Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Data Elixir @dataelixir.com · 8h

The metrics that matter most are the hardest to measure. Bookings take weeks to materialize, but clicks happen instantly. The trap: optimizing for clicks can actually decrease bookings. Correlation isn't causation, especially in A/B tests.

How to estimate correlation between metrics from past A/B tests

Authors: Miha Gazvoda, Christina Katsimerou

booking.ai

Data Elixir @dataelixir.com · 23h

Psychology's dirty secret: "data available upon request" usually means data not available at all. Researchers found systematic patterns in why data disappears over time. Open-washing is real and it's undermining reproducibility.

LnuOpen | Meta-Psychology

Many journals now require data sharing and require articles to include a Data Availability Statement. However, several studies over the past two decades have shown that promissory notes about data…

open.lnu.se

1 1

Reposted by Data Elixir

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 6d

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

nyti.ms

140 1.8K 4.7K

Data Elixir @dataelixir.com · 2d

Parquet is showing its age. CMU researchers built F3 - a columnar format that embeds WebAssembly decoders directly in files. Universal compatibility without the usual compatibility hell. Smart approach for modern ML workloads.

db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2025/...

db.cs.cmu.edu

1

Data Elixir @dataelixir.com · 5d

Mathematicians feared nuclear winter would freeze Earth, but it turns out CO2 might do it instead. The math behind climate tipping points is fascinating and terrifyingly unpredictable. Sometimes the thing you're not watching is the real threat.

The Math of Climate Change Tipping Points | Quanta Magazine

Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful?

www.quantamagazine.org

Reposted by Data Elixir

Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 7d

Data dictionary template: osf.io/ynqcu
Project summary template: osf.io/q6g8d
Dataset level README template: osf.io/tk4cb

5 29

Data Elixir @dataelixir.com · 6d

"Silicon samples" - using LLMs to generate fake survey responses instead of recruiting humans. Sounds efficient until you realize small model tweaks completely flip your results. Shortcuts in research usually aren't.

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research.…

arxiv.org

Data Elixir @dataelixir.com · 7d

Your ggplot2 charts work fine, but are they memorable? Real color engineering: brightness first (strongest differentiator), then hue, finally saturation. Most people get this backwards and wonder why their viz falls flat. www.chartography.net/p/color-engi...

Color Engineering

The tool that snaps mercurial design into mechanical focus.

www.chartography.net

6 17