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

The defenders of British Values, having completed their work assaulting police officers, have returned home, leaving London a Dystopian Hellscape once again

Why does everyone who picks up the mic at this conference feel they have to mention this talk, whether grudgingly or positively??

Miguel Hernán is presenting at EFSPI and giving a frankly embarrassing rant about (addendum-style) estimands. While lots of people are constructively using it to complement causal inference, he is sticking to basic & straw-man gripes that are easily addressed by thinking or listening to others.

Interesting discussion with collaborators about whether it’s acceptable to say anything negative about PPI. They showed a quote that seems like a huge “therefore” lurch! 1/ researchinvolvement.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I already think John Baker will be impressed. Can you help my friend out and improve on it?

After a month I can’t remember what my own code does by reading the source (well at least it takes a while, and I don’t think I’m the worst coder). My help files are for me. If they help someone else too, great.

Look, I’m just saying that “Users can find out what my package does by reading through the source code” is not a win-for-open-source. It’s just admitting you don’t care enough about your users to write decent help files.

ISCB46 has been really fun. So much that I’ve barely been on here. Admittedly “bRave little soldieRs” probably shouldn’t have made it into the slides but IN MY DEFENCE I MADE THEM WITH QUARTO 😇

It was logistic regression in scikit learn (scikit-learn.org/stable/modul...). Apparently, you could not fully turn off regularisation there for some time.

A few years ago there was a hoo-ha when someone discovered a well-used implementation of logistic regression in python used some regularization by default. Can anyone recall more details (or point me to a link because I'm clearly a bad googler)?

Simulation studies are widely used, but have historically lacked clear guidance around preregistration. In response to this gap, a team of researchers have developed a new template for preregistering simulation studies, now available on OSF. 🚀 Read our Q&A: www.cos.io/blog/intr...

Doing slides for ISCB with quarto (since they accept it I thought why not) and don’t really see what the fuss is about – with two slides it takes ~10s to compile. Looks ok. Genuine question: what is exciting about it? Is it code-related stuff?

Post just up: Is multiple imputation making up information? tldr: no. Includes a cheeky simulation study to demonstrate the point. open.substack.com/pub/tpmorris...

Alright Americans, I know you’re having a hard time with stuff at the moment, so here’s an olive branch: I’ll start spelling it randomization if you start pronouncing the letter Z as “zed” instead of “zee”. LMK

What is the right update frequency I’m losing my mind here

It’s a fine line to tread between using the same headshot for quarter of a century and updating it so often you appear vain

New rule: If you’re going to rant about something, you have to say what you think the thing is doing and what you think its proponents claim. Because I keep reading rants that reveal the problem is the ranter’s understanding.

Data in a csv format which we converted to a pdf which we printed which we then scanned which we embedded in a slide deck which we then encrypted which we lost the password to and cited as “available upon request”

Copilot is a real misnomer. The experience is closer to a kid sat in the front seat, pressing every button, turning the volume up and down, pulling the handbrake, beeping the horn, grabbing the steering wheel and incessantly asking "What's that".

Reckon I can submit this as a figure for a paper?

New post: “Marginal” and “conditional” are relative descriptions of an estimand

BMC Medical Research Methodology publishes some low quality papers but also some excellent ones. Saying that, their AEs (or reviewer suggestion system) are not doing well. I have rejected the last ~30* review invitations for not being within my expertise.

I was thinking about a bunch of OLD furniture my parents have and the ridiculously high quality. And then new processes emerge, maybe 60 percent as good but 20 percent of the cost. And perhaps that’s acceptable for a chair. I worry when those utilities are applied to ideas.

“UKRI to scale-up ‘radical’ change to peer review” [after screening Hunger Games and Battle Royale at an away day] www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

New paper posted on Arxiv: "When do composite estimands answer non-causal questions?" This can happen more often than you think, and can have a dramatic impact on trial results (e.g. a false-positive rate of almost 90%) arxiv.org/abs/2506.22610 @timpmorris.bsky.social

I'm wfh and someone is watching the first Jurassic Park in the other room. How am I supposed to work in these conditions?

For researchers with limited background in statistics, we have written this gentle introduction to simulation studies (with @timpmorris.bsky.social and other people from the STRATOS initiative): bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/1...

The author of this paper, James Jackson, has been in touch to clarify and I'd like to reflect his explanation: Dr Jackson does not think evaluating coverage is new. Rather the idea is that evaluating coverage would improve on current practice in evaluation of synthetic data...

I'm working on an exploratory analysis of clinical trial data and am trying to see if I can make everyone (stats and clinical coauthors) mad by putting pvalues in Table 1 but nowhere else in the manuscript.

And another! This is amazing. I'm killing it.

Also:

Remember when someone published a paper that “invented” integration in the 90s? Well, for the 20s someone has apparently reinvented coverage as a performance measure. They even cited a certain tutorial paper that, if they had just read it… academic.oup.com/jssam/advanc...

We’re all thinking it all the time

When people say “statistical significance is not clinical significance”, what they’re actually saying is “statistical insignificance does not make me an insignificant person”

A good control arm is not a valid criticism of a trial. #CCR25

This illustrated guide to TMLE by @kathoffman.bsky.social is very good. I always struggle a bit with the nuts and bolts of TMLE so found it helpful to see the procedure broken down like this. I finally know what a “clever covariate” is! www.khstats.com/blog/tmle/tu...

We don’t need this advice so often on here but I want to remind us of some wisdom from twitter: - When someone is like that, tumbleweed is a good strategy - You can mute - Soft-block if you need to - Proper block (and pat yourself on the back when people whatsapp you screenshots) 😘