Long ago, there were no software companies.

Proportionality is how complex societies remain functional in the presence of uncertainty

Have you ever had that person in your team that made sure to explicitly share that they have been working during crazy hours, every single time they had to do that? (I have, and what a pleasant person to listen to.) These types of glorifications are sometimes thrown around as if they were achievements. Even though it’s not strange to work overtime or do experiments on weekends, if you are a researcher.

This blog is part of a series contributed by presenters at the International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) Conference, held in Istanbul and Bergen in October 2025.

We are ecstatic to announce the release of measr 2.0.0. measr is an R package for estimating and evaluating diagnostic classification models (DCMs). You can specify a variety of DCMs, choose a Stan backend and estimation method, and then evaluate the model using a wide range of model fit analyses.

On January 13, 2026, I was on Posit’s Data Science Lab to talk about my Positron settings and other neat workflow-y things I use to make my life easier. I’ll post the video here once it’s up. This isn’t a standard blog post—it’s mostly just a list of the stuff we talked about, with lots of different links to other resources.

It’s been a very long time since I had my own blog. In recent years, I’ve had the privilege of guest blogging for various outlets, including The White House, The Good Science Project, dataindex.us, and Upstream (among others). I’ll continue to guest blog from time-to-time when a topic is appropriate for a specific venue. However, I can’t always find a home for some of my perspectives and this blog will fill that void in my publishing portfolio.

Metadata for nearly 60,000 new datasets were added to the Federal Data Catalog (FDC) on Data.gov in the first two weeks of 2026. The totals reported on the Data.gov landing page rose from 376,504 on midnight January 1st to 433,944 at noon January 13th. Almost all of that increase was the result of adding new federal data assets to the catalog, which now appear to total 397,191.

Reutilización CC BY 4.0

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new guide from the BMFTR-funded (Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space) project “Professionalisierung der Open-Access-Repositorien-Infrastruktur in Deutschland (Pro OAR DE)”: “Forschungsdaten: Handlungsfeld für institutionelle Open-Access-Repositorien. Pro OAR DE Handreichung” (available in German only). Matthias, L., Pampel, H., Khamis, C. O., & Rothfritz, L. (2025).

Ted Habermann and Erin Robinson, Metadata Game Changers During May 2025 we presented results of measurements of DataCite metadata completeness for four FAIR Use Cases: Text, Identifiers, Connections, and Contacts. We identified repositories who are succeeding at creating FAIR metadata despite facing challenges like those faced by the whole community.