Thom Baguley

Psychology: Fully funded PhD Studentship in ESRC Wales Graduate School for the Social Sciences (WGSSS) PhD Psychology pathway (RS896) - Swansea University We offer a wide range of funded and fully funded research scholarships in all subject areas. Explore your options and apply now.

We've got funded PhD places in Psychology available at Swansea - a chance to work on social issues with members of our great team (including me!) www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate...

Last but not least, paracetamol is probably the safest painkiller in pregnancy and untreated fevers can themselves cause serious health problems for mothers and babies. (5)

At best the evidence is mixed. Importantly, the review says in its conclusions: "observational limitations preclude definitive causation". (4)

Main evidence is a review study of I think nearly 50 studies with 100,000 participants. However there is a Swedish cohort study with nearly 3 million participants showing no effect and lack of dose response. (3)

First it's well understood that most if not all the rise in autism diagnosis can be explained by earlier diagnosis, wider awareness and broadening of diagnostic criteria. For example most of the recent growth is in women. For this to be due to Paracetamol would be wildly implausible. (2)

It's reported that the US government is going to announce they've found the cause of autism (Spoliers: They almost certainly haven't even found one new potential cause). Paracetemol (Tylenol) during pregnancy is the supposed culprit. This seems unlikely to put it mildly. (1)

Trump:

"When you have a network, and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump... They're not allowed to do that."

Monarez agrees that vaccines are safe and effective, and outlines her worries about an anti-vax world.

"I believe that preventable diseases would return, and our children will be harmed by things they do not need to be harmed by."

She affirms that vaccines are a major public health advancement.

I really miss when the stats blogs I read had light-hearted examples like "here is the concept of a multi-variate outlier explained through beer" rather than "here is another example of a logical fallacy being shared by the head of a national health agency"

A cartoon vaccine with a orange shield. Background is pink and green. We see money bags of dollars and euros.

Return-on-investment was $60 - $475 for every $1 invested in COVID vaccines in their first year, making them one of the most cost-effective public health measures in history. buff.ly/lfdINel

#medsky #pedsky 🛟😷🧪💸

Sign the Petition Adopt Registered Reports at Psychological Methods

as editor, I'm actually signing the petition myself :)

==
Adopt Registered Reports at Psychological Methods - Sign the Petition! chng.it/wszLWM4KPX
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e.g., look forward to exploring options for preregistration for the journal

@apajournals.bsky.social
@akmontoya.bsky.social

When do we actually think about what we want to say and what words to use? Interestingly our mind does a lot of this work while we're writing text. In fact, we demonstrated (psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...) that even young writers often don't stop before starting a new sentence. Way to multitask!

Drug (opioid) deaths and maybe car accidents might vary a lot by states also (in the accident category). Homicide probably a factor too (but behind the other causes I'd guess).

Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... )

1/2

CDC headquarters windows with visible bullet holes

I took this picture myself at the CDC protest today. These are among the hundreds of bullet holes in CDC headquarters windows, visible from the street. I heard today that the admin has no urgent plan to fix these windows.

Imagine being a CDC employee going to work under these conditions

Everyone is different but here are some things I think are good general advice. >

Paper with Jens Roeser and Mark Torrance: Semantic contrast ahead: contrast guides pre-planning in complex noun-phrase production | in Language and Cognition | www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

If you think AI is cool, wait until you learn about regression analysis

Letter from FBI Director Kash Patel firing veteran FBI agent Walter Giardina, whose wife died of cancer last month at age 49. Patel accuses this agent, a Marine combat veteran, of “weaponization.” Many of his FBI colleagues told me he did his job scrupulously and ethically.

New executive order puts all grants under political control All new funding on hold until Trump administration can cancel any previously funded grants.

It's been obvious for a while that they were headed in this direction, & this attempt almost certainly won't go unchallenged, but you need to understand that this is & has been America's Lysenkoism moment knocking on the door, & it has to be resisted every way it can.
arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Cover page for the manuscript: Morey, R. D., & Davis-Stober, C. P. (2025). On the poor statistical properties of the P-curve meta-analytic procedure. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2025.2544397

Abstract for the paper: The P-curve (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014; Simonsohn, Simmons, & Nelson, 2015) is a widely-used suite of meta-analytic tests advertised for detecting problems in sets of studies. They are based on nonparametric combinations of p values (e.g., Marden, 1985) across significant (p < .05) studies and are variously claimed to detect “evidential value”, “lack of evidential value”, and “left skew” in p values. We show that these tests do not have the properties ascribed to them. Moreover, they fail basic desiderata for tests, including admissibility and monotonicity. In light of these serious problems, we recommend against the use of the P-curve tests.

Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?

If you haven’t gotten into marginaleffects yet, this may be your chance. Learning about it has been quite transformative for how I think about statistical modeling 🪄

The Relation Between the Capacities of Imagination and Visual Memory in the Short Term | Request PDF Request PDF | The Relation Between the Capacities of Imagination and Visual Memory in the Short Term | Visual imagery and short-term memory utilize similar brain networks, but the extent to which they...

New paper by Chris Atkin and colleagues on the capacity of visual imagination - full text @ResearchGate www.researchgate.net/publication/...

The economy is on the precipice of recession. That’s the clear takeaway from last week’s economic data dump. Consumer spending has flatlined, construction and manufacturing are contracting, and employment is set to fall. And with inflation on the rise, it is tough for the Fed to come to the rescue. Unemployment remains low, but that’s only because labor force growth has gone sideways. The foreign-born workforce is shrinking, and labor force participation is declining. Telling is the economy-wide hiring freeze, particularly for recent graduates, and the decline in hours worked. It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy. The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy. Any notion that the economic data misrepresents the reality of how the economy is performing is way off base. There are revisions to the data, even big revisions, but they universally say the economy is doing worse. That’s because it is. BTW, the DOGE cuts are a key factor in the revisions—not because BLS has cut staff, although that can’t help, but because the government often reports payrolls to BLS late. It didn’t matter when government employment was stable, but now that it’s declining, the cuts are picked up in the revisions.

Trump is panicking because the economic numbers are giving a recession vibe.
From the Chief Economist at Moody's.

Maker Girl and Professor Smarts - Walker Books Two kid heroes use brains and elbow grease to face off supervillains with hilarious powers in this all-new STEM graphic novel series from MIT Kids Press.Ever...

A little joy for a change ... this looks amazing fun: www.walker.co.uk/978152951937... for STEM education

Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards As the Trump administration threatens to strip accrediting bodies of their power, many are scrambling to purge diversity requirements.

Extremely disappointing & cowardly. The American Psychological Association is rescinding diversity requirements. Not due to any actual mandate from the federal government, but only because it may *someday* face pressure from the government www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/h...

who did this

They never learn, I swear to Christ. The agreement is between several parties, Suella. It was negotiated by individuals whose moral & intellectual stature is beyond your fucking comprehension. You don't get to unilaterally rewrite it so it satisfies your pathological simple-mindedness.

Are you working on issues of replication and reproducibility of methodological research in psychology? Consider submitting a proposal to my call for papers, happy to chat about your ideas or answer any questions! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Research and Innovation Assistant at Nottingham Trent University Start your UK &amp; international job search for academic jobs, research jobs, science jobs and managerial jobs in leading universities and top...

RA post at NTU Psychology working on hazard perception in young tractor drivers - working with David Crundall (and me) www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNV058/r... on a Road Safety Trust funded project