flynn002

--> I am beginning to develop an addiction to Hansard, the public record of debates in Parliament and the House of Lords. It's a fascinating public record of how major political decisions are debated, and I feel fortunate to live in a country where it is readily available on the internet the day after a debate. The debate on Donald Trump's state visit was particularly interesting, because it was prompted by a public petition signed by 1.85 million people, which read: Donald Trump should be allowed to enter the UK in his capacity as head of the US Government, but he should not be invited to make an official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen. I've been taking a look at the debate from 20 th February, which divided neatly down party lines, with the Conservatives and a single DUP member supporting the state visit, and everyone else (Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Green) opposing it. A notable point about the defenders of the State Visit i...

After watching this interview between BBC Newsnight's Evan Davies and Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to Donald Trump, I realised I'd been handling conference questions all wrong. Gorka , who is a former editor of Breitbart News, gives a virtuoso performance that illustrates every trick in the book for coming out on top in an interview: smear the questioner, distract from the question, deny the premises, and question the motives behind a difficult question. Do everything, in fact, except give a straight answer. Here's what a conference Q and A session might look like if we all mastered these useful techniques. ED: Dr Gorka, you claim that you can improve children's reading development using a set of motor exercises. But the data you showed on slide 3 don't seem to show that. SG: That question is typical of the kind of bias from people working at British Universities. You seem hell-bent on discrediting any view that doesn't agree with your own preconceived pos...

--> I regard politicians as a much-maligned group. The job is not, after all, particularly well paid, when you consider the hours that they usually put in, the level of scrutiny they are subjected to, and the high-stakes issues they must grapple with. I therefore start with the assumption that most of them go into politics because they feel strongly about social or economic issues and want to make a difference. Although being a politician gives you some status, it also inevitably means you will be subjected to abuse or worse. The murder of Jo Cox led to a brief lull in the hostilities, but it's resumed with a vengeance as politicians continue to grapple with issues that divide the nation and that people feel strongly about. It seems inevitable, then, that anyone who stays the course must have the hide of a rhinoceros, and so by a process of self-selection, politicians are a relatively tough-minded lot.  I fear, though, that in recent years, as the divisions between parties have ...

--> --> © cartoonstock.com My attention was drawn today to an article in the Atlantic , entitled ‘Why Do Humans Still Have a Gene That Increases the Risk of Alzheimer’s?’ It noted that there are variants of the apoliprotein gene that are associated with an 8- to 12-fold increased risk of the disease. It continued: “It doesn’t make sense,” says Ben Trumble, from Arizona State University. “You’d have thought that natural selection would have weeded out ApoE4 a long time ago. The fact that we have it at all is a little bizarre.” The article goes on to discuss research suggesting there might be some compensating advantage to the Alzheimer risk gene variants in terms of protection from brain parasites. That is as may be – I haven’t studied the research findings – but I do take issue with the claim that the persistence of the risk variants in humans is ‘a little bizarre’. The quote indicates a common misunderstanding of how natural selection works. In evolution, what matters is whether...

The end of the year is a good time to look over the blog, to see which posts garnered most attention. Perhaps not surprisingly, among the six most popular were several pieces I wrote related to scientific publishing and the reproducibility crisis: examining the problem and potential solutions. This is a topic I have become increasingly passionate about, as I worry about how the current system encourages us to waste precious time and money pursuing 'exciting' and 'ground-breaking' results, rather than doing thoughtful, careful science. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive, but, sadly, the emphasis on innovation and productivity can lead people to cut corners, and we then end up with findings that are not a solid basis on which to build further research. Here are the top 6 posts of 2016: Ten serendipitous findings in psychology Better control of the publication time-line: A further benefit of Registered Reports The Amazing Significo: why researchers need to und...

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford ignited an impassioned debate about the presence of monuments to historical figures in our Universities. On the one hand, there are those who find it offensive that a major university should continue to commemorate a person such as Cecil Rhodes, given the historical reappraisal of his role in colonialism and suppression of African people. On the other hand, there are those who worry that removal of the Rhodes statue could be the thin end of a wedge that could lead to demands for Nelson to be removed from Trafalgar Square or Henry VIII from King’s College Cambridge. There are competing petitions online to remove and retain the Rhodes statue: with both having similar numbers of supporters. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign was back in the spotlight last week, when the Times Higher ran a lengthy article covering a range of controversial statues in Universities across the globe. A day before the article appeared, I had happened upon the Explorer'...

--> Replication studies have been much in the news lately, particularly in the field of psychology, where a great deal of discussion has been stimulated by the Reproducibility Project spearheaded by Brian Nosek. Replication of a study is an important way to test the the reproducibility and generalisability of the results. It has been a standard requirement for publication in reputable journals in the field of genetics for several years (see Kraft et al, 2009 ). However, at interdisciplinary boundaries, the need for replication may not be appreciated, especially where researchers from other disciplines include genetic associations in their analyses. I’m interested in documenting how far replications are routinely included in genetics papers that are published in neuroscience journals, and so I attempted to categorise a set of papers on this basis. I’ve encountered many unanticipated obstacles in the course of this study ( unintelligible papers and uncommunicative authors , to name ...