Matt Parkes

this article is so unserious it feels satirical

whole-body MRI scans for worried well are horrifically low-value

they find incidentalomas, leading to downstream costs & iatrogenic harm

not sure what it's doing in a newspaper (if that's what we're calling the WaPo)

www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/ar...

Thank God for Bluesky Yes, it's eager. Yes, it's censorious. But it has the very considerable advantage of not being fascist.

Thank God for Bluesky: A little love letter to the people who would not compromise with Nazis iandunt.substack.com/p/thank-god-...

Absolutely love this. Very clear and neat

(This applies to clinical medicine, and arguably all science, too)

1. Transparency is necessary for credibility
2. Transparency is hard to change
3. Require transparency*
4. Transparency is not magic
5. Journals are part of problem
6. Expect more from journals
7. Peer review is not magic
8. A crisis can look a lot like „normal“ science
9. Meta-analysis is not magic

🚨New guidance for CTUs

Making optimal use of clinical trial data is an ethical obligation & often a funder requirement.

Our guidance, written by experienced trial staff, can help you prepare for data sharing & re-use requests.

🔗 ukcrc-ctu.org.uk/quality-assu...

#ClinicalTrials #UKCTUNetwork

Still cracks me up that not long ago everyone was like “Trials are too expensive”, and the solution to this is to do massive AI models with colossal piles of data. More expensive, more assumptions, weaker causality. 🍌🍌

Also it’s way cheaper than pouring barrels of cash into building ultra-mega-giga-data-centers

Announcing surveydown v1.0.0! – surveydown.org We are thrilled to announce the v1.0.0 release of surveydown, a stable release with improvements to YAML settings, page navigation, question creation, and a smoother overall developer experience.

🎉 Announcing surveydown v1.0.0!

surveydown is an #opensource #rstats package for building surveys with #Quarto & #Shiny. This release improves the survey design experience, including:

- Simplified YAML settings
- Auto page navigation
- Previous buttons!

More at surveydown.org/blog/2025-11...

Very niche ask: if anyone on #statsky has used {rpact} to design a trial using a conditional power approach, please can I ask you a question?

It seems to be doing the opposite of what I'd expected it to do, but that might be because I don't understand it properly!

kthxbye

Ripper extension hex logo with Halloween-inspired design. Black hexagonal badge featuring a white .qmd document on the left with red blood splatter effect, and multiple file extension labels on the right (.R, .py, .jl, .js, .lua, .sh, .ts, .md) resembling torn paper. The word 'RIPPER' appears in large red distressed lettering at the bottom, with additional blood drip effects throughout.

Screenshot demonstrating the ripper Quarto extension workflow. Shows the ripper logo (a dark house silhouette with red text), documentation page for Default Configuration, example R and Python code blocks in the rendered document, and two code editor windows displaying the generated script files (qripper-default-config.R and qripper-default-config.py) with extracted code. A red arrow connects the 'Script files' section to the generated output files.

{ripper} dissects your #Quarto documents, extracting code blocks by language and leaving executable scripts behind.

Supports #rstats, #python, #julia, and 13 other victims.

For those who never stopped celebrating Halloween.

📚 quarto.thecoatlessprofessor.com/ripper/
💻 github.com/coatless-qua...

#rstats Please welcome Jarl, a new R linter.

Jarl is a CLI tool with extensions in VS Code, Positron, and Zed. It can check thousands of lines of R code in milliseconds.

Jarl provides several output formats, a Github Actions workflow, and more.

Blog post: www.etiennebacher.com/posts/2025-1...

One thing about PCA/embeddings/political-leaning that should get more attention is the role of zero or “the origin”. It’s often special in a way that depends upon how you do the embedding.

This post is a good example of that.

Once you accept that the origin is special, then….

Improving health by improving trials – applying behavioural science to improve the design and delivery of clinical trials. at University of Aberdeen on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Improving health by improving trials – applying behavioural science to improve the design and delivery of clinical trials. at University of Aberdeen , listed on FindAPhD.com

One of my 2026 goals is to be more present on BlueSky! Another is to recruit a great candidate to this 4-yr PhD studentship with us at the Aberdeen Centre for Evaluation -applying behavioural science to the design and delivery of clinical trials. Please share. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

MNAR

Incredibly helpful! No longer do we need to have awkward mid-lecture discussions about why this is so, can just point to this (great) post which does a much better job of explaining!

This is great.

The problem is the cliff-edge dichotomous thinking, which I think can be exacerbated by the use of p-values, but you can still do this with CIs - it's not a property of either, more a problem with interpretation.

Computational notebooks Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 6, Part 4

Computational notebooks - the first in a set of posts on this topic. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/computatio...

I think Positron might do something similar, called ‘Open Collaboration’, but I’ve not tried that yet!

Live Share: Real-Time Code Collaboration & Pair Programming Real-time collaborative code editor for pair programming, code reviews, technical interviews and more.

How to: visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/liv...

For asynchronous editing, I think it’s a gap. If you’re doing synchronous edits, you can do a kludgey solution by opening the .Qmd in VS Code and firing up a ‘Live Share’ session and sharing the link with collaborators. Not ideal, but not bad.

The speaker at the lectern

Title slide

Next: Jack Wilkinson @jdwilko.bsky.social with 'Problematic clinical trials and the threat to evidence synthesis'
Systematic reviews are considered the cornerstone of medicine. But some of the eligible trials that could be included might be problematic. They could get included.
#IRICSydney

FAIRification of biomedical research data The Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable guiding principles promote Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of data to enhance data management and stewardship. In biomedic...

Key concepts: FAIRification of biomedical research data - Journal of Clinical Epidemiology www.jclinepi.com/article/S089...

Screenshot from the Epstein Document Search which reads: House_Oversight_029401 From: Donald Rubin Sent: 1/22/2017 7:31:32 PM To: jeffrey E. [jeeyacation@gmail.com] Subject: Republican health care experts dismiss Donald Trump's ideas Importance: High https://www.statnews.com/20 1 6/03/04/trump -repub cans-health-care/? s camp aign=trendmd Jeffrey, This cannot be true, can it? This guy must be as dumb about this stuff as a tampon laced with arsenic!! HELP! Great meeting yesterday — really enjoyed it. And happy birthday again, Don Donald B. Rubin John L. Loeb Professor of Statistics Department of Statistics, Harvard University 1 Oxford Street Cambridge MA 02138 HOUSE OVERSIGHT 029401

In between things I've been checking in on the emails that mention "university" and uhh did we all know about this connection?

Getting Started with Git, GitHub & GitHub Copilot at the University of Manchester? This guide introduces key tools in the software development lifecycle - Git, GitHub, and GitHub Copilot – and explains how University of Manchester staff and students can access them for free through…

University of Manchester researchers and PGRs have access to a wide range of tools from #GitHub but it can be confusing to work out what you need and how to get access.
Have a look at this handy guide put together by out Head of Research Software Engineering, Adrian Harwood.

when i left you i was but the learner but now i am the master! ALT: when i left you i was but the learner but now i am the master!

This dot gif?

NEW PAPER: "Reporting guidelines for studies involving generative artificial intelligence applications: what do I use, and when?"

--> www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#HealthTech #ClinicalAI #MachineLearning #MedAI #AIinMedicine #TransparentAI #HealthInnovation #GenAI

On a cold, grey Friday afternoon, what better way to cheer ourselves up than by listening to a few episodes of the Trials Methodology Podcast?

Great topics, excellent interviews - and the enthusiasm is infectious!

🎧 Listen here: linktr.ee/trialsmethod...

#UKCTUNetwork #TMRP #TrialMethodology

Position statement on artificial intelligence (AI) use in evidence synthesis across Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2025 - Environmental Evid... 1. Evidence synthesists are ultimately responsible for their evidence synthesis, including the decision to use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, and to ensure adherence to legal and ethical...

Position statement on artificial intelligence (#AI) use in evidence synthesis across Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2025 link.springer.com/article/10.1...