Julian Wolfson
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drjwolfson.bsky.social
Julian Wolfson
@drjwolfson.bsky.social
760 followers 1K following 21 posts
Professor, UMN Biostatistics & Health Data Science. Co-founder, Daynamica (www.daynamica.com). Canadian still pronouncing Z the right way, usually.
Posts Replies Media Videos
drjwolfson.bsky.social
So proud that UMN Biostat & Health Data Science's own Leif Verace received the John van Ryzin Award for best student paper at ENAR. Congrats Leif (and advisor/co-author Dr. Erjia Cui)!
Graphic featuring a photo of award winner Leif Verace and the title of his paper, "A Marginal Approach to Longitudinal Function-on-Function Regression"
March 25, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
pgourevitch.bsky.social
powerful detailed account of ICE captivity

"To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me...Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there"

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped
I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was lucky
www.theguardian.com
March 19, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
dimitridrekonja.bsky.social
“How bad can it be to have an anti-vaccine zealot leading our health agencies?” 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️
March 10, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
asrothstein.bsky.social
MINNESOTA

NIH Awards Funding: $718 M
Jobs Supported : 7,992
Economic activity supported: $ 1.74 B

www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...
February 8, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
cvidonne.bsky.social
🚀 {unhcrthemes} 0.6.3 is out!

The latest version of our R package for creating UNHCR-styled charts is now on CRAN. 🎨📊

🔗 Check it out: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

(1/3)
unhcrthemes: UNHCR 'ggplot2' Theme and Colour Palettes
A 'ggplot2' theme and color palettes following the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Data Visualization Guidelines recommendations.
cran.r-project.org
January 16, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
evanrobertsnz.bsky.social
There are post-doc openings for the @minnpop.bsky.social Training Program in Population Health Science. Apply by the end of January if you're interested and eligible! And spread the word please!
pop.umn.edu/training/pos...
Postdoctoral Training | Minnesota Population Center
Postdoctoral TrainingWe hire both project-based Post Doctoral Associates and program-based Post Doctoral Trainees.
pop.umn.edu
December 30, 2024 at 9:49 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
Receiving a "Model Release" (the Zoolander kind, not the glm kind) form from NCI definitely wasn't on my bingo card for today.
December 20, 2024 at 8:52 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
veerle.hypebright.nl
Another edition of Shiny Source Code Explained ✨🤓 And this time it is all about the code behind the new busy indicators that were added in Shiny 1.9 (July 2024)!

hypebright.nl/en/shiny-en/...

Enjoy!

#rshiny #rstats
Shiny Source Code Explained: Busy Indicators - Hypebright
Curious how Shiny busy indicators work? Take a closer look at the source code behind spinner overlays and pulsing banners, and find out!
hypebright.nl
December 10, 2024 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
quarto.org
Quarto 1.6 is out! 🎉 Download it here: quarto.org/docs/download/

Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. Blog post: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...
Quarto 1.6 – Quarto
Quarto 1.6 supports unified branding across formats, updates to RevealJS, a new shortcode to reorder content, a landscape page block, and more. There are also a couple of breaking changes that will af...
quarto.org
November 25, 2024 at 8:40 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
ChatGPT "explains" multiple imputation 🧐
Diagram of multiple imputation produced by ChatGPT, consisting of meaningless shapes, arrows, and incomprehensible text.
November 25, 2024 at 7:36 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
Feel-good story? Check.
Public health connection? Check.
Cute dog? Check.
Awesome person doing inspiring things? Check and check.

www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/ne...
After completing a half marathon, this running duo aims to continue pushing boundaries together
Michael Fuller and Mahesh Mathew are finding purpose on Twin Cities running paths together.
www.cbsnews.com
November 25, 2024 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
smachlis.bsky.social
The {tidyprompt} #RStats 📦 *under development* is designed for prompting your #LLMs “the tidy way.” It includes function calling, so you “can define your own R functions and give the LLM the ability to call them.”
By Luka Koning & Tjark Van de Merwe #GenAI
tjarkvandemerwe.github.io/tidyprompt/
Key features of ‘tidyprompt’ are: tidy prompting: Quickly and elegantly construct prompts for LLMs, using piping syntax (inspired by the ‘tidyverse’). Wrap a base prompt in prompt wraps to influence how the LLM handles the prompt. A library of pre-built prompt wraps is included, but you can also write your own. structured output: Extract structured output from the LLM’s response, and validate it. Automatic retries with feedback to the LLM, if the output is not as expected. reasoning modes: Make your LLM answer in a specific mode, such as chain-of-thought or ReAct (Reasoning and Acting) modes. function calling: Give your LLM the ability to autonomously call R functions (‘tools’). With this, the LLM can retrieve information or take other actions. ‘tidyprompt’ also supports R code generation and evaluation, allowing LLMs to run R code. compatible with all LLM providers: Usable with any LLM provider that supports chat completion. Use included LLM providers such as Ollama (local PC/on your own server), OpenAI, OpenRouter (offering various providers, including Anthropic), Mistral, Groq, XAI (Grok), or Google Gemini. Or easily write your own hook for any other LLM provider.
November 23, 2024 at 2:15 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
Sven
#skyhounds #greyhound #lurcher
November 21, 2024 at 3:09 AM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
danielmalinsky.bsky.social
The Columbia public health school published this Q&A about my work on causality & algorithmic fairness. Read on to learn how the IMF's imposed austerity policies post-2009 financial crisis led me down a path toward studying causal inference*

*not among the intended effects

shorturl.at/KkeWu
A Biostatistician Pursues Causality and Algorithmic Fairness
A Q&A with Daniel Malinsky, assistant professor of biostatistics.
www.publichealth.columbia.edu
November 21, 2024 at 12:15 AM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
Interesting but not surprising. The next frontier is leveraging this kind of daily activity pattern data to improve health and well-being rather than harm it.
dell.bsky.social dell cameron @dell.bsky.social · Nov 20
WIRED has tracked thousands of US military & intel personnel coming & going from classified sites, incl. NSA hubs & nuclear vaults. We know where they sleep, what they eat, and which brothels they visit.

It's an ocean of blackmail & national secrets within reach of every spy agency in the world.
Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels in Germany
More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a US data broker expose the detailed movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany—and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it.
www.wired.com
November 21, 2024 at 12:20 AM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
stephenturner.us
For anyone curious, I've never written a browser extension before, and I only know enough Javascript to be dangerous in Shiny/Quarto. I took a screenshot of a bioRxiv page and pasted into Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and asked it to build one for me. Worked with minimal follow up prompts. ~5 minutes in total.
November 20, 2024 at 2:07 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
simonpcouch.com
I've been working a new #rstats package called pal🤖

Pals bring a library of LLM prompts into your RStudio/Positron sessions, editing code directly at the press of a keyboard shortcut.

Read more: simonpcouch.github.io/pal/
A screen recording of the RStudio IDE. After highlighting some code, a dialog box pops up with a selection of keywords; after selecting one called "cli", some erroring code is rewritten. Then, after highlighting a whole function and selecting a new keyword "roxygen", roxygen documentation is drafted on-the-fly.
November 19, 2024 at 8:22 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
This seems pretty cool
colinfay.bsky.social Colin 🤘🌱🏃‍♀️ @colinfay.bsky.social · Nov 19
#RStats I'm so happy to finally share what we've been experimenting on at ThinkR for the past couple of weeks — A native mobile app that can run R code through #webR

Read more at 👉 rtask.thinkr.fr/youve-been-w...
November 19, 2024 at 3:51 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
A bingo card for (bio)stat researchers! I’m dangerously close to a black-out…
maartenvsmeden.bsky.social Maarten van Smeden @maartenvsmeden.bsky.social · Nov 18
I made one for stats papers
November 18, 2024 at 1:46 PM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
What's the statute of limitations on backlogged random thoughts and opinions that didn't get posted at The Other Site? Asking for a friend...
November 18, 2024 at 2:27 AM
drjwolfson.bsky.social
Trying again with a working link:

We’ve just posted a new Contract Assistant Professor position at UMN Biostat & Health Data Science! Happy to discuss with anyone interested.

#biostatistics #healthdatascience #academicjobs

hr.myu.umn.edu/jobs/ext/365...
Careers
Required qualifications:Applicants must have a PhD in biostatistics, statistics, or a closely related field, by the start of appointment and a strong interest in collaborative research with biomedical investigators across the health sciences.
hr.myu.umn.edu
November 17, 2024 at 2:01 AM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
sherrirose.bsky.social
I made a starter pack for health policy statistics! 📈🔢
November 16, 2024 at 9:11 PM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
jaredhuling.bsky.social
Reposting since people are actually on bsky:
jaredhuling.bsky.social Jared Huling @jaredhuling.bsky.social · May 8
When generalizing effects from RCTs to new populations, nonadherence can complicate interpretation. UMN Biostat PhD student Justin Clark's dissertation develops a principal stratification approach to deal with nonadherence when generalizing effects: arxiv.org/abs/2405.04419
Transportability of Principal Causal Effects
Recent research in causal inference has made important progress in addressing challenges to the external validity of trial findings. Such methods weight trial participant data to more closely...
arxiv.org
November 17, 2024 at 12:02 AM
Reposted by Julian Wolfson
tyk314.net
#ICHPS2025 approaches! @sherrirose.bsky.social, @whitneyepi.bsky.social, and @susanpaddock.bsky.social will deliver keynote and plenary sessions. Attend sessions by @rhubbbstat.bsky.social, @lizstuart.bsky.social, @jaredhuling.bsky.social, and @drjwolfson.bsky.social. #hspr #hpss #statssky #episky
2025 International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS)
Throughout the last 20+ years, the International Conference on Health Policy Statistics—organized by the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association—has played a vital rol...
ww2.amstat.org
November 16, 2024 at 9:05 PM