Thomas Lumley
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tslumley.bsky.social
Thomas Lumley
@tslumley.bsky.social
6.1K followers 520 following 3.8K posts
Biostatistician. Baritone. He/Him.

Product of more than one country.
May contain nuts.
Posts Replies Media Videos
tslumley.bsky.social
Excellent talk this morning from Cheng Soon Ong on choosing experiments to both learn where the good values are and take advantage of where you already know.
November 25, 2025 at 6:32 AM
tslumley.bsky.social
I build parsimonious models; you practice dimension reduction for feasibility; they make restrictive assumptions
#IrregularVerbs
November 25, 2025 at 3:06 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
annaleen.bsky.social
Incredible story of tracking down the real human behind AI slop stories, by @nickhunebrown.bsky.social
ketanjoshi.co Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 1d
"I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it"

Stunning investigation of how slop merchants are getting work into established media outlets

thelocal.to/investigatin...
A 2024 story about climate change memes from the non-profit Outrider quotes “Juliet Pinto, a Professor of Psychology” at Pennsylvania State University. I emailed Pinto, who is in fact a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University. “I have not spoken with any reporter about that piece of research, and I am not a professor of psychology,” she wrote back. The piece also quotes “Terry Collins, a climate scientist and professor of environmental science at the University of California.” I could not find anyone of that description, but Terry Collins, the director of the institute of green science at Carnegie Mellon, said he’s never communicated with Goldiee.
November 24, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
dccc-phd.bsky.social
"The mystery of twin heritability comes to an ignoble end: no massive tranche of rare variants, no phantom interactions, just inflation."
sashagusevposts.bsky.social Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 3d
I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵
The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered
Not with a bang but with a whimper
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
November 24, 2025 at 1:07 AM
tslumley.bsky.social
Commendation for the Biometrics -- Australasian Region conference: name tags printed on both sides, not just on the back!
November 23, 2025 at 11:18 PM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
kivenson.bsky.social
New paper out: An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine
Multiple genetic codes developed during the evolution of eukaryotes and bacteria, yet no alternative genetic code is known for archaea. We used proteomics to confirm our prediction that certain archae...
www.science.org
November 23, 2025 at 7:22 PM
tslumley.bsky.social
I don't have the attention span for pure mathematics.

(or, quite possibly, the ability, but I diverted to statistics before that came up)
recursecenter.bsky.social Recurse Center @recursecenter.bsky.social · 13d
What’s the lore behind choosing your career path ?
November 23, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
ernie.tedium.co
If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
November 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
tslumley.bsky.social
Melbourne has wide diversity of transit modes
Steam train-- green engine and coal car, red carriages -- running on a track between a major road and the concrete bulk of Southern Cross station
November 22, 2025 at 3:58 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
mikecaulfield.bsky.social
I did it, I wrote it. The thing I think (?) some educators have been waiting for for quite a while. mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/sift-for-a...
SIFT for AI: Introduction and Pedagogy
Once I thought more deeply about what people had been asking for it made a lot of sense
mikecaulfield.substack.com
November 22, 2025 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
mags.colvett.online
Academic intros that go hard
Introduction In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse. As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI (Table 1). All attacks are strictly single-turn, requiring no iterative adaptation or conversational steering.
November 20, 2025 at 5:54 PM
tslumley.bsky.social
Is it Greg Egan who has the SF short story where literally the woke mind virus is spread by transfusion?
November 20, 2025 at 1:49 AM
tslumley.bsky.social
Helpful cycling infrastructure 😐
Yellow (informational) road sign with pic of bicycle. AURORA LA NO THROUGH ROAD DETOUR VIA <blank> ST
November 19, 2025 at 9:42 PM
tslumley.bsky.social
Rainbow lorikeet on Callistemon, Docklands, Melbourne
Large bush with red "bottle brush" flowers. A parrot with blue head, gold front and green back is looking back at the camera
November 19, 2025 at 9:18 PM
tslumley.bsky.social
A small child on this flight is watching a Tom & Jerry episode about durian!
November 19, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
neorsd.org
just learned we won an award for our blog post about Tom Holland and stormwater management.

remember, when you see an article about stormwater management, you repost it. i don’t make the rules.
What Tom Holland’s historic lip-sync showcase taught us about stormwater management
Grab your umbrella and your tights.
neorsd.medium.com
November 19, 2025 at 12:22 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
freerangestats.info
Excited we are hiring a "statistical capacity development adviser". This is a one year role in Suva, an investment to improve the quality of all the work we (45 of us) do to promote long term capacity for statistics in Pacific island countries and territories. careers.spc.int/job/statisti...
Statistical Capacity Development Adviser
Suva-based position (Fiji) Attractive expatriate package Join the principal development organisation in the region Description The Pacific Community (SPC) is...
careers.spc.int
November 19, 2025 at 3:11 AM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
nicrawlencenz.bsky.social
The wonderful people at the NZ Science Learning Hub have turned my talk on MythBusting de-extinction to sort fact from fiction into a freely available educational resource. You can check it out here www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/my...
Mythbusting de-extinction to sort fact from fiction
De-extinction hit the headlines recently with the ‘resurrection’ of the dire wolf and the push to bring back the moa. However, can scientists really bring back extinct animals? And more importantly, s...
www.sciencelearn.org.nz
November 18, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
gdeejay.bsky.social
#statsky
🤔
"Did you guys know that during the Trojan war the Greeks noticed that their soldiers would return with wounds to the areas around their shield. At first the Greeks wanted to reinforce the areas around their shield until a brilliant mathematician pointed out that it was wounds of soldiers that MADE IT HOME, so the Greeks should armor the area where they didn't suffer wounds, ie the shield."
November 18, 2025 at 4:38 AM
tslumley.bsky.social
Strāy macrōns?
November 18, 2025 at 1:42 AM
tslumley.bsky.social
'"The IDI was developed in 2011 and is still in prototype form," Stats NZ told Treasury late last year.'
www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...
November 17, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
patrickmckenzie.bsky.social
Available now in @asn-amnat.bsky.social ! Taking on some big-scale natural history: processed >40k @inaturalist.bsky.social images of Monarda fistulosa using computer vision to query for flower presence and phenotype flower color: doi.org/10.1086/739413
November 14, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
medpagetoday.com
The BMJ slapped an "expression of concern" on a much-publicized stem cell trial it published just 2 weeks ago.

Read more at: https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/stemcellresearch/118484?trw=no
Something Off About Recent Heart Failure Stem Cell Trial, Major Journal Admits
BMJ issues 'expression of concern' about much-publicized phase III study
www.medpagetoday.com
November 16, 2025 at 5:40 PM
tslumley.bsky.social
Auckland Museum in the distance behind engineering and trees
Plane trees or near offer, and concrete buildings. More varied trees in the background. Museum-like building far right, apparently with white tent on the roof
November 16, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by Thomas Lumley
steamtraen.eu
Moral: Be careful what you ask for.
November 15, 2025 at 10:14 PM