision-making. In a previous post I was wondering about the relationship between calibration and Bayesian use of … Continue reading




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A 10% swing in win probability corresponds (approximately) to a 0.4% swing in predicted vote

There’s some confusion regarding jumps in election forecasts. New information is coming in every day, so it makes sense that forecasts change too. But they don’t change very much. Each new piece of information tells you only a little bit. … Continue reading




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Violent science teacher makes ridiculously unsupported research claims, gets treated by legislatures/courts/media as expert on the effects of homeschooling

Paul Alper shares this horrifying news story by Laura Meckler: Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of the nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these … Continue reading




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Interpreting recent Iowa election poll using a rough Bayesian partition of error

A political science colleague wrote in: We are all abuzz about the Harris +3 in that Iowa Poll with its great track record. When I check the write up of this poll I see a reasonably detailed description of their … Continue reading




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Probabilistic numerics and the folk theorem of statistical computing

U.S. election day is tomorrow. So let’s talk about something else: 1. Encoding prior information using non-generative modeling I was talking with Hong Ge about the uses of non-generative models in probabilistic programming. An example I gave is the use … Continue reading




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What if the polls are right? (some scatterplots, and some comparisons to vote swings in past decades)

There’s a lot of talk about how the polls can go wrong. Fair enough—I wrote an article a few years ago on failure and success in political polling and election forecasting, and a few years before that, Julia Azari and … Continue reading




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The Red Sox are hiring

Here’s another job opportunity for baseball enthusiasts and Stan users! The Boston Red Sox are building out their R&D group and are currently hiring for the position of Senior Analyst, Baseball Analytics. Although the listed qualifications don’t specifically mention Stan, … Continue reading




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If you wanted to be a top tennis player in the late 1930s, there was a huge benefit to being a member of ____. Or to being named ____.

This post is by Phil. A couple of months ago, this blog had a discussion that was prompted by the fact that 2 of the top 5 female American tennis players are the children of billionaires. One, that could be … Continue reading




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Polling by asking people about their neighbors: When does this work? Should people be doing more of it? And the connection to that French dude who bet on Trump

Several people pointed me to this news report on a successful bettor in an election prediction market: Not only did he see Donald Trump winning the presidency, he wagered that Trump would win the popular vote—an outcome that many political … Continue reading




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Meta-analysis with a single study

Erik van Zwet, Witold Więcek, and I write: Effect sizes typically vary among studies of the same intervention. In a random effects meta-analysis, this variation is explicitly taken into account. However, when we have only one study, the heterogeneity remains … Continue reading




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Help teaching short-course that has a healthy dose of data simulation

This post is by Lizzie. I hope you like the cats photo from this summer. I do. I am looking for help. I decided to change my term course (12-14 weeks-long) on `introduction to Bayesian modeling with some hierarchical modeling’ … Continue reading




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Be the Change: Celebrating Down Syndrome Awareness Month

I love October. Crisp mornings and hot cider help me welcome autumn. Change is in the air—you can feel it. One of my very favorite things about October...




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God’s Fingers…God’s Arm

I heard on the news years ago that the Hubble telescope discovered a powerful megastar that is not only one hundred million times brighter than...




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A Far Better Thing

What could be better or make you more grateful than… to have great health? Resistance to viruses, a strong immune system, no pain, cancer, no heart issues...




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Opening Eyes

Dale stepped up to the pulpit and heaved onto it an incredibly large book with thick pages. As an elder lowered the microphone for him, Dale flipped to a...




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Visualizing genetic networks of Gustave Roud’s literary works

The project provides a visual representation of the creative process... more




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Suggested reading: Hallnäs, L., & Redström, J. (2002). From use to presence: On the expressions and aesthetics of everyday computational things.

When investigating how we frame technology in the design process,... more




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Recap of the “Gephi Week” at SciencePo: inquiring the community detection algorithm of Gephi

The CNRS, the Gephi Consortium and the University of Aalborg... more




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Divi 5 Public Alpha Progress Update (200+ Changes)

Last month, we released the Divi 5 Public Alpha, and we’ve been 100% focused on fixing the bugs you’ve been reporting. We released two new versions (Public Alpha Version 1 and Public Alpha Version Two), including over 200 bug fixes and improvements. Download The Divi 5 Alpha Next Stop, Stability We have our eyes set […]

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How to Make a Responsive Website in 2024 (No Coding)

Is your website not performing well on mobile devices? Poor layout or slow loading times can cause users to leave your site before they even engage with your content. In today’s mobile-first world, a responsive website is no longer just an option—it’s a necessity. Whether you’re starting fresh or improving an existing website, a responsive […]

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