Konsta Happonen
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konsta.happonen.eu
Konsta Happonen
@konsta.happonen.eu
440 followers 1.5K following 730 posts
Youth researcher. Bayesian surveyor of inner worlds. Tired baritone.
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konsta.happonen.eu
People are the best and worst part of working in research. And I guess of life in general as well.
November 26, 2025 at 6:13 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
cameronpat.bsky.social
this is one of my favourite observations about sample size calculations. (afaik first articulated by Miettinen in 1985)
"On the first, and pivotal, level the decision is a binary one—the choice between zero and nonzero as the size. Validity considerations alone are often sufficient to imply that zero is the optimal size" - O. S. Miettinen "Theoretical Epidemiology" (1985)
November 25, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
I fully agree that a fully standardized effect size can often be a bad criterion for dismissing an effect. But somehow, instead of choosing more sensible metrics for evaluation, psychologists tend to conclude that hence any “significant” effect is potentially very important.
November 24, 2025 at 7:27 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
chelseaparlett.bsky.social
IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LOOK AT THE UNCERTAINTY OF YOUR ESTIMATES WHY BOTHER DOING THE ANALYSIS AT ALL

#pikasShoutStats
A pika shouting while sitting on a rock
November 21, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
usrbinr.bsky.social
For this reason and others, switch to Linux! For most of your personal computing needs it will not be a significant change.
November 20, 2025 at 11:58 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
williammunny1.bsky.social
November 19, 2025 at 6:20 PM
konsta.happonen.eu
Evolutionary biologists have to create at least one species.

This will be balanced out by ecologists having to drive at least one species to extinction.
rmkubinec.bsky.social Robert (Bob) Kubinec @rmkubinec.bsky.social · 7d
Let's hold academics to real standards.

Peace scientists should be fired if they don't end at least one war.

Political economists should be fired if they don't make at least one non-corrupt administration.

Data scientists should be fired if they don't install Python at least once \w no errors.
November 19, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
pengzell.bsky.social
Maybe this is a good time to mention what my mind plays everytime I see @konsta.happonen.eu
Mean girls ’Fetch’ meme with caption: Stop trying to make Konsta Happonen, it’s not going to Happonen
November 19, 2025 at 9:06 AM
konsta.happonen.eu
It seems my entire {targets} project is now in a superposition of completed / unrunnable because after updating R, the rules around default function arguments have become stricter (I think?). Sigh. I guess I should learn rix.

#rstats
November 18, 2025 at 8:43 AM
konsta.happonen.eu
All other statistical methods: 16/1000 = 1.6 %

Bayesian statistics: "It's 1.648352 %"
rmkubinec.bsky.social Robert (Bob) Kubinec @rmkubinec.bsky.social · 10d
My #rstats cheat code for today is the binom.confint function in the binom package that will spit out *12* different ways of calculating a CI for a proportion.

Also, this is why you use R for statistics...

(and of course the correct CI method is bayes 😎)
shows all the ways you can get a CI for a proportion in R
November 17, 2025 at 2:30 PM
konsta.happonen.eu
This was also a nice reminder that sometimes retrieving the parameters or even the shape of the data generating process is hard even when your model exactly matches your simulation.
A complementary cumulative distribution plot of a Weibull cure model showing 4000 realizations of the model and the true data generating process. The model overestimates the cure proportion because of censoring.
November 17, 2025 at 9:49 AM
konsta.happonen.eu
Spent a couple of hours coding a mixture cure model in Stan. I've never had the need to do survival modelling, but now I wish I had. Survival modelling is cool!
November 16, 2025 at 5:04 PM
konsta.happonen.eu
I just realized that I've never been to the southern hemisphere. Feels like a thing one should do.
November 15, 2025 at 7:42 AM
konsta.happonen.eu
Conference days should be shorter. My concentration can't keep up after following presentations for four hours.
November 14, 2025 at 11:06 AM
konsta.happonen.eu
Attending a youth research conference, a field where most of the research is done by sociologists and psychologists. Delightfully, one of the keynotes was by a historian (Youth and growing up in Ancient rome). It was very enlightening!More conferences should have this type of cross-pollination.
November 13, 2025 at 4:03 PM
konsta.happonen.eu
Monotonicity and concavity/convexity constraints in mgcv's generalized additive models? It's a dream come true!
gsimpson.bsky.social Gavin Simpson @gsimpson.bsky.social · 13d
A new release of the mgcv #RStats 📦 is out on CRAN and Simon Wood (U Edinburgh) has added some significant new features despite the small bump in version number:

🌟 scasm() for estimating GAMs with shape constrained smooths. Can be used with any family & smoothness selection is via the EFS method
Model is: b3 <- scasm( y ~ s(x0, bs = "bs", k= k) + s(x1, bs = "sc", xt = "m+", k = k) + s(x2, bs = "bs", k = k) + s(x3, bs = "bs", k = k), family=poisson, bs=200 ) The second smooth `s(x1) is a shape constrained smooth with a positive monotonicity constraint (xt = "m+"). The `bs = 200` arguments uses 200 boostrap samples, which generates bootstrap distributions for each coefficient in the model. These bootstrap samples respect the shape constraints, while the usual +/- 2 SE credible intervals may not. The uncertainty in the partial effects is shown by two credible interval bands; a dark blue central band is a 68% Bayesian credible interval, while the lighter blue outer interval is a 95% Bayesian credible interval. The background of each panel is light grey with white grid lines, in a similar style to ggplot2's default theme.
November 12, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
hansonmark.bsky.social
Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions.

We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards.

6/n
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
pengzell.bsky.social
Pushing for open access is not enough. We need a push to end profit.
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 14d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
chelseaparlett.bsky.social
🤏🤏🤏
The Drake hotline bling meme. Drake rejects “customer segmentation“ and accepts “clustomers”
November 10, 2025 at 9:14 PM
konsta.happonen.eu
I'd like to learn more about how to design useful conjoint experiments. What are some resources you've found useful? #statssky
November 8, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
eeeey MCARena
a woman in a red top and black skirt stands on a balcony with buildings in the background
Alt: a woman in a red top and black skirt stands on a balcony with buildings in the background dancing the macarena
media.tenor.com
November 8, 2025 at 8:43 AM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
devezer.bsky.social
Hero worship in science is rotten. There are no giants on whose shoulders we stand. We're all part of a community that spans time and geography. Getting fixated on origin stories is very Marvel. Science doesn't happen in heroland though.
November 6, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
matti.vuorre.com
What's the take home message?

If you're submitting AI slop you're a loser. You're just making these great free services harder to run, and making it more difficult to separate signal (science) from noise (your crappy AI shit.)
November 3, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Reposted by Konsta Happonen
andrewqmr.bsky.social
I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.
November 1, 2025 at 8:55 PM
konsta.happonen.eu
Went to see Alexander Ekman's COW at the National Ballet yesterday. Most fun I've had in a while! A delightful tongue-in-cheek performance that nonetheless left me thinking about some of the more serious themes presented.
A white sculpture of a cow hanging from the ceiling.
November 1, 2025 at 12:33 PM