Catherine Best
@cathbest.bsky.social
Quantitative data analysis and statistics #StatsSky . Public health. Commercial determinants of health. Maternal mental health. Associate Professor at University of Stirling Faculty of Health Sciences and Sport.
Your daily reminder that basic AI can't reliably copy maths formulae from the Internet
August 29, 2025 at 7:08 AM
Your daily reminder that basic AI can't reliably copy maths formulae from the Internet
Age verification- does their personal email have a pre 1900s number in it?
July 26, 2025 at 7:41 AM
Age verification- does their personal email have a pre 1900s number in it?
Reposted by Catherine Best
This excerpt from 'Island' by Aldous Huxley is without question something worth saving to your phone, writing down in your secret notebook, committing firmly to your memory, so that when you find yourself in a dire moment, you can call upon it to aid you. ❤️
July 13, 2025 at 9:05 PM
This excerpt from 'Island' by Aldous Huxley is without question something worth saving to your phone, writing down in your secret notebook, committing firmly to your memory, so that when you find yourself in a dire moment, you can call upon it to aid you. ❤️
Reposted by Catherine Best
Look, I've got an AI-powered multi-omics program to sell to the worried well here, so less about the social determinants of health please.
July 10, 2025 at 12:51 PM
Look, I've got an AI-powered multi-omics program to sell to the worried well here, so less about the social determinants of health please.
Reposted by Catherine Best
Pay universities to do this work. We have more expertise, can do it independently, and for less money.
Big Four accountancy firms are racing to create a new type of audit that verifies the effectiveness of artificial intelligence tools as they seek to profit from clients’ demand for proof that their AI systems work and are safe
www.ft.com/content/5e4e...
www.ft.com/content/5e4e...
Big Four firms race to develop audits for AI products
Accounting groups hope to emulate previous profit gains from audits of companies’ ESG metrics
www.ft.com
June 3, 2025 at 6:56 AM
Pay universities to do this work. We have more expertise, can do it independently, and for less money.
Reposted by Catherine Best
Amen - coefficients from different (often non-linear) models don't mean the same thing, but they get compared all the time. The "effect" of interest is a marginal effect for an explicit target population, not a parameter.
Software guided workflow could help, plug into tools like marginaleffects.com
Software guided workflow could help, plug into tools like marginaleffects.com
Managed to squeeze in the urgently necessary shoutout to marginaleffects marginaleffects.com @vincentab.bsky.social
![Speaking of quantification, another issue that remains open is the choice of appropriate metrics when pooling disparate analyses. Ideally, all effect estimates would be expressed in a common metric to ensure they are actually comparable [7]. Kowall and colleagues instead present a range of Hazard Ratios, Odds Ratios and Relative Risks. There are two pragmatic arguments to justify the usage of disparate metrics. First, it may not make a substantial numerical difference in this particular case—if the prevalence is low, Odds Ratios approach Relative Risks according to the rare disease assumption [8]. Second, readers of studies may interpret these different metrics in the same way anyway, thus rendering the differences between them irrelevant in practice.
But they are not irrelevant when the aim is to precisely identify sources of discrepancy, in which case a common effect metric would be desirable. There remains work to be done to enable translation between metrics for very different classes of models—which admittedly may not always be possible, but is at least conceivable, in particular when the underlying data are available (rather than just summary statistics). A promising development on that front is work on a more comprehensive marginaleffects framework in the social sciences [9] that enables researchers to derive a wide number of effect size quantifications from disparate classes of statistical models (with accompanying software packages in R and Python). This, in turn, should enable us to find out whether two different statistical models give the same answer when asked precisely the same question.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:gz53felr7btxgmbxae5aooxi/bafkreiajoplny2ioe5qbuzhjrky5hrdtdfdkuwztqpnv37ypsrn6ogwm4a@jpeg)
May 30, 2025 at 7:10 AM
Amen - coefficients from different (often non-linear) models don't mean the same thing, but they get compared all the time. The "effect" of interest is a marginal effect for an explicit target population, not a parameter.
Software guided workflow could help, plug into tools like marginaleffects.com
Software guided workflow could help, plug into tools like marginaleffects.com
UK Prevention Research conference next March registrations.hg3conferences.co.uk/hg3/frontend...
registrations.hg3conferences.co.uk
May 29, 2025 at 11:54 AM
UK Prevention Research conference next March registrations.hg3conferences.co.uk/hg3/frontend...
When the authors are 'grateful for such a careful and conscientious reading' in my 2nd round of reviewer comments. I can imagine how this is phrased in private 👹👹 🙉 🙉
May 29, 2025 at 7:54 AM
When the authors are 'grateful for such a careful and conscientious reading' in my 2nd round of reviewer comments. I can imagine how this is phrased in private 👹👹 🙉 🙉
Reposted by Catherine Best
re-upping this because I just overheard a fellow statistician say: "Multicollinearity is not really the problem that people make it out to be. I have a really nice paper on this I can send you which a colleague showed me a while ago."
(who was the colleague? pretty sure it was me.)
(who was the colleague? pretty sure it was me.)
Another q for the stats people!
People worry about collinearity (cf blog post below).
Consider a scenario in which the collinear predictors are just controls to account for confounding.
Including both of them doesn't impair the precision with which the effect of interest is estimated, does it?
People worry about collinearity (cf blog post below).
Consider a scenario in which the collinear predictors are just controls to account for confounding.
Including both of them doesn't impair the precision with which the effect of interest is estimated, does it?
Jan Vanhove :: Blog - Collinearity isn’t a disease that needs curing
janhove.github.io
May 16, 2025 at 5:17 AM
re-upping this because I just overheard a fellow statistician say: "Multicollinearity is not really the problem that people make it out to be. I have a really nice paper on this I can send you which a colleague showed me a while ago."
(who was the colleague? pretty sure it was me.)
(who was the colleague? pretty sure it was me.)
Reposted by Catherine Best
The Institute for Social Marketing and Health quarterly meeting in sunny Stirling. 🌞
May 13, 2025 at 7:55 AM
The Institute for Social Marketing and Health quarterly meeting in sunny Stirling. 🌞
Reposted by Catherine Best
New report on vape displays. Young people more likely than adults to notice vapes in a shop window and were more likely to take positive messaging from such window displays. www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/defaul...
May 12, 2025 at 7:49 PM
New report on vape displays. Young people more likely than adults to notice vapes in a shop window and were more likely to take positive messaging from such window displays. www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/defaul...
New report on vape displays. Young people more likely than adults to notice vapes in a shop window and were more likely to take positive messaging from such window displays. www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/defaul...
May 12, 2025 at 7:49 PM
New report on vape displays. Young people more likely than adults to notice vapes in a shop window and were more likely to take positive messaging from such window displays. www.cancerresearchuk.org/sites/defaul...
If you know anyone looking for a week long hybrid course on social statistics this summer- have a look at this one my husband is running 👇 essexsummerschool.com/summer-schoo...
May 4, 2025 at 5:49 PM
If you know anyone looking for a week long hybrid course on social statistics this summer- have a look at this one my husband is running 👇 essexsummerschool.com/summer-schoo...
Yes 'hereness'
THE RISE OF END TIMES FASCISM
My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
The rise of end times fascism
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
www.theguardian.com
April 14, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Yes 'hereness'
Reposted by Catherine Best
THE RISE OF END TIMES FASCISM
My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
The rise of end times fascism
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
www.theguardian.com
April 13, 2025 at 1:32 PM
THE RISE OF END TIMES FASCISM
My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
My first major piece of the new Trump era, co-written with @astra.bsky.social.
The governing ideology of the far right has become a
monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
Strong work here from Altmetric 😁😂. The real twist, is that a huge number of citations by-pass thought
THREAD
Today Altmetric is announcing a major development in collaboration with the Brain Occipital Lobe Learning Observation Centre Kalhausen-Strasbourg.
From today Altmetric will be able to determine what research paper you're thinking of, regardless of what you're actually writing/saying.
1/17
Today Altmetric is announcing a major development in collaboration with the Brain Occipital Lobe Learning Observation Centre Kalhausen-Strasbourg.
From today Altmetric will be able to determine what research paper you're thinking of, regardless of what you're actually writing/saying.
1/17
April 1, 2025 at 6:17 AM
Strong work here from Altmetric 😁😂. The real twist, is that a huge number of citations by-pass thought
During the pandemic, restrictions about partners being present during birth was one of the biggest sources of anxiety for UK expectant mothers in the UK. New paper bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
Google
links.springernature.com
March 27, 2025 at 8:05 PM
During the pandemic, restrictions about partners being present during birth was one of the biggest sources of anxiety for UK expectant mothers in the UK. New paper bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
Reposted by Catherine Best
Happy Large Enough N day for those who observe
March 24, 2025 at 7:15 AM
Happy Large Enough N day for those who observe
Funded PhD studentships available at University of Stirling’s Centre for Place and Memory placememory.net/apply-now-fo...
Apply Now for PhD Studentships 2025
We are recruiting 6 PhD studentships, fully funded by the University of Stirling, which will aim to advance knowledge of the dynamic relations between place and memory at multiple timescales a…
placememory.net
March 7, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Funded PhD studentships available at University of Stirling’s Centre for Place and Memory placememory.net/apply-now-fo...
Reposted by Catherine Best
Right. It's Friday Home Time.
Tune Trump out (if you can).
And listen to this (or whatever music works for you).
Doof doof doof.
Tune Trump out (if you can).
And listen to this (or whatever music works for you).
Doof doof doof.
I'm normally really cynical when remixes of absolute bangers are made.
I was expecting to hate this.
This is an absolute masterpiece in how to remix a song
What happens when a legendary DJ and a legendary rock musician get together?
This. This is what happens
Turn it up people
💃🕺🪩
I was expecting to hate this.
This is an absolute masterpiece in how to remix a song
What happens when a legendary DJ and a legendary rock musician get together?
This. This is what happens
Turn it up people
💃🕺🪩
Armin van Buuren & Bon Jovi - Keep The Faith [Lyric Video]
YouTube video by Armin van Buuren
www.youtube.com
March 7, 2025 at 3:55 PM
Right. It's Friday Home Time.
Tune Trump out (if you can).
And listen to this (or whatever music works for you).
Doof doof doof.
Tune Trump out (if you can).
And listen to this (or whatever music works for you).
Doof doof doof.
Reposted by Catherine Best
UK PM Starmer to Zelensky:
"You are very, very welcome here in Downing Street. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We will stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
"You are very, very welcome here in Downing Street. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We will stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
March 1, 2025 at 5:46 PM
UK PM Starmer to Zelensky:
"You are very, very welcome here in Downing Street. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We will stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
"You are very, very welcome here in Downing Street. As you heard from the cheers on the street outside, you have full backing across the United Kingdom. We will stand with you and Ukraine for as long as it may take."
Reposted by Catherine Best
Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people.
Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.
We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.
Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.
We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.
February 28, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people.
Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.
We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.
Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy.
We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.
Reposted by Catherine Best
In Jan, three unis dropped their 'big deal' with Elsevier
Now, a survey of 100+ unis found 60% might drop their big deals with the five big publishers: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley
All these are being renegotiated this year...
@sophieatrpn.bsky.social reports
Now, a survey of 100+ unis found 60% might drop their big deals with the five big publishers: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley
All these are being renegotiated this year...
@sophieatrpn.bsky.social reports
Six in 10 universities ‘consider dropping big publishing deals’ - Research Professional News
Survey finds three-quarters of libraries are making budget cuts this academic year
www.researchprofessionalnews.com
February 25, 2025 at 7:55 AM
In Jan, three unis dropped their 'big deal' with Elsevier
Now, a survey of 100+ unis found 60% might drop their big deals with the five big publishers: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley
All these are being renegotiated this year...
@sophieatrpn.bsky.social reports
Now, a survey of 100+ unis found 60% might drop their big deals with the five big publishers: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley
All these are being renegotiated this year...
@sophieatrpn.bsky.social reports