Median Watch

My friend and medical colleague John Fraser once said to me that I could sniff out a bad dataset like he could sniff out a patient in trouble.

RORI’s interesting report on the future of peer review noted a lack of cross-over of ideas between peer review in funding and peer review in journals.

Why aren’t ethics applications publicly available?

There’s been another call to “Bring back panels!”

Last week, I blocked out two hours of protected time in my diary for “grant writing”.

Breadcrumbs feature in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel where two lone children drop them along their journey into the forest so that they can find their way home.

Science prides itself on being self-correcting.

Last month I wrote a piece in Nature to announce that I’m going to halve my research output.

When fraudsters make up research data, they can make mistakes.

Originally published in the Deeble and AusHSI newsletter.

My eleven year-old uses lots of words that go over my head, such as “skibidi”, “bruh” and “floptropica”.

“What is the purpose of research funding?”

Reading Adrian Edmondson’s excellent autobiography, he mentioned Sturgeon’s law which is: “Ninety percent of everything is crap”.

Reproduced from the DORA blog.

Reproduced from the LSE impact blog.

Reproduced from the LSE impact blog.

I say real job, because I’d been working whilst studying as a dishwasher, packer, waiter, bingo operator, book-binder, and in a bookies.

We’ve just published the world’s first randomised trial of funding (paper available here).

Last week I saw Alison Avenell give a great talk titled “Improving the integrity of published research: How, when, and if?’’

Reproduced from The Conversation Our lives are becoming increasingly data driven.

A cover of Science from 2018 (available here) shows two giant scientists peering down on other scientists at work.

As a teenager I watched a lot of films starring Paul Newman and Steve McQueen and loved them all.

A colleague sent me a draft manuscript with the typo “statically significant”.

Reposted from The Conversation.

Reposted with permission from Campus Morning Mail.

Reposted with permission from 360info.

I am a statistician.

In my talk on bad statistics in medical research, I showed the infamous plot of Z-values created by Erik van Zwet.

Re-posted from Campus Morning Mail with permission.

Two weeks ago I gave a fun online talk on statistics for the Young Scientist Forum of the German Society for Biomaterials.

Sometimes I fantasise about being in an earthquake.

Re-posted from Campus Morning Mail with permission.

Johnson & Johnson have a funding scheme for women in STEM.

One year ago after another stupid fight with a journal about p-values, I made a pledge to go without them for a year.

In 1998, the French men’s team won the football World Cup for the first time in their history.

Sorry state.

Blog pause It’s been a long while between blogs.

Show me the shortcut Scientists are busy people.

Re-posted from this 2016 AusHSI blog because this is still an issue.

Yet another p-value run-in.

Our paper examining trends in acronyms in abstracts was recently published in eLife.

Today I end my two year stint as president of the Statistical Society of Australia.

Re-posted from the AusHSI blog (8 May 2015).

My daughter loves a song by Parry Gripp called “I did the dishes”.

Re-posted from the March 2020 issue of Advocate.

Re-posted from Campus Morning Mail.

I’ve done a lot of research on seasonal models.

Yet another COVID model.

Statistics can be hard Here’s a great quote about working with statistics from the fantastic statistician David Spiegelhalter: “I am often asked why people tend to find probability a difficult and unintuitive idea, and I reply that, after forty years rese…

The gender disparity in research funding.