Matt Parkes

‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Developing Practical Method Based Guidance for Trial Statisticians for the Design and Analysis of SMART trials at Imperial College London on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Developing Practical Method Based Guidance for Trial Statisticians for the Design and Analysis of SMART trials at Imperial College London, listed on FindAPhD.com

A great opportunity for a PhD studentship in Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomised Trials (SMARTs) at Imperial's CTU with @vcornelius.bsky.social www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Given the recent spicy #rstats threads, an important reminder:

There's no single right way to code

If it works for you, that's all that matters really

Be good to your fellow coders

Preach! Literally just taught this point to my class last week.

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.

It does not.

It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.

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🚨 Don't miss this important MHRA webinar on 12 March 2026 discussing the implementation of the new clinical trials regulations.

🔗 Reserve your place here: bit.ly/3Mq9h5P

#ClinicalTrials #UKCTUNetwork #MHRA

I recently discovered something that has markedly improved my experience of daily life: if you Google something and add “-ai” after the search term, it gives you search results without the AI overview

Archiving research data Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 7, Part 11

Archiving research data russpoldrack.substack.com/p/archiving-... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

Don't miss the chance to submit an abstract to the IEA European Congress of Epidemiology 2026 / 70th Annual Conference of the Society for Social Medicine & Population Health!

Deadline: 02 Mar 2026 at 23:59 GMT
Submission website: tinyurl.com/ssmeuroepi2026
Location: London, UK
Dates: 09-11 Sep 2026

OpenSAFELY news: you can apply to do non-COVID research, from today! | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science We are delighted to announce that - from today - you can submit applications to the OpenSAFELY service for non-COVID-19 studies.

OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c

Now it's over to users!

www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...

This is excellent news and a huge deal!

(Here's my explainer on OpenSafely and why it is incredibly cool.)
takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/how-to-use...

🚨 New blog post - Simplifying the path to tidy variable names with nice labels

the-kids-biostats.github.io/posts/2026-0...

Little by little we're trying to remove friction from OUR regular tasks/processes. We hope others might benefit from this along the way.

Design and analysis to estimate diagnostic test accuracy without universal verification at University of Bristol on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Design and analysis to estimate diagnostic test accuracy without universal verification at University of Bristol, listed on FindAPhD.com

📣 PhD studentship - Biostatistics 💻
University of Bristol, UK
Help improve methods for something that affects us all - how accurate are tests for disease?
Learn, apply & develop Bayesian models to estimate accuracy from varying study designs, synthesise evidence & optimise design of future studies

Survey researchers: I'll discuss LLM "synthetic respondents" in a free webinar this week.

➡️ Synthetic Survey Data? It's Not Data

Thursday Feb 19, 12pm Eastern, hosted by Sawtooth

Free registration: sawtoothsoftware.com/resources/ev...

(P.S., I give no quarter on this topic 😆)

Investigating estimand considerations in adaptive trials: a systematic review - Trials Background Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating treatment effects, with the results informing policy and clinical practice. To ensure appropriate methods are utilis...

📣New Publication: Investigating estimand considerations in adaptive trials: a systematic review link.springer.com/article/10.1...

INSPECT-SR Training Workshop April (N America) An introductory 2-hour online workshop will introduce participants to the INSPECT-SR tool for assessing trustworthiness of randomised controlled...

Intro to INSPECT-SR online training workshop - this one has been timed for North America region. April 30th - I *think* this works out as 10am Pacific...but check that. www.trybooking.com/uk/GATM

A Scanner Darkly. The book hit me right in the feels, and the rotoscoping in the film lets all the blurring between reality and trippiness blend really well.

Introduction to INSPECT-SR Training Workshop March (Europe) An introductory 2-hour online workshop will introduce participants to the INSPECT-SR tool for assessing trustworthiness of randomised controlled...

Next free online INSPECT-SR training workshop on March 6th. Register here: www.trybooking.com/uk/FZUN Timed for Europe. Will try to add something for North America in the next few days...

Important👇

Regulatory Expectations for Bayesian Methods in Drug and Biologic Clinical Trials: A Practical Perspective on FDA's 2026 Draft Guidance The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a landmark draft guidance in January 2026 on the use of Bayesian methodology to support primary inference in clinical trials of drugs and biologica...

Check his preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2601.14701

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Boston Chapter of the ASA Webinar: A Perspective Review of FDA's Draft Guidance on the Use of Bayesian Methodology in Clinical Trials of Drug and Biological... Join the Boston Chapter of the ASA for an insightful 1-hour webinar featuring Dr. Yuan Ji, Professor of Biostatistics at The University of Chicago, as he shares his perspective on the FDA's Draft Guid...

The Boston Chapter of the ASA is hosting a free 1-hour webinar to discuss the FDA's draft guidance on Bayesian Methods in Clinical Trials, with Yuan Ji sanofi.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

3 March, 5 PM London time

The case for sharing clinical trial data The story behind the first statin and how its development was almost derailed, and the implications of sharing clinical trial data.

New short blogpost!

There are probably many benefits of sharing clinical trial data, including:

Verifying results, better meta-analysis, understanding inconsistent results, further exploration, better clinical decision-making, learning how to run trials better, and reducing redundancy.

4-year PhD position in Biostatistics (292171) | University of Oslo Job title: 4-year PhD position in Biostatistics (292171), Employer: University of Oslo, Deadline: Thursday, February 12, 2026

Only a few days left to apply for this interesting PhD position in biostatistics at OCBE: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
@jmgran.bsky.social

Keen to know which affiliation you picked, and if you’re going to use it in teaching in future? 😂

🇪🇺 Top 3 recommendations from the #OpenKnowledgeNetwork to shape the @EU_Commission's Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy:

📑 Dedicated EU funding for open digital infrastructure
📑 Open-source as mandatory in EU-funded projects
📑 EU-wide platforms for code, tools and expertise

dplyr 1.2.0 dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...

dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

New Paper Proposes a Framework for Assessing the Trustworthiness of Research A new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) proposes a systems-level framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of research findings.

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) proposes a framework for evaluating trustworthiness of research findings. The paper is authored by a multidisciplinary group of research leaders, including COS Exec. Director Brian Nosek

📄 :

Wrong, but productive.

Just saw the caption. I guess you can be 10x more productive when you get AI to make up your dataset

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