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It’s with a combination of excitement, trepidation and sadness that I sit down to write this, my final post for scilogs. If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen that recently I’ve been writing a few guest blogs for the Guardian, and last week, I published my first post on my new blog over there. While I’m delighted to be joining such a prestigious network, and joining a cohort made up of some of my blogging heroes (Martin... Read more
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Today, an article appeared on the Guardian website, not in the science section (it was on the US news blog), but tweeted by @guardianscience and containing the word ‘science’ in the title. About girls and science, its headline claimed to explain ‘why the gender gap exists and what to do about it’. I’ve written about women in science before, as there is a large and worrying body of research which suggests that women are less likely to pursue science... Read more
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A new paper looking at cannabis and psychosis appeared in Addiction over Christmas, and it piqued my interest, as it is very similar to a study I hope to conduct as part of my PhD. It shows a bi-directional relationship; cannabis use is associated with later psychosis, and psychosis is associated with later cannabis use. It’s a really interesting paper (though, see this about why a bi-directional relationship might not be the case*), but there’s an aspect of its design that I find […]
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Happy new year everyone! Sorry for the silence recently, December ran away with me a bit. A post about Multiple Imputation is impending, but for now, my boss Marcus Munafò has written this. Enjoy. A lot has been made recently of the ongoing reproducibility crisis in science, and the extent to which current incentive structures motivate scientists to engage in questionable practices. These have been discussed elsewhere in detail, but involve various things like running multiple statistical […]
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Yesterday a load of headlines about genes being linked to binge-drinking appeared on various news sites. Only the BBC (so far) seem to have fallen in to the ‘gene for x’ trap, the first paragraph of their article being particularly poor: Scientists believe some people have a gene that hard-wires them for binge drinking by boosting levels of a happy brain chemical triggered by alcohol. Not quite, but what did the study* actually look at? Stacey and colleagues are interested... Read more
