Tim Morris

Mark your diaries! The ViCBiostat Summer School returns from 13-20 Feb 2026, in Melbourne and online.
Courses include causal inference, cluster randomised trials, meta-analysis and the estimand framework.
Further details TBA shortly - sign up to our mailing list at www.vicbiostat.org.au
#statistics

Look I’m glad people love these speed awareness courses so much, I just think one of the lessons should be to avoid banging on about speeding facts they’ve learned to people who have never had a speeding ticket and didn’t need the 🤬 course in the first place

"we probably do not need to worry about the fact that the actual effect of one treatment rather than the other is not the same for all patients. Quite limited knowledge about an average improvement is the best that we can do" John Tukey, Controlled Clinical Trials, 1993 p282

HYBRID EVENT: 'Introduction to Quantitative Bias' with Rachel Hughes on Monday 1st December at 10am-12pm UK time.

For those near Leeds, bring your laptop and enjoy this as an in-person session!

Sign-up before 9am on Thursday 27th via: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/introducti...

Is the Premier League table super tight or not? A 6-point gap between 1st and 2nd and a 5-point gap between 2nd and 11th.

“early middle age” seems about as accurate as “late childhood” for Paul 😆

Two wow features of typing on an iPhone in 2025:
1. It can accept the word “estimand” but not “ill” (always corrects to “I’ll”) or “Tim” (always corrects to “Tom” FFS).
2. Moving the cursor to edit something takes like 5–10 taps or some hack, and behaviour depends on the app 🤷

Oh yes that’s the one place I’ve seen it: surgeons who called other surgeons ‘Mr’ if they had graduated from ‘Dr’!

Went to reply and Bluesky tells me ‘This post was marked as written in Swedish by its author’ – bravo Ollie 😆
Which countries does the don’t-use-first-names thing actually happen in?? Sounds like a TV thing!

Periodic reminder that if someone describes Consort as a trial design (or analysis) guideline, it means they haven’t yet got to the title. Applies to other reporting guidelines too.
😘

Laughed at the way you used quotation marks in several places 😆

Screenshot of my google search for "univers font"

Hang on… I added "font" to show that this isn’t because it’s ambiguous.

Screenshot of google search for "univers"

Perhaps only if they’re on google fonts?

Looking through the journals that commit this sin, I don’t consider submitting papers to them and perhaps this is a subconscious reason. Essentially showing they don’t care about readers’ experiences (buttressed by various typographic choices).

Screenshot of a pdf with a random big title page before the paper begins

Another screenshot of a pdf with a random big title page before the paper begins.

Does this enrage you too? Publishers adding a random page nobody wants at the beginning of a pdf, bigger than the rest of the pages – the ones people actually want to read – messing up the fit-to-width size of pages you do want to read! Just making readers’ lives pointlessly difficult.

You mean it sounds “correcter”

On the rare occasions it happens this feels like winning the lottery

Potential outcomes tabs in Outlook! DAGs in your Google query! Marginal structural models to help you plan your next vacation!

A small joy I get as an associate editor is that reviewers all answer “Would you like to receive recognition for your review using [Publons / Web of Science™ / whatevs]?” with “No” 😆

Also that journals continue to check, as if this still might be a winner.

Hold the line folks.

😆

📊 Next week, we'll be exploring a new #statistics modelling framework called regression by composition, with examples from growth modelling & HIV trials #healthdata

🗓️ Tuesday 4 November, 12:50-13:50 GMT
📍 LSHTM | Online

Join us ⬇️
www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

That’s exactly it. I guess the old-fashioned use would imply asking “What does he want” every time… sounds awkward.

One bit that made me laugh in Ros Atkins’ “The Art of Explanation” is when he’s discussing presentations and has a subsection titled something like “Have a hands plan”.

Good grief

Ah yes, ‘dreamt’ not ‘dreamed’. No idea why I thought of it but imagine a reader telling someone else about the beginning of the book, with no other knowledge (yet) of the book’s narrator.
Would this use of ‘they’ sound wrong to some generations?

Would the use of ‘they’ have been unavailable to earlier generations, who would instead have to say ‘he or she’?

If so, I’m surprised – it’s been a valid way to refer to an unspecific/unknown person as long as I’ve been alive!

So take the following: In the first line of Rebecca, the narrator tells us that last night they dreamed they went to Manderley again.
[Nothing about the narrator is known by the reader at the point]

Or this exchange:
A: A friend is going tonight.
B: Where did they get tickets?

Something something beggars something choosers

Ah ok, so they being also plural could be confusing. Good point!

Scotland has “yous”! Does that count?
Most of us whose first language is English have a problem with language in general.