flynn002

My research focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders - specific language impairment, dyslexia, and autism in particular. For all of these there is evidence of genetic influence. But the research papers reporting relevant results are often incomprehensible to people who aren’t geneticists (and sometimes to those who are).  This leaves us ignorant of what has really been found, and subject to serious misunderstandings. Just as preamble, evidence for genetic influences on behaviour comes in two kinds. The first approach, sometimes referred to as genetic epidemiology or behaviour genetics allows us to infer how far genes are involved in causing individual differences by studying similarities between people who have different kinds of genetic relationship. The mainstay of this field is the twin study . The logic of twin studies is pretty simple, but the methods currently used to analyse twin data are complex. The twin method is far from perfect, but it has proved useful in helping us ...

Photo credit: szeke Andy Field (who actually gave me a v. helpful response to a query via Twitter...) demonstrates how it should be done: 12 April 2012 06:34 This is an automatic reply. I'm on study leave writing 'Discovering Statistics Using SPSS 4'. This essentially means that I'm locked in a mental Dungeon for the next 6 months in which intrusions from the outside world are like needles lancing my brain. They hurt, and hence I'm going to ignore them. If you really need to get hold of me then you should write a letter and insert it into the stale bread that they push through my cell door every morning. Or you can follow my demented ramblings (or 'progress' as some people call it) on Facebook and Twitter. I will start to emerge back into reality (some might argue I was never in it) sometime in April 2012, at which point please resend your email if you still require a response.

Last month, there was a remarkable disconnect between what was being reported on BBC News outlets and what was concerning many members of the public on social media. The Health and Social Care Bill was passed by Parliament on 21st March, despite massive objections from many of those working in the NHS, and those members of the general public who were aware of the bill. Evidence of this concern was apparent from the fact that a petition with 486,000 signatures was presented to the Lords by Lord David Owen on 19th March, supporting his view that consideration of the Bill should be deferred until after the Risk Register had been published. There had also been a rally on 7th March attended by thousands of NHS workers. During the month of March, when there was still an opportunity of killing the bill if the Liberal Democrats had come out against it, there appeared to be very little coverage of it by the BBC. Only after the Bill had been passed, did the BBC seem willing to run it as a news ...

There’s been a lot written about the new phonics test that is being introduced in UK schools in June. Michael Rosen cogently put the arguments against it on his blog this morning. A major concern is that the test involves asking children to read a list of items, and takes no account of whether they understand them. Indeed, the list includes nonwords (i.e. pronounceable letter strings, such as "doop" or "barg") as well as meaningful words. So children will be “barking at print” - a very different skill from reading for meaning. I can absolutely see where Rosen is coming from, but he’s missing a key point. You can’t read for meaning if you can’t decode the words. It’s possible to learn some words by rote, even if you don’t know how letters and sounds go together, but in order to have a strategy for decoding novel words, you need the phonics skills. Sure, English is an irritatingly irregular language, so phonics doesn’t always give you the right answer, but without ph...