Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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R Consortium @rconsortium.bsky.social · 6d

🚨 Big news for the R Community!

The Sovereign Tech Fund has invested $450,000 in the R Foundation to strengthen R’s sustainability, security, and modernization.

Details: r-consortium.org/posts/sovere...

#rstats #opensource #datascience

The Sovereign Tech Fund invests $450,000 in R Foundation to Enhance R’s Sustainability and Security – R Consortium

R Foundation embarking on a crucial project to modernize R’s core infrastructure, improve its maintainability, and fortify its supply chain.

r-consortium.org

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Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 7d

📢 I've decided to do regular 2-3 mins video updates of latest authoritarian antics of Trump administration on YouTube & TikTok.

Have been inspired by reading how many people get their news there and how dominated it is by the right.
www.tiktok.com/@profchristi...

www.youtube.com/@ProfChristi...

Professor Christina Pagel

I'm Professor Christina Pagel at University College London. My research is in health systems. I'm passionate about science, public health, supporting diversity in the sciences, and protecting liberal ...

www.youtube.com

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Lora Kolodny @lorak.bsky.social · 8d

Please - stop doing the screenshot no link thing on Bluesky. This platform does not punish you for posting a URL. You picked up the habit from Meta apps? Stop doing Mark Z's bidding. Link ESPECIALLY to authors, reporters, bloggers, etc. where you quote the work.

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Edward Elderman @elderman.bsky.social · 12d

This only happens to you once

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International Society for Bayesian Analysis @isba-bayesian.bsky.social · 14d

Proposals for contributed talks & posters are now being accepted for the 2026 ISBA World Meeting! The world meeting will take place in Nagoya, Japan between 28 June and 3 July, 2026. Proposals may be submitted here: forms.gle/dVTUrdEuVF6g...

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Sam Power @spmontecarlo.bsky.social · 16d

Some fun news: We're hiring!

Lectureship (analogous to Assistant Prof.) in Statistical Science and AI, in the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol.

Closing date 13 October 2025; link below!

www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

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Durham University @durham.ac.uk · 19d

We are The Times and The Sunday Times University of the Year 2026 and ranked third overall in its Good University Guide. Congratulations to our global university community on this success. 🎉

Read more: brnw.ch/21wVU4Q

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Susan Vanderplas @srvanderplas.bsky.social · 23d

My University has decided to close the #Statistics department along with several others. The public comment form opened up today: apc.unl.edu/fall-2025-bu...

Please feel free to explain how problematic it is to close a department teaching #datascience #rstats #python in this day and age.

Fall 2025 Budget Reduction Feedback Form | Academic Planning Committee | Nebraska

apc.unl.edu

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EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences @icepfl.bsky.social · Sep 2

EPFL, ETH Zurich & CSCS just released Apertus, Switzerland’s first fully open-source large language model.
Trained on 15T tokens in 1,000+ languages, it’s built for transparency, responsibility & the public good.

Read more: actu.epfl.ch/news/apertus...

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Cameron Patrick @cameronpat.bsky.social · Aug 27

I’ve just gone and re-read the Zen of Python and I reckon Tidyverse in R does a much better job of living up to these principles than trying to do stats in Python! especially readability > density, errors should not be silent, and don’t guess in the face of ambiguity

mail.python.org/pipermail/py...

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Louis Aslett @louisaslett.bsky.social · Aug 26

Agreed, would be nice!
Until journals catch up, I’ve found this tool is handy, though it’s not perfect:

citation.doi.org

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Bruno Rodrigues @brodriguesco.bsky.social · Aug 22

New blog post #Python needs its CRAN

brodrigues.co/posts/2025-0...

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Louis Aslett @louisaslett.bsky.social · Aug 21

Very interesting thanks! Would you mind sharing more about how you did this: your brief explanation in thread is fascinating and could be interesting blog post, so we can learn and apply to other domains 😃 eg did you just concatenate all the resources, and with what prompt for the summary etc

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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · Aug 18

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.

The “Mozart of Math” tried to stay out of politics. Then it came for his research.

newsletter.ofthebrave.org

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Owen Biesel @owenbiesel.bsky.social · Aug 18

$The matrix product (3 4 \\ 8 7) (7 2 \\ 4 9) = (37 42 \\ 84 79), with the entries from the first matrix colored red (along with the matching tens digits in the product) and the entries from the second matrix colored blue (along with the ones digits in the product). Shown with the "Well yes, but actually no" Pirate Captain meme.$

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Durham University @durham.ac.uk · Aug 7

Universities for North East England (UNEE) has issued a statement on the Global Talent Fund. More information can be found on our website: www.durham.ac.uk/news-events/...

A statement from Universities for North East England

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Opal @opalescentopal.bsky.social · Jul 27

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

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Dirk Eddelbuettel @eddelbuettel.com · Aug 4

An interesting thread was spawned by this post.

Yet _not one comment mentions the inferior license_. It may not be open source (as e.g. understood by the #Debian Free Software Guidelines) as it limits how you can deploy it. Tricky. So at U of Illinois we stick with RStudio Server for now. #rstats

Cameron Patrick @cameronpat.bsky.social · Aug 2

my hot take about Positron: it combines things I don’t like about RStudio (the four-pane layout) with things I don’t like about VS Code (overly complicated for everyday applied statistics)

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Sam Power @spmontecarlo.bsky.social · Jul 24

I am pleased to announce that together with some friends, we are organising a workshop on Non-Reversible MCMC Sampling, taking place at Newcastle University from 8–10 September 2025.

Details on the programme and registration can be found at the workshop website (sites.google.com/view/probai-...).

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Scott Hanselman 🌮 @scott.hanselman.com · Jul 17

Hey friends! I did a TEDx talk and it's now up on the TED Conferences YouTube. It's possibly the best and most important talk I've ever done.

I would ask that you watch it, and please SHARE it broadly and widely. Thank you! youtu.be/dVG8W-0p6vg #AI #Tech #TED

Tech Promised Everything. Did it deliver? | Scott Hanselman | TEDxPortland

YouTube video by TEDx Talks

youtu.be

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · Jun 23

Tukey

xkcd.com/3104/

Comic. [block quote] “Far better an approximate answer to the *right* question, which is often vague, than an *exact* answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.” -John W. Tukey, The Future of Data Analysis (1962) [caption] Happy Approximate Birthday to John Tukey, author of my favorite statistics quote, who was born 110.000 years ago sometime this week.

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · Jun 20

Putting myself out there a bit. Honest request from an open-source developer:

Can I please ask you to encourage people you know to stop with the "any updates on this?" discussion post? Every post like that genuinely makes me die inside a little bit.

I'll try to explain in this thread. 1/

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troy_phd @troyhernandez.bsky.social · Jun 2

🎨 Excited to release diffuseR
- an R implementation of the diffusers library!
✨ txt2img and img2img generation
🚀 No Python dependencies
📦 SDXL & SD2.1 models. More coming soon!
What will you create? #RStats #AI

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Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy.bsky.social · May 29

UK universities are in the top 3 in global reputation. But they are losing money, cutting programmes, and laying off staff.

International students are the safety net—and it’s being pulled away.

Will the government’s immigration plans be good for our universities?

The Immigration White Paper aims to reduce international student numbers. But universities need them. Can the circle be squared?

eastangliabylines.co.uk

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