The difference between being nice and being kind. It is important to recognise the difference. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

NIHR ARC Wessex withdraws from X/Twitter @nihrarcs.bsky.social @nihr.bsky.social www.arc-wx.nihr.ac.uk/post/nihr-ar...

We are excited to be attending the Society for Social Medicine & Population Health 69th Annual Scientific Meeting this week at The Midland Hotel and Kala Sangam in Bradford If you’re attending, we’d love to meet! We will have a stand with UK LLC merchandise and friendly faces 👋 #SSM2025

KGB: 1992’s subtly terrifying social poison simulator: jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

HUGE NEWS FROM HELSINKI, FINLAND Helsinki, a city of 690 000 people, has now had a full year without any traffic fatalities. None. No pedestrian, cyclist, scooter user or car deaths. This is a huge achievement for a city of our size. 💪🏻 A little background 🧵 1/ yle.fi/a/74-20174831

Due to disruptions in funding, there will be no applications admitted for U Michigan's epidemiology PhD this fall. 🧪 www.michigandaily.com/news/news-br...

Slightly worrying that some journals are responding to the difficulty in finding peer reviewers by having a single peer reviewer, plus comments by the editor. Especially when the editor is mostly commenting on the style of writing and not the scientific content.

The Health Survey for England 2025 will be the last HSE in it's current format. Please consider adding your views to this consultation if you think that timely national health data is important! Deadline 25 July, please retweet @socsocmed.bsky.social

Brandolini's law (aka the bullshit asymmetry principle): The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Never heard of James McCune Smith? He’s only the first Afro-American to obtain a medical degree, at @uofglasgow.bsky.social, having been denied entry to US universities because he was Black. Also an abolitionist, the man was a total boss 💪🏾 #HiddenFigures en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M...

I’m working with @glasgowbell.bsky.social this week and on my way to Paisley for a rally about proposed redundancies at UWS. If you’re staff or a student who’ll be there and want to chat - or if you want to catch up separately - give me a DM. You can be anonymous!

Reckless disregard for the truth coming from cops, doctors, and scientists: A rant. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/24/r...

People at Glasgow: what’s the mood in your executive & governance board about this? Would dearly like to know how me made the case that he’s a great leader, and if Glasgow knew about these Lancaster plans when they appointed him or if they are surprised as well.

I am absolutely fascinated by people farming nineties nostalgia who are just updating boomer memes and inserting games consoles, video shops and dial up modems into memes about playing out and having sleepovers. And how many of them have nostalgia for American things that didn't happen in the UK.

There is a big problem in academia of people advocating for novel methods without understanding them. It can lead to the widespread use of inappropriate methodology and misleading results. It suggests a lack of regard for the truth and is quite possibly bullshit.

Causal Inference What If by @miguelhernan.org ‬ seems to have progressed to Pre-order notification for Hardback copies. www.routledge.com/Causal-Infer...

The next meeting of the Scottish UKHLS User Group will be online on Friday 15th August from 1500-1630 This time there will be talks from Laurence Rowley-Abel (University of Edinburgh) and Mhairi Webster (Glasgow Caledonian University). Sign up here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scotttish-...

I didn't expect the government to hold a public inquiry into the impact Brexit. However, the lack of any mention of evaluations is deeply concerning. It's not a functioning democracy when parties collude to prevent voters being adequately informed. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70...

New Paper: Mental health of UK youth following the removal of the Education Maintenance Allowance in England: a natural experiment study using Understanding Society data. bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/3/1/...

People working in precision medicine seem to have rebranded social determinants of health "personomics", with the help of chat GPT-4, and seemingly ignorant of wide body of research in this area, and published in what I thought was a reputable journal.

I suggest that people stop reading anything by Matt Goodwin and read Harry Frankfurt's on Bullshit instead. vultureofcritique.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

Today’s #ResearchTip is if you’re using an acronym to describe your study ensure it is clear, respectful, and does not imply cures or other promises your work cannot deliver. I’ve seen trials and other studies using acronyms like “hope” “calm” or “care” when they won't offer ANY of these things.

Interested in learning more about clinical trials? With input from experts in biostatistics and health economics, and sessions on design, analysis and reporting, the Clinical Trials Training for Investigators course is taking place at the University of Liverpool in September – tinyurl.com/4utspbvc

It seems to me that powerful organisations & people can communicate progressive-sounding messages (e.g. about collaboration, equity, community, shifting power), but simultaneously operate in ways that uphold the status quo. So you get a message about sharing, but a reality that's retention of power.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued that bullshit was "a greater enemy of the truth than lies are". But is generative AI-generated botshit even worse than human-generated bullshit? (Yes) My latest @financialtimes.com here: on.ft.com/3SikRPK

I don't think I can take social media anymore. There are so many occasions when it would be easy to take a nuanced position with which most can agree. Yet people default to taking simplistic reductionist to get the engagement that comes with polarisation.

“We need to create real pathways to permanence, recognising mid-career scientists not as anomalies or exceptions, but as essential”. Having left academia mid-career to move into the private sector, I have strong feels about this article… #AcademicSky www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/im-tir...

Another q for the stats people! People worry about collinearity (cf blog post below). Consider a scenario in which the collinear predictors are just controls to account for confounding. Including both of them doesn't impair the precision with which the effect of interest is estimated, does it?

PI: "this draft is so great, why didn't we write it this way in the first place??" PhD student: "I did, and then you told me to change it"

"Empowering people to spot manipulation—irrespective of the issue—is the opposite of censorship. It’s not about taking stuff down or reducing visibility. Prebunking, debunking, and fact-checking are examples of “counter-speech.” They allow more speech to happen" time.com/7282640/how-...

Since 2022, my colleagues and I have been targeted by political attacks. Early on, we worried that political actors would specifically target our projects & universities for defunding. But in the end, they came after everyone. The strategy of keeping heads down was never the right one.

‘April showers’ were few and far between in 2025.

I am very comfortable with saying "No" to journals who are trying to normalise 10 days as the turnaround time for reviews.

I have controversial views of this initiative: Our #1 priority in the EU should be to fund the WHO & the programs that were brutally cancelled due to USAID closure which have directly caused terrible harms & death among the world's poorest people, subject to this elected US administration

On Bullshit is probably one of the most important works of the current Era. Although at 67 pages it still manages to be a bit too long. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Invitation to review from a journal came at 23:46 on a Friday evening, the reminder at 07:05 on Morning. The people who do this either directly or designing automated systems are not using their brains.

📣Calling our mid-career researchers: Our MCR sub-committee is hosting a webinar on practical tips for aspiring Principal Investigators!📣 In this 2hour workshop, Profs Simon Capewell & Ruth Dundas will share insights on planning + managing projects to improve your capability as a PI bit.ly/44lfh6u

📣 UK LLC are hiring📣 We are hiring a Research Manager, responsible for understanding, curating and providing technical advice for data analyses of a suit of novel and exciting NHS mental health data and surveys and administrative data from DWP and HMRC. lnkd.in/g7V-PCEj) #hiring #JobAdvert

I just completed a survey on public engagement for researchers. My main thoughts while completing were that we need to get the science right before communicating it. My main thought afterwards is that the survey is a convenience sample with poorly worded questions.

I am seeing a lot more discussions about whether people should travel to the USA due to Trump, than whether or not they should take long haul flights due to climate change. The politics which enables the "elite" to fly while telling the masses to make sacrifices is one force driving populism.

Happy Earth Day!! 🌎 🌱 Here are some of my very favorite photos my fiancé and I took while exploring together in these last 365 days around the sun.

Race is a social construct. But what does that mean, and why do we say this? An explainer, in the wake of Trump being racist and wrong (pt 675) www.bbc.com/future/artic...

The days of Google Docs are ending; we enter the age of Docs, made by France's Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs and Germany's Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration. We need more governments to collaborate on public software projects to achieve digital sovereignty.

UKRI cuts its research budget by £300 million down to £8.81 Billion www.theregister.com/2025/04/08/u... Given the increases in employers' National Insurance contributions and the difficulties recruiting international students it is yet another hit to a struggling sector.

Petition to make Tour de France accessible on free to air television in the UK. Particularly pertinent as it will be in the UK in 2027. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/71...

"New" Paper : Associations between different measures of SARS-CoV-2 infection status and subsequent economic inactivity: A pooled analysis of five longitudinal surveys linked to healthcare records. doi.org/10.1371/jour... Using @ukllc.bsky.social data

Only 10 days for applying for Fully funded PhD scholarship supervised by @moragtreanor.bsky.social & myself! 👇 Exploring transitions to early adulthood using data from Growing Up in Scotland Closes: 21 April bit.ly/4ckbHeV @uofgsocsci.bsky.social @uofgussp.bsky.social @uofgsps.bsky.social

The UK NHS gets a lot of stick, but my experience is that that the NHS works much better than portrayed by the media. On the other hand dealing with HMRC is awful.

2-3 hours is the lower end for me. Depending on the length , it takes at least 1-2 hours to read and take notes. Organizing these notes into a review takes another 30-60 mins, depending on how many issues I have identified. With minor distractions, I plan for half a work day per review

2h it's just what it takes me to properly and deeply read a paper for review 🫣. So, I try to limit the time I spend to 4-6 hours by teaming up PhD students (with permission from the editors). They learn while helping me a lot.