Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Really nice to see this being used - a real blast from the past. If anyone is keen to help get this back on CRAN or do other work on it that would be amazing!

🥼 Join our #healthdata seminar, which will introduce the target trial emulation framework #TTE for emulating randomised clinical trials #PublicHealth 🗓️ Thursday 6 November, 10:00-11:00 GMT 📍 LSHTM | Online Details ⬇️ www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

Want to understand serological data better? We've compiled a suite of tools which can help you out 🔗 seroanalytics.org These tools are free, open source, peer reviewed and have comprehensive documentation. Big thanks to @alexlizhill.com, @jameshay.bsky.social and others for their contributions!

In my blonde era

🚀 New tool: Reversible Jump MCMC running in your browser! Built an interactive widget for fitting mixture distributions when you don't know how many components you need. Check it out: dchodge.github.io/rjmc-widget-...

This is the picture my four year old brought home for me today. Me: lovely honey, who's it a picture of? Her: that's me in the pink dress, and that's a dead guy *spotting my horrified look* Her: don't worry, he was bad

I'm giving a free public talk asking 'How certain is certain enough?' at @lshtm.bsky.social on Monday 24th November at 5.30pm, as part of the Global Health Lecture Series. From epidemic response and clinical trials to online misinformation and AI, I'll look at how truth emerges – and why it falters.

The US Department of Health announcing they've found the cause of autism has a similar vibe to the time the Egyptian army announced it had a cure for AIDS. Crazy to watch US governmental institutions deteriorate at such a rapid pace. www.bbc.com/news/blogs-t...

Another triumph for human tenacity, intelligence and compassion over the brutally indifferent force that is evolution.

Every debate at HowTheLightGetsIn festival on transhumanist themes: Transhumanists: We should reduce suffering by all means available to us Audience: *shaking heads in disapproval* Opponent: This feels icky to me Audience: *loud applause*

🚨 New paper out in PLOS Computational Biology! 🚨 We're excited to share our new paper, serojump, a new probabilistic framework and R package for inferring infections and antibody kinetics from longitudinal serological data. 📄 Full paper: tinyurl.com/re7du3t2 R package: seroanalytics.org/serojump

💡 Open science: A team of researchers at Shandong University has attempted to replicate Oprea (2024 AER). The results do not replicate. Oprea 2024 reported an online lab experiment, and found that prospect theory anomalies occur not only for lotteries, but also for deterministic 'mirrors'.

"[A]ll civilisation involves an ever-increasing foresight for others, even for others as yet unborn". - Havelock Ellis, 1911

For the last couple of months I've been working on something and I'm excited to finally share an early preview: Say hello to plumber2 🎉 plumber2 is a full rewrite of the plumber package for creating powerful webapis in #rstats. It takes everything we have learned from plumber and adds even more

I'm writing a series of blog posts on the subject of women and free love, partly out of my interest in the history of free love, partly out of a sort of affectionate prurience about sex-positive women of yore. This first one is about free love in the 1800s and the first woman to run for president.

Wild that Gen Zs appear to think Chappell Roan has written the first ever lesbian country song. Sorry KD Lang! Not to mention Melissa Etheridge, Brandi Carlile, Melissa Ferrick etc

One of my least popular views is that women will not truly be emancipated until bionic wombs are readily available.

As great as IVF is, the process of retrieving eggs still feels v inefficient: you have to incubate the eggs inside yourself, inject hormones for a fortnight and hope that the oocytes mature at a similar rate. Maturing them in vitro would be a huge improvement. worksinprogress.co/issue/fertil...

I was gifted this mug that I feel sure is offensive to women but I can't quite figure out why, or indeed, what it means at all. Are the economists the ones supplying the curves? Very confusing.

Looking at the Mary Wollstonecraft memorial but shaking my head so everyone knows I disapprove of the naked lady.

I really don't have a fixed opinion on trans women competing in women's sports - I think both sides are arguable - but the majority of the public are against it and that's clearly a reasonable position to take, so I don't know why it's the hill so many left/liberal politicians want to die on.

The first time I read The More Loving One by W.H. Auden, I imagined it must be a sort of metaphor or allegory about loving a person, and struggled to understand it. When I read it as straight-forwardly about relating to nature and the whole indifferent universe, I get a lot more out of it.

@dchodge.bsky.social and I developed an app using WebR and React, to see how this stack compares to RShiny. Looks quite promising I think! The app wraps the SeroSim R package by @jameshay.bsky.social for simulating serosurvey data: serosim.seroanalytics.org

Happy World Book Day! I'm about to absolutely humiliate all these other preschool parents with my superior fancy dress skills, honed over 2 decades of partying.

In the run up international women’s day, it’s worth recalling that less than 60 years ago, men tried to stop Kathrine Switzer from completing the Boston marathon. They wanted it to be high status, only for men. A low status woman would be polluting. We have come far! 🙂

The water was out on my road for about half a day last week due to a burst pipe. My neighbours were outraged at the inconvenience and like, I agree we should hold utility companies to high standards, but all I could think was how amazing it is that we have clean water on demand 99.999% of the time.

Just a little thread on (some) of my favourite charts I've made. 🧵

I have become horribly addicted to rage/doom-scrolling since Trump was sworn in, and desperately need to replace this with something more productive. Can anyone recommend a good book?

I don't think about food until my body absolutely forces me to (like, I haven't eaten in hours and am starting to feel faint) and even then it's like, ugh, I guess I have to eat something now. This would have been way more pathological in the past: I would not have survived as a hunter-gatherer!

Actual EA is vocal and united in its condemnation of these actions,which are the literal opposite of what we've been working to accomplish in our global health and wellbeing work. I'm not aware of Musk having engaged in any EA giving which speaks for itself given his wealth.

Many countries worry about declining birth rates, but in English-speaking nations, it seems to be more of a preoccupation of the right, with the left reluctant to discuss the issue. We think that's unfortunate, so we gathered thinkers from the centre/left to reflect on the issue

Enjoying this discussion of the famous von Neumann quote "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them": math.stackexchange.com/questions/11...

Whatever you think about Government aid, if you want to give money directly into the hands of poor people, I recommend @GiveDirectly.

The "woke grant" database is predictably idiotic, includes papers about diversity in beetles, cis-regulatory gene pathways, and brain trauma. US gov characterises the included grants as advancing "neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda". www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about...

I am so excited for the results of this ongoing trial for a novel treatment of hyperemesis gravidarum (severe pregnancy sickness) 👀 GDF15 has been identified as the major determinant of HG and this is the first trial of a GFD15-blocker in pregnant women: www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN76681798

New op ed from Tom Wein, @garrisonlovely.bsky.social and I on PEPFAR and giving up the legacy of US power in Africa: foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/05/p...

I hadn't really been exposed to "hipster skepticism" on AI until joining Bluesky - now I see it's very prevalent on the left! Seems like a very bad idea to make AI skepticism a partisan signalling issue.

🌍🚺 A silent epidemic in women’s health 🐌 On #WorldNTDDay, we celebrate the fight against Neglected Tropical Diseases & highlight Female Genital Schistosomiasis, an overlooked disease affecting millions of women. 📰 www.theguardian.com/global-devel... @theguardian.com #BeatNTDs #EndTheNeglect #FGS

How long is too long for a blog post on an obscure topic? Asking for... me, who has written a ~4500 word essay on the life and work of Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for US presidency). Have lost all perspective on what is interesting to other people.

odin and monty are exciting new tools - a DSL for ODE based models and an MCMC sampler (includes Metropolis-Hastings and HMC) written in R and compiled to C for performance. Very user friendly compared to other options out there imo!

🎉 Bringing you our new Bluesky account all the way from Windsor While we’re enjoying our retreat, why don’t you follow the new #GHECO account? It's the perfect place to get all the latest health economics news & updates in @lshtm.bsky.social

Excited to officially announce my new book Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty, out in March (UK) and May (US) and available now to pre-order: proof.kucharski.io It digs into the ideas we can use to weigh evidence and converge on truth under pressure - and what happens when they fail... 1/

My first time acting as a recommender for the ERROR project. Huge props to the authors @erichehman.bsky.social et al. for exposing themselves to this detailed post-pub peer review and to Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org for his detailed review and reproduction.

Why it's okay to use ChatGPT, in 4 graphs

Today I'm amusing myself with the 1921 UK House of Lords debate (only men present of course) against an amendment that would have made lesbianism a crime. The amendment was roundly voted down thankfully, and the arguments are pretty amazing. Some highlights:

Novel threats made by my 4 year old recently, in order of increasing insanity: I will pluck out your eyelashes; I will cut off your mouth; I will pull out my heart and throw it at you

This is such an important point when communicating health research: average effects aren't super predictive at the individual level unless variance is also small. And the standard error is often confused for the population variance.

Mother and Child at Breaking Point (1970), by Maureen Scott

We are hiring a tech lead! We build high impact national health data infrastructure that is open, productive, and beautiful - like our OpenSAFELY - in a truly mixed team, where software developers and researchers all share skills, status, knowledge, and best practice! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...