Andrew Mercer

@awmercer.bsky.social

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Principal methodologist at Pew Research Center. He/him

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This would be an amazing PhD position for anyone interested in surveys/official statistics.

Interested in advancing data collection methods in official statistics? Working in an EU-funded project with colleagues in 8 countries? Testing app-based data collection in smart surveys? Doing a PhD @Uni Mannheim? Apply here: tinyurl.com/2fh6m58xhttp...

www.sowi.uni-mannheim.de

Things i learned today: “side pork” is something that *looks* exactly like bacon but is completely and utterly unlike bacon in every other respect. Colossal disappointment in literally every way.

Air travel with a cat makes you the most popular person in the airport.

Folks. The fourth was yesterday. Today you’re just maximizing your chances of blowing your fingers off.

I can never remember, are we on team `mse = TRUE` or `mse = FALSE`? @statstas.bsky.social @tslumley.bsky.social

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Andrew Mercer

This week we released a new version of our short course “Public Opinion Polling Basics.” In six short lessons, I discuss why we have polls, how polls work, the challenges facing polls, what to look for in a poll, and more. A new lesson focuses on election polling. www.pewresearch.org/course/publi...

Public Opinion Polling Basicswww.pewresearch.org How do polls work? What are the different kinds of polls? And what should you look for in a high-quality opinion poll? A Pew Research Center survey methodologist answers these questions and more in si...

Duverger’s… well, really more of a recommendation.

Labour is going to wind up with 63% of the seats in the House of Commons despite winning only 34% of the popular vote.

Mischa really wishes it could hurry up and just be July 5th already.

As is our custom, I will be spending the 4th playing video games in the basement while also trying to comfort my poor terrified cat who thinks the world is ending.

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Andrew Mercer

I believe you know my answer

You have to pick a new national anthem for the US, but it has to be a song that plays at least once a week on your city's equivalent of Jack-FM (a sort of all-purpose "top 40 from 1970 to 2010" station, skewing rock but not averse to pop/R&B/etc.).

As is our custom, I will be spending the 4th playing video games in the basement while also trying to comfort my poor terrified cat who thinks the world is ending.

The other question I have about this is that apparently this was because of algae blooms in the Potomac river. Can our water treatment plants just not handle that? We are probably going to be having algae blooms every year for the foreseeable future. Seems like we need a way to deal with this.

this is, btw, really bad public health comms – the text is confusing as fuck, and /I know what they're trying to say/ www.dcwater.com/about-dc-wat...

DRINKING WATER ADVISORY: DC Water Issues Boil Water Advisory for All Customers in the District of Columbia, the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery and Reagan National Airport | DC Waterwww.dcwater.com

Jesus, boil water advisory for all of Washington DC.

Sorry everyone, Hopper has informed me that any plans for today have been cancelled.

Whoever does the sound editing for Welcome to Wrexham deserves an Emmy (if they don’t already have one).

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Andrew Mercer

NEW: Among supporters of several right-wing populist parties in Europe, confidence in Vladimir Putin is on the rise. www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/...

Not sure if anyone else has ever had the experience of elbow bursitis materializing out of nowhere over the course of about 20 minutes while eating dinner but I can confirm that it’s both weird and gross. Oh the joys of being middle aged.

FWIW, this is not in relation to specific happenings in the news. I do this a lot. Correlation is not causation!

Screw it, I'm getting taco bell delivered.

What is the current state-of-the-art for tree-based prediction models? Is it still xgboost? lightgbm? Are people still enamored with BART? My knowledge in this area is a few years out of date but I’d love to get back up to speed. #stats #machinelearning

Make a band bready Loved when DJ Sourdough and Cut Challah did a whole tour based on cuts from his personal record collection.

Afrika Ciabaataa

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Andrew Mercer

Reply to

Mark Baxter 🏳️‍🌈🧂

We used MI instead of FIML since the data were MAR but the FMI was still high. fml

Hive mind, if one did want to register a personal domain, what’s the best company to use? I feel I periodically hear horror stories about various domain registries.

Can you *imagine* an election that only lasts 6 weeks?

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Andrew Mercer

our methods for studying political change and stability typically provide group-level estimates, while our theoretical goal is often to understand individual-level processes. Steve Vaisey (@vaiseys.bsky.social) & I ask whether we can go from the former to the latter in panel data: osf.io/rhf4q

Need some non-debate related content on the TL this morning so here’s a picture of Frances.

Your posting is reaffirming my decision not to watch the debate.

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Andrew Mercer

Statisticians! Please use hashtags like #stats, so your work or question or idea appears in the StatsSky feed and can be found by people interested in that topic! And please promote other people's work there too, especially if they aren't typically represented in science feeds.

StatsSky

Feed by @steveharoz.com

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Andrew Mercer

Two of the three most-viewed presidential debates ever have involved Donald Trump. The first Trump-Clinton debate in 2016 drew 84 million viewers, while the first Trump-Biden debate in 2020 drew 73.1 million, according to Nielsen. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

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Andrew Mercer

The #rstats {ggpp} package seems to greatly amplify adding text, data labels, annotations, arrows, insets, ... to ggplot2 graphics. docs.r4photobiology.info/ggpp/index.h...

Grammar Extensions to ggplot2docs.r4photobiology.info Extensions to ggplot2 respecting the grammar of graphics paradigm. Geometries: geom_table(), geom_plot() and geom_grob() add insets to plots using native data coordinates, while geom_table_npc(), geom...