Erin Jonaitis

Applied statistician at UW-Madison, interested in longitudinal data analysis, reproducible workflows, and Alzheimer's disease. Views mine; all my errors are independent.

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emjonaitis_at_mathstodon.xyz@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-02-09 14:28:43 UTC

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I am stupid fussy about this. I cut tiny butter squares just so every hole has some. I’m glad I eat all my waffles at home.

2026-01-13 12:15:33 UTC

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How targeted are the Medicaid cuts? Constraining a funding source that pays for nursing home care seems insane as the boomers age. If nursing home payments go away, not only will you be creating problems for the elderly, you’ll also be taking working adults out of the workforce and impoverishing their families.

2025-08-13 20:01:53 UTC

This updated list of bike helmet ratings went around a few days ago. I checked and, lo and behold, my helmet was in the “false economy” class (cheap but virtually useless). Celebrated my day off today with a new bike helmet, and a new seat too. (If bike seats had ratings, my old one would have been in the “decrepit” class.)
https://www.helmet.beam.vt.edu/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html

2025-07-25 16:11:42 UTC

I’m looking for an alternative #rstats IDE. I’ve been a longtime user of RStudio and have relied heavily on their “projects” construct for data and code organization, and on RMarkdown for document creation. However, there is a decade+ old performance issue with this IDE when working with projects through a VPN, which makes effective remote work almost impossible. At a previous remote job, we had the resources for me to keep a desktop on-site that I could remote into so that all code running would be local to the network where the files live. However, I’m in a different job now with different resource constraints, so I really notice the slowdown, which for simple test code is about 10x, but I think for real code is longer still.
Advice?

2025-03-27 13:31:22 UTC

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That link isn’t working for me; not sure if it’s server nonsense — is there a news story linked?

2024-11-16 17:58:25 UTC

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When I was dipping my toe into the water of a stats degree, I came to understand that there's the way that it's taught to people in other disciplines -- which maps well onto the "lesser math" reputation -- and the way that it's taught in stats degree programs -- which leans heavily not just on intro calculus but also Real Analysis (which, coming to the field late, I did not have). The gap here is vast and I think is part of the reason that statistics as a field has not been successful in guild behaviors like naming constructs or policing who can practice it.

2024-10-18 12:25:33 UTC

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Wondering if this should make us question satisfaction ratings as an outcome…

2024-09-04 16:32:13 UTC

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Teaching non-practitioners to understand what they're looking at is important, so thanks for making this a living course. My sense is that public understanding of what "AI" means is fairly weak. We're now seeing compliance folks pushing back on any use of our own data to train any AI model, which in the limit could result in absurdities like not being permitted to set internal cutpoints for normal vs abnormal on a blood test (which is necessary because not everything used in research is a clinically validated test that comes with package inserts, and because some assays have normal ranges which vary significantly by lab). I'm on board with a restriction on using generative AI specifically, but "no AI at all" pushes very far back into the past in a way I think laypeople don't really understand. People were doing AI work when I was in my PhD program 20 years ago! And it wasn't new then, either.

2024-08-27 19:03:13 UTC

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There’s a volume aspect to this too. I suspect I’m considerably more norm-core than the archetypal Mastodon user (along most axes but not all) — but because I don’t have a big account, this stuff just doesn’t come up for me.
Might be worth doing a qualitative study of pain points identified by big users of various platforms/whatever-we-call-them, and what those say about the culture. (Possibly this is already out there. Possibly you are even the person who would have written it… I’m out of my depth here) The median user of any service probably just isn’t going to experience the same things.

2024-08-22 14:30:36 UTC

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I've had my mind blown by the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. Totally new way of thinking about consent for me. And for small genetic groups, particularly marginalized ones, it makes a great deal of sense.
For some things, a risk management dial pulled all the way to one side defeats the purpose of the thing, and we need to contend with some middle ground (think "safer sex"). I like the data sovereignty movement because it sets the dial somewhere in the middle: yes, we want our nation to be connected to the wider world, because we need some of what biomedicine has to offer and most of it is happening in that wider world, but we want to do it in a way that mitigates the risk to the nation.
(This is not a commentary on All of Us, I have no insight into that study and don't know whether they have any relationships with Native groups. One of the Alzheimer's cohorts I work with does, which is how I became aware of this movement.)

2024-08-22 14:19:31 UTC

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I think this touches on a big question: under what circumstances should community norms prioritize risk management vs connection (to history, to other people)? Consumer genetic services are another example where this tradeoff comes into play, and an interesting one because "individual decisions" sort of aren't, really.

2024-08-22 13:54:53 UTC

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*nods* Yeah, I see that, in terms of sensitive items (and of course all it takes is a shifting of political winds to change what's sensitive). It's a bigger threat with electronic records, I would expect, because it's easier to do stuff en masse, but of course if the set of books you want to snoop on people for is small, the analog version was plenty risky.
The thing I liked about these cards was that they made tangible something about the community function of a library, showing you how you and other people are related. It wouldn't surprise me if it's a general principle that the practices which can generate this kind of feeling also present risks.

2024-08-22 13:45:54 UTC

Found out where an item I recently ordered via ILL is shipping from, and I thought, hey, I bet I know a person or two who's used this very book. I kinda wish we still wrote names in cards in the back. That was a nice cultural practice.

2024-08-20 19:32:06 UTC

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Interesting. Who actually makes the selection?

2024-08-20 19:16:11 UTC

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I thought about that one too, actually, but it sounds like a bigger time commitment than I'm looking for right now.

2024-08-14 02:41:24 UTC

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Pleased to say that the voters of our state wisely saw through this ploy and rejected the referenda in question. I hope others were as disgusted by the disinformation as Mr. Me and I were.

2024-08-13 13:19:04 UTC

I’m off work today, so I have the latitude to comment briefly about politics. I got my first political disinformation text yesterday, which was targeted to me based on my location and my party affiliation. (My husband got a similar one.) The right wing party, which has controlled the legislature for some time and has a structural advantage in retaining control, is trying to arrogate some gubernatorial powers to itself by constitutional amendment. The text we received insinuated that the amendment is meant to constrain the powers of a former governor who left office in 2019. Be careful out there, everyone, and vote!

2024-08-08 03:13:22 UTC

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Sent a message to ACLU of Wisconsin. Also tagging [@starchy](https://infosec.exchange/@starchy ); does EFF have any Wisconsin connects or resources for advocacy on this issue?

2024-08-08 02:24:09 UTC

@npub1ffa…r8hz This merits your attention, I think. Feeling a duty to respond myself. https://www.channel3000.com/news/mmsd-introduces-facial-recognition-technology-to-screen-visitors-against-criminal-databases/article_6eb13fec-5509-11ef-894e-57a1c978bb19.html

2024-08-06 21:14:42 UTC

#git newbie question: I have a repository stored on Github; I created a copy on an internal Gitlab instance for coworker convenience. How do I sync the version on Gitlab with the one on Github?

2024-08-05 14:31:56 UTC

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Oh yeah, he is absolutely a missing stair. I’ve been using R for work since maybe 2011 and probably one of the first things I learned, passed down from someone else whisper-network style, was “avoid the mailing list.”

2024-07-26 14:12:51 UTC

I’d like to look at some university policies around AI in research using human subjects data, with a particular eye to how AI is defined. Is anyone collecting these?