Duncan Vernon
duncautumnstore.bsky.social
Duncan Vernon
@duncautumnstore.bsky.social
Hi! I’m a consultant in public health (interests - data/PHM, health care public health and wider determinants)

Also enjoy music (partic indiepop, post rock, hyperpop and musicals).

Plus board games, computer games, astronomy and other stuff.
Pinned
Gig news! Really excited to be putting on two Autumn Store gigs in October and November in Birmingham.

2nd October I’ve got Fightmilk and Wiiince at the Rock and Roll Brewhouse

7th November it’s Healees, The Leaking Machine and Kate Thompson & William William Rodgers at The Victoria. Plus dancing!
Still getting my thoughts together from The Autumn Store on Friday, but a huge thank you to everyone who came down and all the bands. I enjoyed the night so much and hope everyone else did too.

My phone was behind the sound desk most of the gig so only got a few pics
November 9, 2025 at 11:34 AM
Reposted by Duncan Vernon
Birmingham UK we are are chuffed to bits to be playing this rad show - Friday Nov 7 don't miss it!
October 29, 2025 at 4:39 AM
Excitingly, I’m supporting The Wave Pictures this Friday. It’s at The Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath and we have a tidy set of songs from the new album and last EP to play.
October 5, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Fantastic Autumn Store gig with Fightmilk and The Proctors last night. The room was full of people enjoying themselves - and that is why I put on gigs! Both bands on their way up to the Edinburgh Indiepop Alldayer who are in for a real treat.
October 3, 2025 at 5:58 AM
Two weeks to go until @fightmilkband.bsky.social play their first Birmingham show, and hopefully the first of many!
Gig news! Really excited to be putting on two Autumn Store gigs in October and November in Birmingham.

2nd October I’ve got Fightmilk and Wiiince at the Rock and Roll Brewhouse

7th November it’s Healees, The Leaking Machine and Kate Thompson & William William Rodgers at The Victoria. Plus dancing!
September 18, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Slightly diminish a book:

Watership Downer
September 9, 2025 at 5:50 AM
Gig news! Really excited to be putting on two Autumn Store gigs in October and November in Birmingham.

2nd October I’ve got Fightmilk and Wiiince at the Rock and Roll Brewhouse

7th November it’s Healees, The Leaking Machine and Kate Thompson & William William Rodgers at The Victoria. Plus dancing!
September 2, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Duncan Vernon
I don’t usually write anything personal having been advised early in my career that journalists shouldn’t really ever use the word “I”, so this is a bit of a deviation from my norm. But some personal reflections on the Test series.

www.thetimes.com/article/fd7e...
Why England v India was the best series I have ever covered
From on-field brilliance to traffic cones in the stands, this contest delivered drama and chaos in equal measure — what a privilege it was to witness it all
www.thetimes.com
August 6, 2025 at 5:35 PM
If you see this, post a castle.
August 3, 2025 at 12:31 PM
While I’m thinking about gigs, it’s only a week until the return of The Autumn Store - Friday 25th July in Birmingham. I’ve worked out how to DJ off a lap top especially.
July 18, 2025 at 4:22 PM
On the train to That London to see a few days of the @skepwax.bsky.social weekender. Looking forward to seeing Heavenly and wondering who we’ll bump into there.
July 18, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Looking forward to playing at Pop at the Lock next weekend. I’m doing a short solo acoustic set of a couple of Falling and Laughing classics at 5.15.
June 29, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Wait until The Independent finds out about the rest of the music industry!
June 29, 2025 at 1:16 PM
I finished watching Andor on Friday, then Rogue One last night and a New Hope tonight. I’m convinced that plus Empire and Jedi is the new order to watch Star Wars. Not sure what the rest really adds.
June 8, 2025 at 7:40 PM
I woke up early and so I listened to the first mixes for the new Falling and Laughing album in track order for the first time. I can’t wait to share it!
June 6, 2025 at 5:24 AM
Genuinely feel like there’s a lot of good music happening in Birmingham at the moment. More decent gigs on than I can feasibly go to, and that’s the way it should be.
May 30, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Was a great set from The Leaking Machine (feat two members of Mighty Mighty) last night at the launch of Jenny’s Feather Factory records.
May 30, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Reposted by Duncan Vernon
Main character energy is OUT, this summer we’re bringing NPC energy. We’re posted up at the bar dropping lore and suggesting side quests. We’re leaning casually near a locked door and saying “I don’t think you have the key for that” when someone tries the handle. We’re staring at a tree.
May 29, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Duncan Vernon
A fortnight tonight at the Rock n Roll Brewhouse in #Birmingham

My label launch - and the launch of the new album by The Leaking Machine.

Free CD on arrival OR upgrade to vinyl on the night for an extra tenner.

Tickets selling fast...

www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Bir...
The Leaking Machine Album Launch at Rock N Roll Brewhouse, Birmingham
The Leaking Machine release their new album 'Sound On Sound' - the first release on 'Jenny's Feather Factory'.
www.skiddle.com
May 15, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Having a band admin day, and so it would be remiss of me to not share the charmingly DIY poster and link to our gig in July! It’s only £5 (plus booking fee) because in my head it’s still 2010 and I priced the gig accordingly.

www.seetickets.com/event/cloud-...
May 4, 2025 at 8:52 AM
@betharzy.bsky.social also Ill be bringing some flyers down for my indiepop night in Brum so it you end up speaking to anyone who might enjoy it feel free to point them in my direction too 😁
May 3, 2025 at 8:36 AM
@betharzy.bsky.social looking forward to the JSP gig in Birmingham tomorrow! Do you know roughly what time you’ll be playing?
May 3, 2025 at 8:33 AM
I once did a survey which proved that 100% of people respond to surveys. It was a large sample so it must be true!
The larger the dataset, the larger the false sense of confidence - if bias is baked in, size just makes a flawed measurement more convincing.

Xiao-Li Meng has called it the big data paradox: 'The bigger the data, the surer we fool ourselves.'

In other words, scale isn’t a substitute for scrutiny.
Statistical paradises and paradoxes in big data (I): Law of large populations, big data paradox, and the 2016 US presidential election
Statisticians are increasingly posed with thought-provoking and even paradoxical questions, challenging our qualifications for entering the statistical paradises created by Big Data. By developing measures for data quality, this article suggests a framework to address such a question: “Which one should I trust more: a 1% survey with 60% response rate or a self-reported administrative dataset covering 80% of the population?” A 5-element Euler-formula-like identity shows that for any dataset of size $n$, probabilistic or not, the difference between the sample average $\overline{X}_{n}$ and the population average $\overline{X}_{N}$ is the product of three terms: (1) a data quality measure, $\rho_{{R,X}}$, the correlation between $X_{j}$ and the response/recording indicator $R_{j}$; (2) a data quantity measure, $\sqrt{(N-n)/n}$, where $N$ is the population size; and (3) a problem difficulty measure, $\sigma_{X}$, the standard deviation of $X$. This decomposition provides multiple insights: (I) Probabilistic sampling ensures high data quality by controlling $\rho_{{R,X}}$ at the level of $N^{-1/2}$; (II) When we lose this control, the impact of $N$ is no longer canceled by $\rho_{{R,X}}$, leading to a Law of Large Populations (LLP), that is, our estimation error, relative to the benchmarking rate $1/\sqrt{n}$, increases with $\sqrt{N}$; and (III) the “bigness” of such Big Data (for population inferences) should be measured by the relative size $f=n/N$, not the absolute size $n$; (IV) When combining data sources for population inferences, those relatively tiny but higher quality ones should be given far more weights than suggested by their sizes. Estimates obtained from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) of the 2016 US presidential election suggest a $\rho_{{R,X}}\approx-0.005$ for self-reporting to vote for Donald Trump. Because of LLP, this seemingly minuscule data defect correlation implies that the simple sample proportion of the self-reported voting preference for Trump from $1\%$ of the US eligible voters, that is, $n\approx2\mbox{,}300\mbox{,}000$, has the same mean squared error as the corresponding sample proportion from a genuine simple random sample of size $n\approx400$, a $99.98\%$ reduction of sample size (and hence our confidence). The CCES data demonstrate LLP vividly: on average, the larger the state’s voter populations, the further away the actual Trump vote shares from the usual $95\%$ confidence intervals based on the sample proportions. This should remind us that, without taking data quality into account, population inferences with Big Data are subject to a Big Data Paradox: the more the data, the surer we fool ourselves.
projecteuclid.org
April 25, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Injury prevention is how I came into public health, the history is it was a long battle in the US to have it recognised as a field of public health and establish this work in the CDC. Now gone.
npr.org NPR @npr.org · Apr 21
Workers who track data on car crashes, drownings, traumatic brain injury, falls in the elderly, and other perils lost their jobs. Advocates worry life-saving work will stop.
With CDC injury prevention team gutted, 'we will not know what is killing us'
Workers who track data on car crashes, drownings, traumatic brain injury, falls in the elderly, and other perils lost their jobs. Advocates worry life-saving work will stop.
www.npr.org
April 21, 2025 at 11:04 PM
@jetstreampony.bsky.social hi Jet Stream Pony! Is the Birmingham gig in May confirmed now? Seem to remember it was tbc for a while.
April 20, 2025 at 10:59 PM