Richard Shaw

Worried about turning 60? Science says that’s when many of us actually peak Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating midlife as a countdown and started recognising it as a peak.

🧠 Midlife is a mental peak, not a decline

A new study finds overall psychological functioning peaks between ages 55–60, when reasoning, emotional balance, and judgement combine at their best.

🔗 doi.org/10.64628/AA....

#Psychology #SciComm 🧪

The BBC is a partisan battleground – why does Japan’s public broadcaster escape the same fate? The BBC commands middling levels of trust overall, but those levels are deeply polarised.

The BBC commands middling levels of trust overall, but those levels are deeply polarised.

The impact of PhD studies on mental health—a longitudinal population study Recent self-reported and cross-sectional survey evidence documents high levels of mental health problems among PhD students. We study the relationship…

The impact of PhD studies on mental health - A longitudinal population study

PhDs can be and some would likely argue, should be hard.

But surely not *this* hard?

#AcademicSky

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

‘Bored aliens’: has intelligent life stopped bothering trying to contact Earth? Astrophysicist proposes a ‘radically mundane’ theory for why humans have yet to encounter extraterrestrials

"Radical Mundanity" Explanation of the Fermi Paradox

"If aliens exist, their technology may be only marginally better than ours. And having explored their cosmic neighbourhood for a while, they simply got bored and stopped bothering, making it difficult to detect them."

🧪

The point we need to get across is that experts' knowledge is based on evidence i.e. appropriate methods and data. Open science practices mean that the logic of experts is available for scrutiny. The trust should be in scientific methodology not people.

One of the big challenges of today is that we have allowed selfish individualistic people to define aspiration.

The result is apathetic "leaders" only interested in their own wealth, gratification or prestige, and completely oblivious to a system that is malfunctioning and falling apart.

The training is the easy part. People also need to have the resources and the time to do what they are trained to do. This requires better management to make better use of existing resources.

One thing that rapidly becomes obvious in public health is that behaviour change is dependent on more than knowledge and education.

Yet social media is full of "experts" in public health who completely ignore this and constantly stating that the solution is more training and education.

Not everybody can be good at anything. Communication needs to be done as team with scientists in different roles depending on their skills and aptitude.
To do this well scientists need secure funding and reasonable workloads as well as the knowledge.

I really liked this. Spelling out the assumptions explicitly in model out output has the potential to help reinforce what people are learning through other media.

Join us next week for our #PublicHealth seminar on using casual inference in #epidemiology research for asthma & kidney disease #HealthData

🗓️ Tuesday 14 October, 12:50 BST
📍 LSHTM | Online

Details ⬇️
www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

I may be missing something but isn't this called teaching?

Fundraiser by EUPHA European Public Health Association | U* are Public Health - Stand up for Science EUPHA European Public Health Association Needs Your Help | U* are Public Health Stand with us to protect science, equity, and public health in Europe. Public health is under attack — but together we c...

The European Commission has cancelled all NGO operating grants for 2025. EUPHA was receiving around 400,000 euros a year and has been left with nothing. @eupha.bsky.social have started a solidarity campaign to address the short fall. whydonate.com/fundraising/...

There are more equitable ways of raising money from international students. The wealthier ones are consuming more luxuries and taking holidays, perhaps raise taxes in these areas? Others are struggling financially and having to work to support themselves while studying.

How do you build a survey that works? - Understanding Society Peter Lynn, Associate Director of Understanding Society, tackles the question in an article in Nature: Human Behaviour Peter Lynn, Associate Director of Understanding Society, examines the features of...

In our latest blog, Peter Lynn takes an overview of survey methods, and says understanding and care are more important than budget

I am starting to appreciate how little training academic researchers get on how to present and frame things. In particular the ethics around it. The default is focused on framing things for journals, and the limited training on knowledge exchange emphases "impact" not balanced advice.

This is not new as Bertrand Russell said "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

On many issues the science is so complex that it's not possible for anybody to understand it all and people emphasise parts of it in biased way often very loudly and aggressively. This is political but it is not a proper debate.

tl;dr Collinearity is a form of lack of information that is appropriately reflected in the output of your statistical model. When collinearity is associated with interpretational difficulties, these difficulties aren’t caused by the collinearity itself. Rather, they reveal that the model was poorly specified (in that it answers a question different to the one of interest), that the analyst overly focuses on significance rather than estimates and the uncertainty about them or that the analyst took a mental shortcut in interpreting the model that could’ve also led them astray in the absence of collinearity. If you do decide to “deal with” collinearity, make sure you can still answer the question of interest.

Was asked about collinearity again, so here's Vahove's 2019 post on why it isn't a problem that needs a solution. Design the model(s) to answer a formal question and free your mind janhove.github.io/posts/2019-0...

Chart shows difference between median full-time earnings of men and women as % of median earnings of men in OECD countries.

Gender pay gap
S Korea 31%
Israel 25%
Japan 21%
Canada 17%
US 17%
Mexico 17%
UK 15%
Germany 14%
Turkey 10%
France 9%
Spain 7%
Italy 3%
Belgium 1%

Why I gave the world wide web away for free My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation – and here’s why it’s still worth fighting for

Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee

I am all for making sure politicians retrospectively get the terrible ratings they deserve . On this basis of failing to implement the Dilnot report, austerity and Brexit, David Cameron is the worst PM of my lifetime.

Two decades ago David Coleman from a right wing perspective and Danny Dorling from the left seemed to be able to maintain a much higher profile than anybody does now.

It's almost as if the discipline is actively trying not to upset anyone.

It does raises concerns over what the UK's academic demographers have been doing for the last couple of decades.

Demography has been driving UK Politics for more than a decades, and they are almost completely invisible.

In 2016 Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists now" since AI would soon be better at their jobs.

He was right: models have outperformed radiologists on benchmarks for ~a decade.

Yet radiology jobs are at record highs, with an average salary of $520k.

Why?

Please only repost the first or key posts in a thread. If people are interested in it they will naturally follow it. Reposting all of them ends up with the thread in the wrong order and makes it harder to read.

Data Analyst at Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh Discover Data Analyst jobs and more in higher education on jobs.ac.uk. Apply for further details on the top job board.

I have been following #psychometrics jobs in #Scotland for a while. I think this is the first one* I am notified about in 2 years
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOU426/d...

I have no experience with/connection to the employer. Given its rarity, it seemed worth passing on.

#DataAnalysis #Job #MedicalEducation

Well provide support for your position with evidence from a survey on why clinicians are leaving research. The limited data in the article focuses on security of funding.

I have reread the article, the main focus s on the job security and funding for researchers NOT salaries. Hardly surprising as job security has always been the main concern of early career researchers. The solution to that is senior academics showing more solidarity to their junior colleagues.

There are thousands of people losing their jobs in academia due to funding problems. MRC units are being closed. Inflation is running at 3.8% the current pay offer for non-academics is 1.4%. The solution to this is solidarity, and that requires focusing the support on the most disadvantage.