20% of staff at the University of Essex, including 40% of its Maths, Stats and Actuarial Science School are being laid off. Please, sign this petition to stop it and share widely.
Our download stats visualization just received an update, with focus on usability and accessibility. You will certainly enjoy finally seeing the names of the apps!
Every #Mastodon / #Fediverse poll that includes the text "boost for larger sample size" should be required to have "Dewey Defeats Truman" as one of the poll answers.
Bluesky falls below 5 million monthly active users, marking a 67% decline
Almost exactly one year after peaking at 15.12 million monthly active users, Bluesky’s long-running decline has pushed the platform below 5 million MAUs. The latest figures show a loss of about two-thirds of its peak user base.
🆕 blog! “Now witness the power of this fully operational Fediverse!”
How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes.
Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog…
How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes.
Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog from each site. It is an imperfect measure - and a vain one - but lets me know where I should be spending my time. No point posting on a network which is just bots talking to each other, right?
Earlier this year I built a stats-counter for my blog. Every time someone clicks from a website which links to my blog, it records that visit in a database. I get to see which blog posts are doing numbers, and where those numbers came from.
Until fairly recently, the Mastodon social network didn't send referer details. I thought that reduced the visibility of the network and lobbied for it to change. As various Mastodon servers upgrade, and admins opt-in, it is becoming more apparent just how much traffic originates from the Fediverse.
Over the last few weeks, here's how many people have clicked from BlueSky and Mastodon to one of my blog posts.
At first glance, it doesn't look good for our elephantine friends, does it? The butterfly sends over twice the traffic. Game over!
But, of course, while Mastodon.social is the biggest instance - it is far from the only one. What happens if we slide down the long tail? Here's all the Mastodon-ish instances which sent me over 10 clicks.
If you add up all the Lemmy instances, they send about as much traffic as Facebook and LinkedIn combined. That's not a huge surprise - those platforms hate anyone clicking away to the wider web.
Twitter is basically the Dead Internet. I'm no longer on there, but I do occasionally search it to see who is sharing my posts. The popular posts I write get shared a lot - sometimes by accounts with huge followers - yet there are no comments or retweets and barely and clicks.
I don't do Instagram or Threads, and that might be reflected in their low numbers. But I'm not active on YouTube either - yet people there occasionally link back to me.
Firstly, my stats only represent my site. Your site might be very different.
Secondly, I've ignored search engine traffic, big blogs, newsletters, and other sources.
Thirdly, and most importantly, this isn't a competition! The desire for a "winner-takes-all" service is dangerous and disturbing. An ecosystem is at its most vibrant when there are multiple participants each thriving in their own niche.
I want a thousand sites, running a hundred different software stacks, some of which only serve a dozen people, or even a lone participant.
A graph with 2 panels. In the upper panel is a normal distribution probability density curve, with "Normal Distribution" written underneath it.
In the lower panel there is another curve, a bit like the one above, but with smaller variance (so the curve drops more steeply), and the sides are joined up at the bottom with a wavy line that hovers just above the X axis. The curve has 2 dots near the top, which look like eyes, so the whole thing looks like a ghost.
It has "Paranormal Distribution" written underneath it.
#Introduction (renewed for this instance): I am a programmer turned biostatistician/bioinformatician living in Prague, Czech Republic.
I love helping clinicians make sense of their data and the Stan language. The project I am currently most excited is working on the SBC R package (https://hyunjimoon.github.io/SBC/) that lets you validate that you implemented your Bayesian probabilistic model/algorithm correctly #statistics#bayesian
Coming soon to #LabPlot: Python scripting, live data analysis, and a suite of 13 statistical hypothesis tests like t-Tests, ANOVA, Chi-Square and Mann-Whitney U Test.
Huge thanks to the NLnet Foundation and the EU's Next Generation Internet Program for making this possible!
The image is an X post by @RealJakeBroe from 7 hours ago, featuring a two-panel comic. The top panel shows a scientist pointing to a chart with a general trend and an outlier, illustrating a rational argument. The bottom panel depicts a person labeled "ANTI VAX" pointing to a similar chart, labeling it "CONSPIRACY THEORY" with "Lies" and an outlier called "IRREFUTABLE PROOF!!!", satirizing irrational arguments. The caption reads, "It is difficult to win an argument with a smart person. It is impossible to win an argument with an idiot."
I have a #science question. A major challenge in #climatology and climate models is reconstructing historical weather and climate data from incomplete and fragmentary data sets and many different sources. I know that there is a lot of thought put into these models, and that they largely do it well. But to outsiders, this process of reconstruction can often seem dubious and thus is frequently used to cased doubt against both these reconstructions and the field of climatology as a whole.
So what I could use for such discussions are other examples of mathematical reconstructions of historical datasets from fields outside of climatology, to show that this is not a unique process but a widely used approach. Can anyone give me any suggestions?
All politics are local, so here are some things that might primarily be of interest to locals in #SomervilleMA but also others.
First, there was a mayoral candidate forum on Monday night. The video is now online. I think it's pretty representative of each candidate's style and positions, personally. You can watch that here (and you can adjust the speed, if that's your thing, fyi).
For the first time in approximately forever, I've posted to my old blog. It's about Somerville voting history, turnout, and Ballot Question 2 this year. It's dorky and not polished enough, but I'm starting midterms and want to put this out there so I can go back to schoolwork and stop fussing over it. 😅