Trying to sum up, in a pithy way, the challenges of modern (political) polling... "Voting intention polling has three main weaknesses: they ask the wrong people the wrong question, and the respondents often answer a different question."

Under UK law, a company can make £200m+ in sales and still hide its profit & loss by calling itself “small”. That’s how PPE Medpro kept its finances secret. A short thread on one of Britain’s daftest loopholes, the 1970s EU compromise that created it — and how to fix it.

Who?

This is my flag.

But presumably this is euphemistically attributable to "actuarial turnover"

The whole time we were growing up and we thought there was no way the table of the Emperor's New Clothes could actually happen in real life...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint. This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

I absolutely don't love Labour focusing more on not losing voters to the right (on immigration, welfare, etc.) than the left, but a lot of people say stuff like "they are losing 2× as many votes to the Greens" without realising that one vote lost to a party that can overtake you is twice as bad...

Wow! Project Hail Mary is coming to the big screen! I had totally missed that this was coming... Here's hoping it can live up to the book. @chelseaparlett.bsky.social have you seen?

My model was fitting just fine until I realised my data was only 320 of N=325. Now it refuses to fit. When is the next stop so I can get off this train? #ChoiceModelling #DiscreteChoiceExperiment #stats #stata #econometrics #HealthEconomics

This, but also if you are one of the academics that say data are available on request and you have actually provided it on request, go you! (Next time go even further and deposit it so you don't lose it)

Don’t think I’ve ever muttered the words “fuck me sideways” quite so much reading a story as this one.

The Editorial Boards of leading health economics journals are issuing a Joint Statement of Principles on Editorial Independence. In these troubled times some scholars worry their work might suffer ideological attack. We reaffirm our commitment to unfettered scholarship. Please repost.

The UK government must step in to protect jobs in #HigherEducation. Voluntary and compulsory redundancies throughout the sector. Staff costs have been squeezed for years - the sector needs cash. Either bring back international students, raise tuition fees, or reinstate block funding... Do it fast!

There is an academic theoretical paper I keep coming back to, and every time I read it I can't work out if I'm really dumb or the authors are really dumb... No, I will not say which paper it is!

I do love this show. If you have time for only one Star Wars podcast a month, make it this one!

Trump has no interest in peace, he only wants Zelenskyy to lose and Putin to win. Next step will be undoing sanctions on Russia. The US has truly switched sides, and it probably all originates from Zelenskyy not helping Trump screw Biden in 2020 election. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Rail fares in the UK don't even obey the triangle inequality, it's so frustrating!

Bonus panel and hovertext here: smbc-comics.com/comic/murderer

Trump is a dangerous & ridiculous hypocrite. Zelenskyy declared martial law because Ukraine was invaded. He wants to declare martial law because people have pronouns and there are undocumented migrants. Only one of them is a dictator, and he's in the role we used to call leader of the free world.

post a female character that you love

Indeed, what they want is mob rule. Majoritarian if possible, but if not they are very happy to also be a mob-ruling minority oppressing everyone who is not them. A democracy is more than elections. Rule of law is a perquisite, pluralism a strength.

To make UK higher education significantly more progressive, scrap fees in favour of a graduate tax and make the unit of resource for universities higher for home UG students from more deprived backgrounds.

Squeezed in 20 minutes this evening... I'm working on coding a stripped down version of the beautiful game Forest Shuffle. It's got some fun features (lots of the cards are "split" and you choose which half to play) but also interactivity between players is limited (no stealing, peeking, etc.)

Exceptional detail to be found at www.nhsforsale.info/private-prov... about private provision of major #NHS services

'The misalignment of incentives in academic publishing and implications for journal reform' by Trueblood et al. This is a really rich overview of the current state of scientific publishing and researcher incentives. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I finished #AdventOfCode over the weekend! Now very slowly starting to spend hobby coding time (ha!) on boardgame.io, gradually building my skill until at some point I can code up the Fantasy Flight Games #StarWars Destiny tabletop game. And of course I've decided to learn #Typescript too!

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

Yep I would definitely prefer to watch Bills v Commanders in #SuperBowlLIX than a repeat of Chiefs v Eagles. But I do not want Jayden Daniels to win it all in his rookie year, that's too much for my jaded #Jets heart. Go win it all Josh Allen!

How worried should I be about this from Spotify?

Well part 2 of day 24 of #AdventOfCode was tough. After I realised what the network of logic gates *should* look like, I gave up on the idea of coding something to work out the minimal changes to get from the actual network to that, and instead inspected by hand. Just one day left to do!

Ugh. I miss #InboxZero. Grant deadlines and marking do not leave time for email hygiene...

As usual the #nyjets are not in the #NFL playoffs... So who to root for? My Desirability Of Outcome Ranking: 1. Detroit Lions 2. Baltimore Ravens 3. Houston Texans 4. Bills 5. Vikings 6. Rams 7. Chiefs 8. Bucs 9. Chargers 10. Packers 11. Commanders 12. Steelers 13. Eagles 14. Broncos

An excellent thread on #immigration, well worth reading

I had a nice example this afternoon of the odd fact that sometimes a more complex model can be fit more quickly than a simpler one. In this case, the more complex model assumed correlations between different random effects, while the simpler model assumed independence. #stats #statistics

Today's music recommendation: Stranger in the Alps by Phoebe Bridgers My favourite tracks: Motion Sickness open.spotify.com/track/5xo8Rr... Funeral open.spotify.com/track/3rJDsZ...

PLEASE SHARE: Registration is now open for the next Introduction to Causal Inference Course for Health & Social Scientists (7-11 July 2025, Leeds, UK). See more info & register here: www.causal.training Note, we are not planning any other courses until 2027. #CausalIntroCourse #EpiSky #CausalSky

A remarkable stat: Heidi Alexander’s appointment as Transport Secretary means the cabinet is now 100% state-educated for the first time in history.

"Captain, it's only Wednesday" but make it Monday

Working out the Fisher information for a simple choice model and 😭

🚨 Preprint! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the article counts per journal-year from #OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last 5 years. A. $8.349 billion ($8.968 B in 2023 USD) $2.5B in 2023 alone. arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 #metasci

Been considering authorship practices in academia, and I think "Guest, Gift and Ghost authorship" no longer describes the full range of unethical issues that we see. Here's a draft longer list. Would love opinions. static1.squarespace.com/static/64914... #researchintegrity #academicsky

Come work with me! Looking to carry out model-based economic evaluations for two projects relating to cancer diagnosis. Deadline for applications is 27 November - happy to answer questions about the role! Further details at tinyurl.com/4pvahsy7

We reviewed 100 psych. simulation studies & find room for improvement in planning/reporting. As a remedy, we (František Bartoš, @timpmorris.bsky.social Anne-Laure Boulesteix, @danielheck.bsky.social & Samuel Pawel) present ADEMP-PreReg, a simulation study preregistration & reporting template 🧵/1

Back once more on Ticketmaster, hitting refresh repeatedly in the hope of being successfully gouged... 40 minutes was the sweet spot last time...

Quote this & tell me: 1) a project you are working on & 2) an odd idea/theory you aren’t working on but keep thinking about 1) how much should we try to avoid unnecessary hospital tests for cancer 2) how can we use Itō processes in health economic models

Introduce yourself with some jobs you've done apart from what you do now: - security guard (mostly student bars and night clubs, but also stores) - shelf stacker - quantitative finance programmer (internship)

Did some work. Achieved some stuff.

It's like watching an addict fall off the wagon

#TuitionFees rising in line with inflation* does not mean** university is getting more expensive, it means it is staying the same price, not getting cheaper each year. * RPI is a terrible inflation measure & usually higher than better measures ** Other student costs may have risen above inflation