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btjo.bsky.social
Unfork Statistics
@btjo.bsky.social
400 followers 2.6K following 380 posts
False +ves only occur on true nulls. Srsly.
Stats: https://bsky.app/profile/btjo.bsky.social/post/3kvloovvbcz23
QRPs: https://bsky.app/profile/btjo.bsky.social/post/3kvmompohir24
NNT me: https://bsky.app/profile/btjo.bsky.social/post/3kvkrxghlhv2d
She/they
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btjo.bsky.social
Unfork Statistics @btjo.bsky.social · Jul 10
Interesting review of irradiated platelets, comin' soon in Transfusion Medicine Reviews.

We included lab studies which had used split samples because that is the only sensible design for this Q. Only 1/3 analysed pairs, only 1 reported fully. ☹️

Poster here: ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid... #ISBT2024
Image of the poster. There's a downloadable (and hopefully readable) pdf behind the link. Any problems let me know and I'll try to find a way to get the text to you. It's about the use of paired analysis for paired data. Only a third of the studies used a paired analysis, only one (of 43) reported it in enough detail to meta-analyse. It makes a huge difference, as we show by reporting that one study both ways. Pairs eliminate population variability and so provide narrower confidence intervals than the equivalent comparison of groups.
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olivia.science
15-year-old bug 😐 in an industry that has the highest profit margins possible pretty much

www.theguardian.com/science/2017...
November 23, 2025 at 3:45 PM
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nicktsergas.ca
The most important part of this article, to me, is the end.

It challenges a false binary between “long COVID” and “everyone else.”

Maybe it's a spectrum... 🧵 (1/5)

www.bmj.com/content/390/...
Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2
“Immunity debt,” a theory to explain the global surge in non-covid infections since pandemic restrictions were lifted, is increasingly being challenged by emerging evidence. Nick Tsergas reports Myco...
www.bmj.com
August 20, 2025 at 5:50 AM
btjo.bsky.social
Domain knowledge is always critical for the appropriate application of statistical methods. Here, it would have prevented this embarrassing episode occurring at all.
To him, the research seemed off. Elkan used to work as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and as a scientist at Amazon, where he led machine-learning teams. The technology sounded too good to be true to him, given its supposed date of deployment. Also, 3M and Corning were the only U.S. materials companies Elkan knew of that employed a large number of scientists, and he questioned why, if they were inventing so many new materials, they would be keeping it secret.
November 22, 2025 at 2:40 PM
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klonskylab.bsky.social
Not sure where this is from, but assuming it’s right, there are clear implications for countering the replication crisis and “false positive” psychology: Insufficient sample sizes are a primary culprit, and should be a primary target of reforms.
johnholbein1.bsky.social John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 20d
lol; as statistical power goes up, effect sizes go down
November 4, 2025 at 3:21 AM
btjo.bsky.social
Unfortunately, they can fake data just as easily, and do much more damage to the literature with it. Need checking of grants, ethical approval, etc to verify that the research actually took place.
carnage4life.bsky.social Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 22d
arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category – arXiv blog
blog.arxiv.org
November 2, 2025 at 7:33 AM
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heimbergecon.bsky.social
Publication bias is greater at the top five journals: "56% of statistically significant results [in leading econ journals] were selected to be statistically significant. Selection bias is greater at top5 journals, where 66% of significant results were selected to be significant."
October 31, 2025 at 6:56 AM
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jessicacalarco.com
We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.
My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph
November 1, 2025 at 12:31 AM
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rebeccasear.bsky.social
"Two major publishers have begun to automatically reject the vast majority of papers based on public health data sets, following revelations that unscrupulous actors use these data sets to churn out nonsense scientific papers."

www.science.org/content/arti...
Journals and publishers crack down on research from open health data sets
PLOS, Frontiers, and others announce policies trying to stem the tide of suspect research
www.science.org
October 13, 2025 at 7:43 AM
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dingdingpeng.the100.ci
A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸

How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data.
www.science.org/content/arti...
AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds
Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings
www.science.org
October 1, 2025 at 4:17 AM
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jensfoell.de
People are running stats on LLM-generated participants and think they’re being social scientists when in fact they’re technically just playing a very strange video game. This is like saying you’re doing math research because you’re playing sudoku.

www.science.org/content/arti...
AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds
Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings
www.science.org
October 4, 2025 at 6:52 AM
btjo.bsky.social
I walk my dog by the river. Properly managed sewage systems are sexy. top-of-the-poops.org/waterway/uni...
October 1, 2025 at 1:53 PM
btjo.bsky.social
This is a failure to explain herd immunity properly. Some parents hear only a demand that they vaccinate to protect others. But their (unvaccinated) kids are most likely to be harmed in an outbreak. It's their (unvaccinated) kids who pay the price of herd immunity breaking down. Spell it out.
"The impact of their vaccine choices on others is not necessarily part of their calculation. And why should it be? There are few other arenas in which parents are asked to consider the effects of their choices on other children."
October 1, 2025 at 8:34 AM
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jakescottmd.bsky.social
A US senate subcommittee was told this unpublished vaccine study was 'the most important ever.' Henry Ford Health now confirms why it was never published: it failed scientific standards.

Here's what's actually wrong with the study:
jakescottmd.substack.com/p/why-the-senates-most-important-vaccine
Why the Senate's 'Most Important Vaccine Study Ever' Was Never Published
The fatal flaws that made this study unpublishable
jakescottmd.substack.com
September 13, 2025 at 4:04 AM
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benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:
September 6, 2025 at 11:09 PM
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statsepi.bsky.social
This can't be true because academic papers are all peer-reviewed by experienced experts who would be able to easily identify these shenanigans and stop them in their tracks.
nature.com Nature @nature.com · Sep 5
An investigation has identified more than 1,500 research articles produced by a network of Ukrainian companies that could be one of Europe’s largest paper mills

go.nature.com/3VxA1SD
Europe’s largest paper mill? 1,500 research articles linked to Ukrainian network
A group of companies has flooded 380 journals with hundreds of suspect papers since 2017.
go.nature.com
September 6, 2025 at 7:00 AM
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zeileis.org
🚨 Relaunch of CRAN Task View: Clinical Trial Design, Monitoring, and Analysis
#rstats

Complete rewrite by an int'l team of experts in #clinicaltrials

Ya Wang, Thomas Jaki @thomasjaki.bsky.social, Laura Pascasio Harris, Orla Doyle, Elias Laurin Meyer, Wilmar Igl

cran.r-project.org/view=Clinica...
Screenshot of the CRAN Task View "Clinical Trial Design, Monitoring, and Analysis" at https://CRAN.R-project.org/view=ClinicalTrials
September 5, 2025 at 9:10 AM
btjo.bsky.social
Nice example of the ecological fallacy, with a conclusion so absurd it's hard to understand how it got written down. #stats
A new WalletHub study shows how deeply car loan debt cuts into household budgets across the U.S. The financial site reviewed more than 2,500 cities, measuring median auto-loan balances against median incomes. The results revealed a clear warning: in more than 160 cities, drivers spend half or more of their yearly income on car loans alone. That burden comes as this particular debt keeps climbing nationwide. Some of the hardest-hit cities are in Texas Rio Grande City leads the list, where the median auto-loan balance is nearly equal to median income: $32,173 in debt versus $33,782 in earnings. That’s a 95% debt-to-income ratio. Nearby towns like Donna, Mercedes, San Juan, and Brownsville all land in the danger zone as well. Uvalde, Eagle Pass, and Pharr also show residents committing well over two-thirds of their annual income to car notes.
August 30, 2025 at 11:28 AM
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deadneanderthals.bsky.social
Recent paper on paper mill activity in the Taylor & Francis journal 'Bioengineered', which we have published in Taylor & Francis journal 'Bioengineered'.

~25% of the investigated 878 papers were 'problematic'

Bioengineered has now halted submissions.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Tackling paper mills requires us to prevent future contamination and clean up the past – the case of the journal Bioengineered
Taylor & Francis journal Bioengineered has been targeted by paper mills. Our goal is to identify problematic articles published in Bioengineered during the period 2010 to 2024. Dimensions was used ...
www.tandfonline.com
August 30, 2025 at 6:12 AM
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gidmk.bsky.social
A new expression of concern was published on this randomized clinical trial of cinnamon for diabetes.

The study itself has been cited, according to Google, 1,700 times.

I first complained about it in 2023, so let me tell you the story of one of the most problematic papers I've come across 1/n
August 25, 2025 at 3:30 AM
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chromatowski.bsky.social
Pretty striking for the BMJ to run this piece.

“[Immunity debt’s] explanatory power has faded as the number of non-covid infections has kept rising each year.”
Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2
“Immunity debt,” a theory to explain the global surge in non-covid infections since pandemic restrictions were lifted, is increasingly being challenged by emerging evidence. Nick Tsergas reports Myco...
www.bmj.com
August 24, 2025 at 12:33 AM
btjo.bsky.social
It really is quite stark, mapped out like this. (Assuming the underlying data is correct, I can't vouch for it but it smells right.)
A useful graphic from NYT charting published claims that there is, or is not, a link between vaccines and autism. 18 of the 27 claiming a link were auhored by David & Mark Geier, with 5 others retracted (including Wakefield's original 1998 paper). None of the 43 showing no link have been retracted, or authored by a Geier. vs 43 claiming
August 20, 2025 at 12:14 PM
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tomkindlon.bsky.social
Extract from a new, short blog post "When an Old Weak Theory Leads a Field Astray"

hildabastian.wordpress.com/2025/08/06/w...

Links in image:
www.bmj.com/content/389/...
www.bmj.com/content/389/...

Hilda Bastian (PhD) is a writer & scientist. She does not have ME/CFS.

#MEcfs #CFS #PwME
I spent a lot of time recently on another example of this phenomenon. Back in May, the BMJ ran an online opinion piece by Alastair Miller and colleagues arguing that even people with severe ME/CFS can recover if they are guided down a path that begins with “reframing beliefs about illness.” That theory of ME/CFS – that the mind is central to overcoming the condition – persists in large part due to sustained promotion like this. It comes, as these things tend to do, with a lot of references that gives an impression of solidity. Readers ordinarily don’t have time to do anything other than take all that at face value. This time, I decided to go systematically down the rabbit hole of citations, to understand the the links in the chain of theory that leads to telling people they are, in effect, responsible for their own suffering. I’ve been involved for years now with the evidence of how poorly these theories work in practice. I should not have been surprised that the theories don’t work in theory, either, but I was. So I wrote a rapid response, which you can read here.
August 6, 2025 at 5:27 PM
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looftsabine.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/reeserichardson.bsky.social/post/3lvo54cbfek2q
reeserichardson.bsky.social Reese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · Aug 5
Our article is now fully open-access!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
August 5, 2025 at 4:42 PM
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marcveld.bsky.social
Exclusive: retraction-prone editors identified at megajournal PLoS ONE

Study says small editor group handled many problematic manuscripts — and a Nature investigation finds out who they are.

Bad science and practice undermines science as a whole.

www.nature.com/artic...
Exclusive: retraction-prone editors identified at megajournal PLoS ONE
Nature - Study says small editor group handled many problematic manuscripts — and a Nature investigation finds out who they are.
www.nature.com
August 5, 2025 at 12:08 PM
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transfusionlib.bsky.social
The #Transfusion Evidence Alert - July 2025 is out!

See the PICO summaries from the top 10 articles and subscribe here:
www.transfusionevidencelibrary.com/alerts/latest
#MedSky
Image showing an extract of the Transfusion Evidence Alert - July 2025
July 22, 2025 at 8:52 AM