flynn002

This post was prompted by Tom Hartley, who asked if I would be willing to feature an interview with Alan Baddeley on my blog.  This was excellent timing, as I'd just received a copy of Working Memories from Alan, and had planned to take it on holiday with me. It proved to be a fascinating read. Tom's interview, which you can find here , gives a taster of the content. The book was of particular interest to me, as Alan played a big role in my career by appointing me to a post I held at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit (APU) from 1991 to 1998, and so I'm familiar with many of the characters and the ideas that he talks about in the book. His work covered a huge range of topics and collaborations, and the book, written at the age of 84, works both as a history of cognitive psychology and as a scientific autobiography. Younger readers may be encouraged to hear that Alan's early attempts at a career were not very successful, and his career took off only after a harrowing period...

Screenshot from http://dclgapps.communities.gov.uk/imd/idmap.html Densely packed postcodes appear grey: you need to expand the map to see colours --> The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has a website which provides an ‘index of multiple deprivation’ for every postcode in England.  This is a composite index based on typical income, employment, education, health, crime, housing and living environment for each of 32,844 postcodes in 2015. You can also extract indices for the component factors that contribute to the index, which are explained further here . And there is a fascinating interactive website where you can explore the indices on a map of England. Researchers have used the index of multiple deprivation as an overall measure of environmental factors that might affect child development, but it has one major drawback. The number that the website gives you is a rank from 1 to 32,844. This means it is not normally distributed, and not easy to interpret. Y...

How Einstein dealt with peer review: from http://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-einstein-did-too-27405 This all started with a tweet from Jesse Shapiro under the #shareyourrejections hashtag: JS: Reviewer 2: “The best thing these authors [me and @ejalm] could do to benefit this field of study would be to leave the field and never work on this topic again.” Paraphrasing only slightly. This was quickly followed by another example ; Bill Hanage: #ShareYourRejections “this paper is not suitable for publication in PNAS, or indeed anywhere.” Now, both of these are similarly damning, but there is an important difference. The first one criticises the authors, the second one criticises the paper. Several people replied to Jesse’s tweet with sympathy, for instance: Jenny Rohn : My condolences. But Reviewer 2 is shooting him/herself in the foot - most sensible editors will take a referee's opinion less seriously if it's laced with ad hominem attacks. I took a differen...

An interesting twitter thread came along yesterday, started by this query from Jan Wessel (@wessel_lab): Quick thread of (honest) questions for the numerous people on here that subscribe to the position that sharing code in MATLAB ($) is bad open-science practice compared to open source languages (e.g., Python). What should I do as a PI that runs a lab whose entire coding structure is based (publicly shared) MATLAB code? Some say I should learn an open-source language and change my lab’s procedures over to it. But how would that work in practice?  When I resort to blogging, it’s often because someone has raised a question that has captured my interest because it does not have a simple answer. I have made a Twitter moment to store the rest of Jan’s thread and some of the responses to it, as they raise important points which have broad application. In part, this is an argument about costs and benefits to the individual scientist and the community. Sometimes these can be aligned, bu...

Helpful advice from the World Bank This blogpost was prompted by a funding call announced this week by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)  , which included the following key dates: Opening date for proposals – 6 August 2018  Closing date for proposals – 18 September 2018  PI response invited – 23 October 2018  PI response due – 29 October 2018  Panel – 3 December 2018  Grants start – 14 February 2019  As pointed out by Adam Golberg (@cash4questions), Research Development Manager at Nottingham University, on Twitter, this is very short notice to prepare an application for substantial funding: I make this about 30 working days notice. For a call issued in August. For projects of 36 months, up to £900k - substantial, for social sciences. With only one bid allowed to be led from each institution, so likely requiring an internal sift.  I thought it worth raising this with ESRC, and they replied promptly, saying: To access funds for this c...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing George Davey Smith (aka @mendel_random) talk. In the course of a wide-ranging lecture he recounted his experiences with conducting a systematic review. This caught my interest, as I’d recently considered the question of literature reviews when writing about fallibility in science . George’s talk confirmed my concerns that cherry-picking of evidence can be a massive problem for many fields of science. Together with Mark Petticrew, George had reviewed the evidence on the impact of stress and social hierarchies on coronary artery disease in non-human primates. They found 14 studies on the topic, and revealed a striking mismatch between how the literature was cited and what it actually showed. Studies in this area are of interest to those attempting to explain the well-known socioeconomic gradient in health. It’s hard to unpack this in humans, because there are so many correlated characteristics that could potentially explain the association. The pr...