Jess Butler

ifs.org.uk/publications...

FORM | Wellcome Leap: Unconventional Projects. Funded at Scale. NEW $50M Program Foundations of a Resilient Microbiome APPLY NOW We are pleased to announce the selected performers.Kiran Raosaheb Patil, University of CambridgeLaurel...

Predictably enough, one of the people funded by Wellcome LEAP's FORM project is James B. Adams brainfoundation.org/brain-invest..., whose work featured in our recent review www.cell.com/neuron/fullt..., and not in a good way.
see wellcomeleap.org/form/

Nuffield Trust Summit 2026 The Summit is the Nuffield Trust's annual flagship event. Sessions from the conference will be available to watch here.

👋 Good morning and welcome to everyone joining us for our annual health and care Summit, in the room or online.

We'll be livestreaming here 👇

Starting from 9:30am 🕤️

Baby step with Claude:
The excellent search engine DuckDuckGo has an interface to query Haiku anonymously without downloads

duck.ai

NHS nerds, go learn and talk about open source with other lovely people!

Logo for Scottish Research Integrity and Culture Week, featuring a map of Scotland showing all the universities joined up as dots on the map

Scottish #ResearchIntegrity and Culture Week is finally here! 🎉
Check out the full list of events happening throughout Scotland, both in-person and online, here www.sricw.co.uk/programme

Palantir currently runs the tech that links our health data across the NHS

www.bmj.com/content/386/...

For journalists who want to dig into stories about scientific integrity: Here's an exciting new opportunity from two of my favorite science-journalism organizations, @retractionwatch.com and @theopennotebook.bsky.social. I'll be joining a webinar to help kick things off on March 26!

I am so, so grateful that you take the time to post this, it helps me feel confident when I talk about things like this at work and publicly. If you have the bandwidth, I think writing it up for the Converstion would be very helpful.

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.

It does not.

It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.

🧵 1/

I saw this when it was a preprint? They have a unique version of the estimand-estimator-estimates workflow, will be useful for may biologists, not just ecologists. We need more case studies for ecologists to emulate and for norms to shift so "regression and storytelling" becomes unpublishable.

"If the norms changed so that hiring and promotion hinged on a candidate’s top two or three papers instead, then researchers’ incentives would change and the pressure on peer reviewers would diminish."

Job description British Library Advisory Council- Chair The British Library is entering a bold new era. As one of the world's leading national libraries, we hold over 170 million items and support millions of people across the UK and beyond with research, learning, and inspiration. This is a pivotal moment to join us as we begin an ambitious new chapter, expanding access, strengthening engagement, and shaping our future as a modern national library for the digital age.

OK so I know I carp on a bit about the British Library, but only because I think it’s important. They want a new Advisory Council Chair - surely someone here would be excellent in helping them get back to their core purpose of serving the research community?
ce0752li.webitrent.com/ce0752li_web...

Thinking Critically About AI in Healthcare L3 YouTube video by Jessica Morley

Third Lecture in my Thinking Critically About AI in Healthcare series

Recording: youtu.be/G_tnE3ycM1M

Slides: www.canva.com/design/DAHBD...

This week looking at the "last mile problem" i.e., why do we keep building models that succeed technically, but fail to help clinically.

"anyone who wishes makes a brief pitch to attendees describing a problem they’ve experienced in the health and social care space. Multidisciplinary teams then organically assemble around the most compelling pitches and work on a prototype solution over the course of the weekend"

Vacancy: Regulation Committee independent members The closing date for applications is 6 March 2026 at 23:55pm We are looking to appoint two independent members to the Regulation Committee of the UK Statistics Authority. The UK Statistics Authority ...

If you care about official statistics this is an opportunity to join the Regulation Committee of the UK Statistics Authority. It meets 5 times a year. Members receive a £3k fee
uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/news/vacancy...

"We welcome presenters from any background, with particular interest in hearing from artists, data practitioners/professionals, activists, & critical thinkers. We strongly encourage contributions that engage queer, trans, feminist, and non-conformist approaches to data"

£150 + expenses for speakers

‘Silent decoupling’ under way as Elsevier talks near crunch point York and Swansea latest to decline publisher’s offer, with latter also walking away from Springer Nature deal

'The University of York and Swansea University have became the seventh and eighth universities to confirm they will not take up a three-year deal with the world’s biggest academic publisher'. Sheffield, Lancaster, Surrey, Kent, Essex and Sussex have already opted out.

I love Jane Gardam's Old Filth. And, it's just a novella, but Helen DeWitt's The English Understand Wool is perfect imo

"Ultimately, our results suggest that without policy mandated human oversight, the deployment of generative AI threatens to degrade the very healthcare data ecosystems it relies upon."

"Blinded physician evaluation confirms that this decoupling of confidence and accuracy renders AI generated documentation clinically useless after just two generations."

"Crucially, this degradation is masked by false diagnostic confidence; models continue to issue reassuring reports while failing to detect life threatening pathology, with false reassurance rates tripling to 40%."

"we find that models progressively converge toward generic phenotypes regardless of the model architecture. Specifically, rare but critical findings...vanish from the synthetic content generated by AI models, while demographic representations skew heavily toward middle aged male phenotypes."

"In 2024, Professor Bishop did something that sent shockwaves through the academic world by resigning from the Royal Society over Elon Musk's continued inclusion as a fellow"

Some initial reactions to the 'published on a Sunday afternoon' letter from the CEO of UKRI. 🧵

www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

Smallpox: when was it eliminated in each country? World choropleth map showing, for each country, the decade when smallpox was eliminated. Legend categories shown are: Before 1900; 1900s; 1910s; 1920s; 1930s; 1940s; 1950s; 1960s; 1970s. Subheading notes that smallpox was declared globally eradicated in 1980. Key pattern: most countries in Europe, North America, and Australia eliminated smallpox earlier in the 20th century, while many countries in Africa, South Asia, and parts of South America eliminated it later, concentrated in the 1960s to 1970s. Data source: Fenner et al. (1988).

William Foege, the physician who saved many millions from smallpox—

William Foege, who sadly died this week, is one of the reasons why this map ends in the 1970s.

New article time! It's about self-defence against the fact that people seem to have lost their mind about LLMs and tech.

Call for entries 📣 The international €350K #EinsteinFoundationAward honors researchers and institutions across all scientific disciplines working to advance #research quality and integrity.
Deadline: April 30, 2026
Please share! 🌍
➡️ award.einsteinfoundation.de
#OpenScience #reproducibility

DHSC published its impact statement for the 10 Year Health Plan this week (yes, that is 6 months after it published the plan)

It's more measured and clear-eyed than the original document and quite a contrast to some of the effusive optimism in the plan

Some of the things that caught my eye 👇

I love this. Unis to stop paying a company millions of taxpayer £ to post their own academic research on a website