Monica Alexander
@monjalexander
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Associate Professor in statistics and sociology at @UofT . Demographer. 🇦🇺 in 🇨🇦. On the other app with the same username
Toronto, Ontario
Joined February 2015
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The dentist asked me whether I grind my teeth at night. Ma’am I work in academia I grind my teeth when I open my inbox
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On a scale of 1-10 how tired are you?
I am 'thinking iMessage is the command line' tired
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Writing "In this paper we will..." in a sole-authored paper
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Getting shapefiles into useable format in R based on copy-pasting various code chunks from Stack Overflow
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My research ~process~
1. Excited about new project
2. New git repo
3. Data messier than I thought
4. Modeling harder than I thought
5. Guilt about other unfinished work
6. Wonder if any of it matters anyway given current state of world
7. Self-loathing, dread
8. Go to Step 1
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My students waiting for me to get the mutate(across()) syntax working while live coding in class
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Trying to weave all my projects into a coherent research narrative
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Me: yes I'm dealing with the current work situation fine thanks all good
Also me, writing exam questions:
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I got tenure! Here are a few short reflections:
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Happy Halloween from us! The prior, likelihood and posterior (turns out getting a nice family photo with a baby that’s just learnt to crawl is impossible).
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People emailing me to see a syllabus for a course I'm teaching next semester: I too would like to see a syllabus
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PhD: stressed because
- trying to do the best job I possibly can on one thing
- ignoring email from supervisor asking for updates
Assistant prof: stressed because
- trying to do a just okay job on 1254 things at once
- ignoring the 27 emails that have arrived since 10 min ago
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This morning I ran a workshop on social media data for population researchers. We extracted Twitter data, and did some geocoding, mapping, and text analysis. All the materials and code are here for people who are interested:
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Thinking about data collection: wow it would be great to collect info on all these variables! They would be super interesting to analyze!
Realities of data collection:
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The toddler has a ‘Bayesian probability’ book so for the sake of a well-rounded education I made a frequentist version. The next page says “draw a ball from the urn, note its colour and return it. Repeat this an infinite number of times” so it should keep him busy for a while
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Being in the same department as
@RohanAlexander
is a fun natural experiment. The same student emailed both of us with the same request.
They could have literally copy-pasted the greeting. And yet, Rohan gets "Dr" and I get "Ms"
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A friend gave our toddler an 'E is for Economics' book so I decided to make a 'D is for Demography' book. The pdf and code to make the book is here:
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d <- read_csv("data/data.csv")
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This post runs through an example Bayesian workflow in
#rstats
, looking at the relationship between birth weight and gestational age.
There's code and examples on how to do prior and posterior predictive checks, and LOO-CV, using both Stan and brms.
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Find a research project that excites you like a garbage truck excites a toddler
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This semester I taught stats to undergrad sociologists using the tidyverse in
#rstats
for the first time. Here's some reflections about what went well and what didn't:
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How to be a demographer:
1. Turn up to a talk, ask about denominators
Congratulations, you're a demographer
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This collaborator has an interesting approach to my “try and avoid Excel files” philosophy
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I wrote a post about applied statistics, data, and answering hard questions. The takeaway is that when doing and teaching applied statistics, we need to emphasize engaging with data, and understanding data in context.
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Just managed to replicate results in a paper and I'm not sure if I'm more surprised/impressed by myself or the authors
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Hey
#PopTwitter
! Here's a list of active women scholars in demography, with links to their website and two notable papers:
1/4
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Roses are red
Iron is magnetic
Each group consist of only one observation. Do you need to adjust the group aesthetic?
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File under “transit signs that look like shitposts”
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I'm recruiting a postdoc! Come and work on demographic methods, computational social science, and reproducibility. The position is for two years, with one year spent visiting the Lab of Digital and Computational Demography at
@MPIDRNews
. Details are here:
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'Terrible twos' appears to be false advertising and doesn't prepare you for the onslaught that is a 3 year-old
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I turned my git commits into a Christmas tree. Happy holidays!
Code in case you want to do the same:
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Someone found my wallet on the street in downtown Toronto. He saw my UofT ID card in it so googled me, emailed me and just now dropped it off at my door because the baby is napping. Canadians are amazing.
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Yesterday
@RohanAlexander
and I got Canadian permanent residency. We celebrated with a double double and watching replays of the Maple Leafs losing 🇨🇦
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This week's topic in both classes is "Multilevel models", or, "how many times and in how many ways can I misspell the word hierarchical"
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Sure I'll agree to do this recorded presentation for a webinar it's only 8 mins should be super quick to do
1395 takes, several hours later: "I'm Monica Alexander, an assistant professor in sadistics and sociology..."
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Finishing off your assignment submission when your professor forces you to use R Markdown:
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Our
#rstats
package 'rcbayes' is now on CRAN. The package has functions to calculate, visualize and estimate Rogers-Castro migration schedules using
@mcmc_stan
.
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Me, a demographer, trying to write about my research agenda: “I am interested in people, broadly defined”
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A lot of my feed right now is different modeling takes for COVID-19 but one thing that sticks out is the demographers en masse yelling “YES BUT HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE POPULATION AGE STRUCTURE” which is the most demography thing ever
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Canada:
Pros: nice people, great healthcare, very decent coffee, hockey
Cons: the Canadian Common CV
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1) Cool, seems like pretty clear relationship, will probably hold for more recent cohorts too
2) oh no
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It’s been a very long while between flights and I didn’t realize how much I missed the ‘coding while at an ordinary airport bar drinking a very ordinary beer’ vibe
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Surely for the Monaco Grand Prix they should randomly assign drivers to cars, complete the race, repeat the process ten times and calculate the winner based on the best average time
#montecarloftw
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Pretty excited to start as an Assistant Professor at
@UofT
in the statistical sciences and sociology departments!
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Sociology at the University of Toronto is hiring a TT position in the area of the sociological study of science and technology! The department is full of wonderful, supportive, talented people, and the views from our new office are pretty solid
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Academia is just replying to emails with “Sorry, this week is a bit of a mess, will try and get to this next week” over and over until summer break
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We have 4 TT jobs advertised at
@UofT_Sociology
this year! Areas are international migration, family, theory, and teaching stream. Toronto is great and the department is full of wonderful, talented people.
Links:
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New computer:
✅Install R
✅Install RStudio
✅Install LaTeX distribution
✅Clone repos
✅Change desktop background to photo of child
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Found out today that a paper with
@LeontineAlkema
, which is older than both of my children, was accepted for publication so I am absolutely making cocktails
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Taylor Swift revisiting her music from 2012: hey this is pretty good👌
Me revisiting code from 2012: 😱💀
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What's better than getting a paper accepted? Getting a paper accepted that you coauthored with your grad school bestie. Happiness x 2
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Grant me the optimism I had when I wrote this syllabus at the start of semester
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Yes I did change my intro regression lecture to include this tweet, thanks for the content
@ajeanstevenson
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New apron gifted from a non-stats friend who said “I think you do something Bayesian? Is this funny?”
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Today was my first time teaching in person in (almost exactly) two years. I forgot:
- what floor my office is on
- how projectors work
- how to make eye contact
- that people are different heights
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Happy Mother’s Day to all the academic mothers, who can seamlessly switch from building lego to building models 🤗
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Teaching statistics to undergraduate sociology students for the first time next semester and looking for a good intro textbook using
#rstats
...
@djnavarro
's 'Learning Statistics with R' is top of the list, but curious if people have other recommendations!
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Being both a professor and a parent means I am quite effective at putting a wide range of people to sleep
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Acceptable greetings for academia-related emails:
If you know me: Monica
If you don’t know me: Dr. Alexander, Professor Alexander
What my inbox looks like:
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Excited to see our paper with
@LeontineAlkema
published in
@ReadDemography
! We developed a cohort component projection framework that relies on limited data inputs, combined with demographic knowledge, to get projections and estimates of the components of population change
A new study by
@monjalexander
&
@LeontineAlkema
proposes a Bayesian CCP model to estimate subnational populations. Their age-specific net-migration model employs parameters that can be used in data-sparse settings to better understand drivers of change.
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PSA for anyone considering switching to Bayesian methods: you do end up having to spell hierarchical and propagation a lot
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Happy Halloween from an (extra confused) confusion matrix!
Outcome of interest: person loves garbage trucks (yes/no)
Model predictions:
pre-schooler = yes (TP)
@RohanAlexander
= yes (FP)
toddler = no (FN)
me = no (TN)
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My New Years resolution was to git commit every day. Luckily I forgot yesterday, so the pressure’s really off.
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Reviewing grad applications for another year and again in the rec letters the women are often described as "gentle and polite" and then men are often described as "wonderful and talented"
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Me before classes started: "Okay this semester I'm actually going to be at least a week ahead for lecture prep"
Me by week 3:
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The 6 stages of a toddler having a cold:
1.Incubation
2.OMG DOES HE HAVE COVID? (No)
3.*google: How much Tylenol can toddlers have?*
4.Become at peace with not answering emails
5.*google: How many days can an adult survive without sleep?*
6.Oh now he’s fine but I feel like death
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Me, teaching applied stats: all data and code files should be clearly named with meaningful titles
Also me, downloading
@ipums
data:
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Hey
#poptwitter
! Inspired by recent discussions on here,
@v_dilego
,
@rmogimogi
and I have decided to start a formal demography working group. If you’re interested in being involved, sign up here:
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There's currently an enormous wait time to talk to Passport Canada. But every minute they give you an update on the number of calls ahead of you. So I've turned it into a data collection exercise to use in my intro stats course next year
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Sure I could be frequentist but then when would I make paper cranes for our Christmas tree if not while my models are running
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Very proud of
@RohanAlexander
for this remarkable book. Written in true Rohan style (weaving R examples with references to politics, philosophy, and novels), but also in a truly Rohan way: always listening and incorporating feedback from others. Pictured: behind the scenes edits
My book about introductory data science was published today. It is available online - - and you can buy a print copy: . I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions for improvements.
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The next formal demography working group meeting is happening this Friday at 10am ET (Toronto time)! The formidable
@timriffe1
will be talking about decomposition methods and how to implement them.
Sign up at our website to be on the email list:
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The only thing worse than giving a lecture online is listening to a recording of yourself giving a lecture online
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Some thoughts after finishing a demography PhD:
- Learn from mentors; work hard; and back yourself.
Featuring quality tweets from
@PHDcomics
;
@legogradstudent
;
@AcademicsSay
and
@les_ja
:
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Maternal mortality vs data availability
The brighter the red, the higher the mortality; the brighter the blue, the better the data coverage.
Summary: much less data available for countries with a high mortality burden.
code to make map is here:
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Super excited to join
@DemographicRes
as an Associate Editor! A great open access journal that accepts all types of submissions, including replications, research materials, and formal demographic relationships
📢We are excited to announce that the restructuring of our Editorial Board is complete and delighted to welcome all new members! See who’s who here ➡️ 🎉
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For those
#poptwitter
folks who are finalizing their Fall reading lists, here's a period reminder that we made a list of women scholars in demography:
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