"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.” www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

In case you were wondering what it’s like to boot a free to play mobile game in 2025

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was this trap cam which allows me to see the creatures I share the garden with. Here’s a badger foraging beneath a persimmon tree

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

Happy Christmas everyone! I'm thrilled to recieve a copy of The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, which tells the story of a certain 1854 cholera outbreak. The perfect #EpiSky geek gift 🤓

Happy Christmas to everyone whose Christmas starts with this!

‘Now, after 4 years… that scheme was this week delayed by at least 3 years. Trams will not run in Leeds or Bradford before the late 2030s. We are promised that this remains a delay and not a cancellation, but we have heard that many times before.’ @tomforth.co.uk www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Interested in quantitative bias analysis, but you're not sure where to start? Check out our newly published, tutorial-based exercise introducing probabilistic quantitative bias analysis in an applied and accessible way. Special kudos to 1st author Nick G 🙌 Link: onlinecjc.ca/article/S082...

Happy unprecedented wave of super-flu season to those who fabulate.

Suppose you ask #AI for improvements to your writing. The #LLM was trained on, but doesn’t mention, Smith’s work. You adopt the suggestions containing Smith’s ideas. You don’t even realize YOU’VE PLAGIARIZED because you’ve never read or heard of Smith.

banning generative AI for things like research and writing is about a lot more than just banning generative AI. it’s about fostering a positive culture of curiosity, creative thinking, integrity, and intellectual rigor that renders the very idea of using generative AI nonsensical.

This is how I would end the news if I was reading the news.

An English local council innovates, evaluates what it did, finds it works (replicating an earlier study in Scotland) … and all councils are told by the Labour government not to try it. What message does this convey? Another victory for ideology & cowardice www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Can I ask a favour? Life has been really tough lately due to terminal family illness and I just haven’t had the spoons for decent self promotion. Could you please give the “Little but Fierce” kickstarter prelaunch page a repost (and maybe a follow)? www.kickstarter.com/projects/dcb...

Differences like these, in how people answer the same question when using different modes of measurement, are called "mode effects". Look out for a new introduction to mode effects - with DAGs - coming soon, led by @georgiatomova.bsky.social

Oh no. The press gave started reporting the collider-biased 'prodigy' study in Science 🤦 I think we might have a new 'fair game' teaching example!

A lot of people seem to be under the impression that causal inference mak you more certain about causation. It sometimes can but often it just shows you all the ways your study could be spectacularly wrong.

Why do journals do this?? How can you possibly differentiate between e.g. 72 and 73? Or even 70 and 80, what does it even mean....

"research not causal" she said with contempt

I, personally, have never cited a fake paper specifically because I live in fear of Darren. This demonstrates how accountability works.

started / going

I think it's a bad thing to lump all types of machine learning under "AI".

Reading the structured abstract alone should set off a half dozen statistical alarms in any scientists head. The fact that this found its way into Science makes me wonder how we drive home those stats 101 lessons and make them intuitive. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I think about this every time I see some speculative basic science explanation for basically any phenomenon in a nutritional epi paper. Do you really think it's a novel compound in macaroni and cheese... or do you think there's at least one unmeasured confounder...

"Across the highest adult performance, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance" Is uite literally what you'd see if coliderbias:

In summary, I interact with @pwgtennant.bsky.social, @dingdingpeng.the100.ci and an assortment of stats bros.

Wake up babe, Applied Causal Graphs workshop just got announced. I attended the previous versions of this event which were absolutely *fantastic.* It's the place to be for all causal graph connoisseurs!

"How can funders avoid crossing the Szilard point?" The Szilard point is "the threshold at which the total cost of competing for a grant equals (or surpasses) the value of the available funding."

Not wanting to disappoint you so much that it lies is the last quality I want in a computer.

The venn diagram of people who use the term "exposome" and people who understand population health science

Writing for me is a slow, messy, frustrating, and iterative process from which new ideas and new clarity emerges. I cannot think of a topic that I have actually understood before trying to write about it. It is the backbone of my creative and cognitive thinking.

Writing is thinking - a short but memorable thread.

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

If your cost-benefit model tells you it isn't worth investing in a tram or light rail system for an urban area with a population of well over 1m, like Leeds-Bradford, your model is wrong and should be thrown in the bin.

This will be no surprise to anyone in Leeds or the North of England. We've been messed around and let down over and over again by governments of all colours. The Westminster elite do not care about investing in the North. It's no wonder that so many northern people are driven into populism.

yes! This is generally ignored in discussions, but you can only do that big scale research if you have enough resources and 'research power'. That stuff effects publications, large number of high impact papers were probably won over by rebuttals with significant spend/staff to do in a few months

Now that I think about this, you definitely see this in neuroscience don't you. Big labs throw resources at a question, absolutely nailing the answer. The research isn't necessarily any more creative/innovative, but would be more likely to get a 4* through the sheer scale of the work

I'd love to do a '360 degree REF exercise' where I gather together world leading experts in epidemiology and public health to score the quality of research produced by the Epi / public health REF panel. Let's see if they themselves are qualified to judge what is world leading.

Imagine running a higher education system/country so badly that you actually can't afford, or refuse to fund, research that is *literally defined as* "internationally excellent". Stupid, stupid, stupid country.

"Using LLMs as stand-ins for human subjects amounts to fabricating data" - @emilymbender.bsky.social , @carlbergstrom.com, & @jevinwest.bsky.social

The Nature journals seem completely incapable of reviewing population level studies. These are retraction-level concerns that would have been spotted by my masters students in their first month of training.

"The most ambitious thing we could do... is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research" Hopefully more metascience funding will come from @ukri.org that isn't tied to narrow aims or definitions of metascience.

Ridiculous idea that will lead to an appalling narrowing of the kind of research that is recognised and rewarded in the UK 🤦

This is actually the trippiest thing I've ever seen that was not deliberately created by M C Fucking Escher. It straight up took me over a minute to make sense of and now I can't go back. This is the white-and-gold dress on a gram a week of trenbolone.

"The most ambitious thing we could do... is to meaningfully invest in metascientific research" Hopefully more metascience funding will come from @ukri.org that isn't tied to narrow aims or definitions of metascience.

I don't understand why he even answered the phone!

Man answering his phone on the train: Yes? Correct, I’m not at work (pause) I’m not going to answer that because I am not at work today. No, you’re going to have to ask someone who is. Goodbye.

We need an extension of Clarke's Law third law along the lines of. "Any technology can be perceived as sufficiently advanced and thus indistinguishable from magic if we just give it a new pseudoscientific name." Exposome is just one of many such terms.