Richard Shaw
richardshaw.bsky.social
Richard Shaw
@richardshaw.bsky.social

Researcher @ University of Glasgow, UK. Epidemiologist interested in mental-health and wellbeing, health inequalities, administrative data, education.

Trying to learn Italian and Spanish.

Public Health 35%
Psychology 21%

This is why the country is completely screwed.

Junior ex minister booted out of office and gets a nice cosy position in a Quango thanks to their political connections. They can then leverage that position to get a hole host of related roles.

Meanwhile actual experts struggle to find work.

This may annoy me more than anything today's budget.

If the UK was serious about Health Data Science they might actually might employ somebody with expertise in the area. Instead they appoint a failed politician with a degree in music.

It's even more absurd because she is Tory.

I don't think it is just an issue of miscommunication.

Conceptualising population as opposed to individual level effects requires high level abstract thinking. Thus while a academic's work might reflect population scale thinking, outside work people often confuse the two even in though own area.
One of the biggest challenges in public health & environment-related fields is the miscommunication of population-scale results to the individual-level

This is often caused by the desire to formulate “action” relevant to people’s lives but ends up blaming individuals for things not in their control
Important new report out on precarious working conditions in Geography in UK HE. Sadly the nature and scale of the findings are grim but unsurprising. www.rgs.org/research/hig...
States of precarity in UK Higher Education geography
Findings from a discipline-focused research project exploring the lived realities of precarious academic work within UK Higher Education geography.
www.rgs.org

Reposted by Richard Shaw

⚠️ Closing tomorrow!

We're hiring a Senior Quantitative Researcher!

Can you turn data into creative, high-quality analysis and visualisation?

Experienced with applied quantitative methods and national survey datasets?

We'd love to hear from you.

Don't miss out - apply now 🔽

bit.ly/3LqTdzQ
Octo Candidates - Application Form - Vacancy Details
bit.ly

Don't you think that the person's avatar, Dr Stranglove, a satirical Nazi war criminal who starts a nuclear war, might be a bit of clue to the degree of insanity?

Can somebody explain to me why a person whose avatar is Dr Strangelove is being taken seriously?

How more obvious can trolling be than a satirical Nazi war criminal who starts a nuclear war?

The world has enough problems without people putting trolls on pedestals only so they can be knocked down.
One way to take some of the heat out of politics, which is within the BBC's control, is to drop phone-ins and vox pops.

Reposted by Richard Shaw

Arguments for why social care isn't just for older people, a thread.

A lot of details would need to be worked out, such as editors red flagging people doing superficial reviews.

It wouldn't be impossible to create a central database enabling journals to require people's publication metrics be more in equilibrium with their review metrics before they are allowed to submit more than a couple of papers.

Many of my research colleagues over the years have taken early retirement due to their contracts ending. Retirement is much more attractive than having to compete in a hyper-competitive labour market rife with ageism.

Stop making people redundant if you want them to say in work.

Reposted by Richard Shaw

Half of UK workers aged 50–65 leave work before retirement. How can we change that?

Join FPH, SOM & Centre for Ageing Better for an online webinar on enabling older workers to stay and return to work.

Find out more and register www.fph.org.uk/events-cours...
Enabling older workers to stay and return to work – Society of Occupational Medicine supported by the Centre for Ageing Better
The UK Economy needs older workers, yet half the workforce aged 50-65 leave before retirement. Current local delivery of programmes to reduce inactivity due to ill health often ignores this key group,...
www.fph.org.uk

Unfortunately, deciding what a person wants to say and then manipulating evidence to fit seems to be the default position in most areas of life not just the BBC. This includes politics, journalism and academia. See the work on Questionable Research practices ukrio.org/ukrio-resour...
Questionable Research Practices - UK Research Integrity Office
Guidance from UKRIO Simon Kolstoe. Defining the Spectrum of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), UKRIO, 2023 https://doi.org/10.37672/UKRIO.2023.02.QRPs References Andrade C. (2021). HARKing, Cherr...
ukrio.org
Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments:

One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

May be accepting Jeremy Hunt's tax cuts and promising not to put up Income Tax and VAT was in the long run a very bad idea.
After Liz Truss's mini-budget, just 15 per cent of people felt the Tories were the best party at handling the economy

Today, the equivalent figure for Labour is 12 per cent

www.thetimes.com/article/470f...
The impossible dream some people on the British right are chasing is that you can have a BBC News operation that retreats from detail and expertise, that takes dictation from the government, but this will only create incompetence and failure when it suits you:
To fix the BBC, focus on competence and cash
Corporation fails to learn from criticism, while politicians have consciously reduced its scope for quality journalism
www.ft.com

I think this is true of academia in general. Institutional knowledge of how the system operates is far more important for careers than disciplinary specific knowledge.
We’ve forgotten what universities are for
We’ve forgotten what universities are for
With New Zealand universities facing not only a funding crisis but a philosophical challenge to their role, the soul of tertiary education is at stake....
thespinoff.co.nz

Reposted by Richard Shaw

After Liz Truss's mini-budget, just 15 per cent of people felt the Tories were the best party at handling the economy

Today, the equivalent figure for Labour is 12 per cent

www.thetimes.com/article/470f...

Reposted by Richard Shaw

New publication in BMC Public Health:

Incidence of reported cases of euthanasia adjusted for demographic composition: a study of ten years of Belgian administrative data (2014–2023)

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

With @healthsociety.bsky.social

A lot of my feed is some variation of the following.
Person A: X is rubbish and needs fixing.
Person A some months later: People tyring to fix X are evil and making things worse.

Tinkering around with metrics to try and improve the behaviour of those extrinsically motivated and gaming system is missing the point.

The real issue is how do we get people to focus on the intrinsic motivation of creating and communicating good science.

My conclusion about this generation of social media is that you don't use it, it uses you.

Unless you are shareholder the best you can hope for it is amplify existing social capital.

Also attributing it to mental health is really stigmatising to people with mental health conditions. The underlying issue might better be described as Durkheim's Anomie.

This story highlights the problems of people speculating on social media without establishing what happened first. Only a single British born man was charged. The other may have been suspected simply because of their ethnicity and age.

People like Paul Johnson (formerly of the IFS) are saying that economic growth will make it easier for the government to solve problems. The unfortunate result is that the government ends up prioritising growth even if that growth causes the problems it supposed to help solve.

Reposted by Richard Shaw

It's that day I know you've all been waiting for with great anticipation.

That's right, it's NEW INDICES OF DEPRIVATION day!

www.gov.uk/government/s...
English indices of deprivation 2025: frequently asked questions
www.gov.uk

I am studying for a PGCert in Academic Practice and I am getting the impression that qualitative social science has a very unhealthy relationship with UK academia.