I love when someone quotes a good bit of ancient wisdom

My mother-in-law just sent “This rain 🌧️🤨” to the family whatsapp and within 60s almost everyone had replied with the current rain status in their locality. Take THAT everyone who says the weather isn’t a banger of a conversation starter.

Preprint!📢 We examined reporting- and open science practices in simulation studies in psychology with a questionnaire Importantly, we asked ‘why?’ Why were results omitted? Why weren’t MCSEs reported? Also: how do researchers evaluate simulation studies in their field? doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵

I was chatting to a friend about AI, academia, fraud, authenticity and creativity and for some reason it led me down a rabbit hole to the classic satirical TV news show, The Day Today; and the great bluffer of the reporting world, Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan. Bear with me on this one... 1/6

Wonderful bit of ‘added value’ here. New manuscript system seems to use ‘AI’ to suggest my primary affiliation for an accepted paper. That the paper is accepted means I already told the system my affiliation. What a superb list 😆

What’s your personal protocol when you receive an “as per my earlier email” but the thing was not in fact in the earlier email? Tumbleweed?

Don't you f**king dare.

I've done an analysis where the outcome unit was in hours, and in the results we report decimal hours (e.g. 0.89 hours) rather than in HH:MM. A respected colleague thinks we should use the later. Who is more correct? True pedants only please. *ahem* @timpmorris.bsky.social

Thank you to the company who just emailed this reassurance/encouragement 😘

Please can someone create a bot that replies to all covid commentary papers with the title followed by ‘(needless to say, I had the last laugh)’ appended?

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

New paper: ‘A fully-integrated Bayesian approach for the imputation and analysis of derived outcome variables with missingness’ Harlan Campbell, me and Paul Gustafson onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Morning

Regretting this post already

Commenting on a draft manuscript once again leads me to the conclusion that Ian White is a 🤬 genius

You’re gonna love this one

My 11 year old has jumped quickly to the “humour” stage of grief

An asterisk in the text but no footnote* is one more annoying

New post on a topic you might have struggled with if you do simulation studies. For a given data-generating mechanism, you might wonder “What is the true value of my estimand?” This post describes four ways to learn it. tpmorris.substack.com/p/learning-t...

Lukas Widmer showed me this years ago: set.seed(0) x0 <- runif(5) set.seed(1) x1 <- runif(5) x = cbind(x0,x1) x x0 x1 [1,] 0.8966972 0.2655087 [2,] 0.2655087 0.3721239 [3,] 0.3721239 0.5728534 [4,] 0.5728534 0.9082078 [5,] 0.9082078 0.2016819 x[2,1]-x[1,2] 0 Wild.

Laptop but no screen iNnOvAtiVe

The Matilda from the 90s and the more recent Matilda The Musical are about as good as each other

Complaining that someone’s blogs* are too long and suggesting the authors could use a good editor is an early contender for 2026. *papers, in this case 7 pages

NEJM: hold my beer 🥴 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

JAMA’s Statistics and Methods section must get so mad when BMJ Christmas papers get so much attention because they’re doing this level of comedy all year round!

Great to see this announced!!

One journal I sometimes submit to/publish in has a submission system of “email your paper and files to the editors, CCing coauthors”. This morning, we submitted a revision. Within 30 mins, the editor replied that we had done what was asked; paper accepted. Beats every other submission system.

Posted this yesterday after being devastated to see one situation where I might be persuaded, by a collaborator who always makes me rethink strongly-held opinions – exhausting!

Once again: please use your brain when considering “meta-models” for simulation study performance and make the right decision to just not. Using one instantly gets you on my naughty list. open.substack.com/pub/tpmorris...

The opposite applies if you’re using a German word, because everyone loves learning and remembers German-word-for terms

People, short-hand terms are supposed to conjure some meaning for the thing they describe! If your short-hand terms are Latin, you may as well be using A and B because, though equally non-descriptive, they are at least shorter.

When I'm right, I'm right; and when I'm wrong, I'm just trying to create a teachable moment.

Mark your diaries! The ViCBiostat Summer School returns from 13-20 Feb 2026, in Melbourne and online. Courses include causal inference, cluster randomised trials, meta-analysis and the estimand framework. Further details TBA shortly - sign up to our mailing list at www.vicbiostat.org.au #statistics

Look I’m glad people love these speed awareness courses so much, I just think one of the lessons should be to avoid banging on about speeding facts they’ve learned to people who have never had a speeding ticket and didn’t need the 🤬 course in the first place

"we probably do not need to worry about the fact that the actual effect of one treatment rather than the other is not the same for all patients. Quite limited knowledge about an average improvement is the best that we can do" John Tukey, Controlled Clinical Trials, 1993 p282

HYBRID EVENT: 'Introduction to Quantitative Bias' with Rachel Hughes on Monday 1st December at 10am-12pm UK time. For those near Leeds, bring your laptop and enjoy this as an in-person session! Sign-up before 9am on Thursday 27th via: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/introducti...

Is the Premier League table super tight or not? A 6-point gap between 1st and 2nd and a 5-point gap between 2nd and 11th.

Two wow features of typing on an iPhone in 2025: 1. It can accept the word “estimand” but not “ill” (always corrects to “I’ll”) or “Tim” (always corrects to “Tom” FFS). 2. Moving the cursor to edit something takes like 5–10 taps or some hack, and behaviour depends on the app 🤷

Periodic reminder that if someone describes Consort as a trial design (or analysis) guideline, it means they haven’t yet got to the title. Applies to other reporting guidelines too. 😘

Does this enrage you too? Publishers adding a random page nobody wants at the beginning of a pdf, bigger than the rest of the pages – the ones people actually want to read – messing up the fit-to-width size of pages you do want to read! Just making readers’ lives pointlessly difficult.

Potential outcomes tabs in Outlook! DAGs in your Google query! Marginal structural models to help you plan your next vacation!

A small joy I get as an associate editor is that reviewers all answer “Would you like to receive recognition for your review using [Publons / Web of Science™ / whatevs]?” with “No” 😆 Also that journals continue to check, as if this still might be a winner. Hold the line folks.

📊 Next week, we'll be exploring a new #statistics modelling framework called regression by composition, with examples from growth modelling & HIV trials #healthdata 🗓️ Tuesday 4 November, 12:50-13:50 GMT 📍 LSHTM | Online Join us ⬇️ www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

One bit that made me laugh in Ros Atkins’ “The Art of Explanation” is when he’s discussing presentations and has a subsection titled something like “Have a hands plan”.

When referring to an unspecified, imaginary person, why do some writers need to refer to them specifically as “she” or “he”? 🧠: are you proudly showing that your imagination is this specific or are you just really against using “they”? Either way, it’s a distraction.

Classic bit of pathetic fallacy here from my gluten-free bread

New (short) post on hearing criticism of your work. No, I’m not telling you who it was – they will recognise themself! open.substack.com/pub/tpmorris...

My favorite genre of fiction is Thesis Acknowledgments.

Straight onto my reading list