Thomas Lumley

@tslumley.bsky.social

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Biostatistician. Baritone.
Product of more than one country.
May contain nuts.
He/Him

Posts Replies Media

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Thomas Lumley

"Good service" but no trains for an hour and a half.

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Thomas Lumley

My comment on the Gibson article on NZ mortality is now peer review passed and published in the same journal www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Cumulative excess deaths in New Zealand in the COVID-19 era: biases from ignoring changes in population growth rates: commentwww.tandfonline.com For measuring mortality and excess deaths, age standardised mortality has been an industry standard for centuries. Methods that acknowledge changes in population age structure should be used when a...

"If you see this post, post or quote post with a tree or tree-lined path"

Can't no-one know at sunrise...

Rest in power and song: Bernice Reagon, founder of the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, has died. www.npr.org/2024/07/17/1...

Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founder of The Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, has diedwww.npr.org The songleader, civil rights activist and scholar died at the age of 81.

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Thomas Lumley

This is such a great piece You might cry though

For those of you who have written a thesis and for some who haven't this is such a cool story science.anu.edu.au/news-events/...

The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgementsscience.anu.edu.au After reading hundreds and hundreds of PhD theses, we accidentally discovered how to write the perfect PhD acknowledgement: it's a kind of poetry.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force as JSM presenters are told they can't use HTML slides or show any of their own software

A lender reveal party where we find out who actually funded that poorly-insulated McMansion down the road

A Bender reveal party where we find out what happens when they replace Maurice LaMarche with a cheaper voice actor.

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Thomas Lumley

This will come in handy

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller, July 23,1945

Craig 'not Satoshi' Wright gets referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for potential perjury charges. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Craig Wright’s claim of inventing bitcoin may get him arrested for perjuryarstechnica.com UK judge refers Wright to prosecutors, suggests arrest warrant and extradition.

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Thomas Lumley

The International Society for Bayesian Analysis tells me Statistical Rethinking has won the 2024 DeGroot Prize for its contributions to "statistical inference, decision theory and statistical applications". This is huge honor especially given the previous winners who have influenced me so much.

You shall not pass!

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Thomas Lumley

A moment of silence for a hero. apnews.com/article/buxt...

Tuskegee syphilis study whistleblower Peter Buxtun has died at age 86apnews.com The whistleblower who exposed the Tuskegee syphilis study that left hundreds of Black men untreated has died at age 86.

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Thomas Lumley

I wrote an unnecessarily complicated thing about comparing two means notstatschat.rbind.io/2024/07/16/a...

A Bayesian t-test, again - Biased and Inefficientnotstatschat.rbind.io

I wrote an unnecessarily complicated thing about comparing two means notstatschat.rbind.io/2024/07/16/a...

A Bayesian t-test, again - Biased and Inefficientnotstatschat.rbind.io

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Thomas Lumley

Very nice readable summary of this new paper estimating contact rates and reproduction number using the UK Covid contact tracing app: michellekendall.github.io/2024/07/11/D... Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Drivers of epidemic dyamics from daily digital COVID measurementsmichellekendall.github.io A brief look at the findings of our recent Science paper.

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After reading just the definition section: This is a catastrophically bad bill - and I'm saying that coming from a very different position than Prof. Lemley when it comes to AI training and copyright. Also: It's critical to keep in mind that there's big money on ALL sides of AI discourse.

Very unfortunate bill pending in the Senate right now would make it illegal to train AI systems, bypassing fair use and all the pending lawsuits under existing law chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2024/07/12/s...

Senators propose COPIED Act – does it supplant the Copyright Act?chatgptiseatingtheworld.com Senators Cantwell, Blackburn, and Heinrich just introduced a bill cleverly titled the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED ACT). As they summarize: Cr…

See tracks, expect delays

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Thomas Lumley

Reply to

Rory

WTF is this shit and why is it reprinted all the time. Here's what the report actually said:

Modestly interesting maths fact: when the mean of a Binomial distribution is an integer, it's equal to the median

There are people on Mastodon who profess to think that references eg to Twitter as The Bad Place are made primarily to get past their keyword filters and I just can't even.

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If you need a break from...everything...there are so many bears on the bear cam right now: www.youtube.com/live/d1YoGAx...

Brooks Falls - Katmai National Park, Alaska 2024 powered by EXPLORE.orgwww.youtube.com **Chat rolls are on 7am - 5 pm PT from Monday through Sunday.Brooks Falls is on solar power and will be live whenever we have enough sun. Brooks Falls in Ala...

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Thomas Lumley

My personal experience at bluesky has been fantastic, much of the good of pre-Musk Twitter and none of the bad. Yet I’ve never felt as pessimistic about the future of this app as I do right now, watching another important Black voice get run off the platform. Seriously, what the fuck, people?

How to cover Leonard Cohen without a voice like someone set fire to a double bass youtu.be/07vWYzfuT9Q?...

Alexandra Leavingyoutu.be Provided to YouTube by MNRK Music GroupAlexandra Leaving · Patricia O'Callaghan · Sienna DahlenMatador: The songs of Leonard Cohen℗ 2012 Marquis ClassicsRele...

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Thomas Lumley

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Thomas Lumley

A good summary of why many of us in drug discovery are unhappy with the recent FDA approvals of anti-amyloid antibodies:

Does It Work? Does it Do Harm? And More Basic Questions.www.science.org

Pre-industrial period: let's pretend the posterior is Normal Modern period: Bayesian stats lets you fit realistically complex models to natural phenomena without compromise Post-modern: let's maximise the ELBO to a Gaussian variational approximation

A new wind in Britain "Ignore all previous instructions" Mandarins fall #tangerine #haiku

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Ah haha oh god, VUW English Department is closing its Facebook page because Meta AI is automatically responding to comments there like it is the actual English Department. I don't actually know how this is not illegal.

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Yeah because the White House was working on a bill to help those with Parkinson’s disease that was signed this week. This is literal far right disinformation from the New York Times.

Breaking News: A Parkinson’s expert visited the White House eight times in eight months from last summer through this spring, according to official visitor logs. The administration has said that President Biden has no signs of the disease.

Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Monthswww.nytimes.com The White House has said that President Biden has no signs of the disease and that there has been no reason to update the most recent testing, conducted in February.