Martyn Plummer

@martynplummer.bsky.social

580 followers 190 following 83 posts

Statistics. Computing. Cancer Epidemiology. Public health.

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Physics 31%

Public Health 25%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Martyn Plummer

Richard Everitt @bayesianstats.bsky.social · 7d

*Environmental Modelling meets Infectious Diseases: from Mathematics to Applications* Upcoming workshop in Warwick Stats, supported CRiSM, LMS and RSS. We aim to promote the transfer of ideas between the environmental modelling and infectious disease modelling communities.
http://go.warwick.ac...

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · 14d

Added to my Christmas list . Thanks.

About half way though Person of Interest in case you are wondering if I listen to your recommendations.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · 27d

I live in Coventry South and can confirm. Sultana scraped in with a 401 majority in 2019. Her majority increased to 10000 in 2024 mainly because the Conservative vote plummeted. It was not a personal endorsement of her politics.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · 28d

This is very sad news. John had an enormous influence over applied statistics through his books and software. It was always a pleasure to interact with him.

Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 28d

#rstats
It is with profound sadness I heard that my long-time friend and colleague, John Fox passed away this week.
He was the author of {car}, {effects}, {Rcmdr}, ... and numerous influential books. I will miss him greatly.
www.john-fox.ca

John Fox: Books and Software

www.john-fox.ca

Reposted by Ben H. Ansell, Patrick S. Forscher, Will Lowe , and 3 more Ben H. Ansell, Patrick S. Forscher, Will Lowe, Barrett, Martyn Plummer, Jan R. Boehnke

Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 28d

John Fox: Books and Software

www.john-fox.ca

Reposted by Steve Peers, Martyn Plummer

dag @davidallengreen.bsky.social · Nov 23

"Unfortunately, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire 28-point peace plan was eaten by a small dog."

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Nov 22

Tim Capello in The Lost Boys (1987) was peak sax. It was all downhill from there.

Reposted by Martyn Plummer

Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · Nov 19

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
💀Nov 18, 1887 Gustav Theodor Fechner died in Leipzig, Germany 🇩🇪

1850: Fechner's Law: the subjective sensation is proportional to the log of stimulus intensity. This is a core idea behind accuracy of visual encoding of data -- eg, length > angle > area > color

Graph illustrating Fechner's Law, S = k log I. It plots I= intensity of a stimulus on the horizontal axis vs. perceived Stimulus sensation on the vertical.

Photo of Gustav Fechner, sitting, holding a book

Reposted by Peter Thorne, Steve Peers, Tim Bale , and 11 more Peter Thorne, Steve Peers, Tim Bale, Elizabeth Stokoe, Patrick Walsh, Tom Griffin, Adrian Vickers, David Murakami Wood, Ian Butler, Simon Naylor, Martyn Plummer, Nicole Guenther Discenza, Eugene McCann, Aidan O’Sullivan

Stephen Collins @stephencollins.bsky.social · Nov 13

Every ad now

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.]

JANET:
Ugh...

LIZ:
What's up?

JANET:
I am so bored of cooking peas!

LIZ:
Have you tried...

AI peas?

JANET:
AI peas?

LIZ:
They're peas with AI!

[Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI].

LIZ:
Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas

JANET:
What

LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines]

Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas?

[Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it]

LIZ:

Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine

[Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas]

LIZ:
With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas!

JANET:
What

LIZ:
Shut up

LIZ:
Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow

From opening the bag of peas

to boiling the peas

to eating the peas

To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means.

JANET:
Is it really necessary to-

LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]:
THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET

[Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan:

AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas.

[Ends]

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Nov 6

This remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets is a bit dark.

www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor Isn’t a Prince Anymore, but He Could Still Become King

King Charles’s brother remains eighth in the line of succession even though he no longer has his royal titles and honors.

www.vanityfair.com

Reposted by Martyn Plummer, Frédéric Barraquand

tj mahr 🦃 @tjmahr.com · Oct 29

student used some AI-assisted code to compute ROC stats with weights and the AI hallucinated pROC::roc(…, weights = weights). (the function doesn’t have a weights argument.) and because the function has a … argument, the fake weights argument was ignored without any warning

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Oct 18

The No Kings protests in the UK today have been helpfully renamed “No Tyrants”, just to clarify that they don’t want to get rid of the actual king.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Oct 1

I think it’s plausible that, under the right conditions, life is common, but intelligent life is rare (it took billions of years on Earth). Without fossil fuels a sustainable industrial revolution might be next to impossible so industrial civilisations are even more rare.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Sep 27

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Financial Times @financialtimes.com · Sep 27

AI can’t raise the dead, but it might do the next best thing on.ft.com/4gFXyus | opinion

AI can’t raise the dead, but it might do the next best thing

Rapid advances in generative AI and voice technology mean communicating with the deceased will no longer be sci-fi

on.ft.com

Reposted by Martyn Plummer

Financial Times @financialtimes.com · Sep 27

AI can’t raise the dead, but it might do the next best thing on.ft.com/4gFXyus | opinion

AI can’t raise the dead, but it might do the next best thing

Rapid advances in generative AI and voice technology mean communicating with the deceased will no longer be sci-fi

on.ft.com

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Sep 24

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." - Hannah Arendt

LBC @lbc.co.uk · Sep 24

"We were told thalidomide was a safe drug and it wasn't..."

Nigel Farage says he has 'no idea' if Donald Trump is right about paracetamol being linked to autism.

Reposted by Will Jennings, Steve Peers, Andrew Scott , and 9 more Will Jennings, Steve Peers, Andrew Scott, Tim Bale, Anand Menon, Jonathan Hopkin, David Merrett, Holger Hestermeyer, Steven Fielding, Ian Loader, James Connelly, Martyn Plummer

LBC @lbc.co.uk · Sep 24

"We were told thalidomide was a safe drug and it wasn't..."

Nigel Farage says he has 'no idea' if Donald Trump is right about paracetamol being linked to autism.

Reposted by Martyn Plummer

Adam Johansen @adamjohansen.bsky.social · Sep 23

There are a couple of vacancies in Wollongong for Maths/Stats lecturers:

www.uow.edu.au/about/jobs/j...

www.uow.edu.au

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Sep 22

People have been predicting the end of the world for some time and they’ve all been wrong so far. When the world failed to end in 1844, the Millerite movement called it “The Great Disappointment“. I don’t suppose that sentiment was widely shared.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Sep 15

Yes. Melanoma is not the most common cancer in Australia but the others appear later. So when you restrict the picture to under-50s you get high peaks in Australia but also N Europe. Data from the IARC Global Cancer Observatory gco.iarc.who.int/en

Reposted by Martyn Plummer

R-Ladies @rladies.org · Sep 12

R Developer Day at University of Warwick brought together R-Ladies from around the world 🌎.

Spaces like this remind us how powerful our global community is when we learn, collaborate and build together.

Thanks to Heather Turner for making this possible 💜

#RDevDay
#rladies

“Smiling group of 14 R-Ladies at R Dev Day, posing together in a meeting room with a whiteboard and chairs in the background.

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Steve Peers, Elizabeth Stokoe , and 2 more Dorothy Bishop, Steve Peers, Elizabeth Stokoe, Martyn Plummer, Guy Dewsbury

LBC @lbc.co.uk · Sep 7

"It got the debate going and that's why we put him on."

Reform’s Laila Cunningham explains why her party allowed a 'quack' to falsely claim that the Covid vaccines gave the King cancer.

Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · Sep 4

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Sep 4

At the RSS conference in Edinburgh where @firthstat.bsky.social is presenting his new tetraplots for displaying 4-way results in UK elections. Wooden tetrahedron by @warwickstats.bsky.social woodworker-in-residence Nick Tawn.

David Firth holding a wooden tetrahedron in front of a poster displaying his new tetraplots. The proportion of votes for each of four parties is a point inside the volume of a tetrahedron, which is then projected onto the nearest surface and the tetrahedron is unfolded to make a flat display.

Reposted by Will Jennings, Chris Hanretty, Philip Cowley , and 1 more Will Jennings, Chris Hanretty, Philip Cowley, Martyn Plummer

David Firth @firthstat.bsky.social · Aug 26

At next week's RSS conference I'll be presenting a poster (a first for me...it's about time!)

"Tetraplot displays of UK General Election results" shows how to graph GE 2024 vote shares across 4 parties in a useful way.

Full PDF poster at:
github.com/DavidFirth/t...

Image of a poster to be presented at the Royal Statistical Society conference in Edinburgh, September 2025. The main point is to generalize the idea of a ternary plot to handle 4-part compositions, by showing views through the triangular faces of a tetrahedron. The data shown are vote counts from England, Scotland and Wales in the UK General Election of July 2024.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Aug 24

It can’t give you advice because it doesn’t know anything. It’s a synthetic text generator that responds with a statistically plausible continuation of the context window based on the training data. @infinitescream.bsky.social

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Aug 24

Kyle [secretary of state for science innovation and technology] has been a vocal champion of AI … he had asked ChatGPT for advice on a range of work-related questions, including why British businesses were not adopting AI and what podcasts he should appear on.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Deal to get ChatGPT Plus for whole of UK discussed by Open AI boss and minister

Exclusive: Deal that could have cost £2bn was floated at meeting between technology secretary Peter Kyle and Sam Altman

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Martyn Plummer

F. Javier Rubio @fjrubio.bsky.social · Aug 21

New paper, with P. Basak, A.R. Linero, and C. Maringe, accepted in JASA A&CS

"Understanding Inequalities in Cancer Survival Using Bayesian Machine Learning"

doi.org/10.1080/0162...

#inequalities #cancer #survival #Bayesian #MachineLearning @icon-lshtm.bsky.social @statisticsucl.bsky.social

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Aug 18

This explains why Peter Kyle wants the Turing to focus on defense and security research which a) belongs in the public sector and b) is in the national interest.

It's a narrow view of the national interest but it answers the existential question.

Martyn Plummer @martynplummer.bsky.social · Aug 18

The problem with creating a centralised research institute is that you have to answer the question "Why here? Why can't this be done elsewhere?" Caught between industry and the university sector, the Alan Turing Institute is having a hard time answering.

The Guardian @theguardian.com · Aug 18

‘Shut it down and start again’: staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

Whistleblower warns UK’s top AI research body in danger of collapse due to threats over funding and new direction

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