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Donate to Help save our cat Trasno: Urgent treatment needed, organized by Javier Ortiz De Guinea

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Alba Fernández-Sanlés (Dr, she/her) @albafsanles.bsky.social · Jun 23

I am devastated because our cat Trasno is critically ill and needs urgent treatment to survive, but it’s financially overwhelming. If we’ve ever made you smile or feel supported, please consider sharing or contributing: gofundme.com/f/help-save-...
Thank you from the heart,
Alba

Help save Trasno: Urgent Treatment needed for our cat’s life… Javier Ortiz De Guinea needs your support for Help save our cat Trasno: Urgent treatment needed

gofundme.com

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Jun 10

Our experience at @pci-regreports.bsky.social was great - Really helpful and collaborative reviews and editors, made for a refreshing change from the usual grind of the academic review/publishing process!

If any folks are PCI-curious, would totally recommend! 😊

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Jun 10

Caveat 2) We measured climate *concern*, not climate *anxiety*. It's possible that reactions to the climate crisis which are more extreme than mere 'concern' have an impact on mental health - We simply can't infer anything about this from our paper

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Jun 10

Many caveats though (ofc!)

1) Just because we *tried* to estimate a causal effect, doesn't mean we *succeed*. Our causal estimand was our target, but our aim may have been terrible, but we at least tried to be open about these issues (unmeasured confounding, selection bias, measurement error, etc.)

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Jun 10

What did we find? Pretty much nada!

In this UK population of young adults (~30 years old) there was essentially no relationship between climate concern and subsequent mental health/well-being

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Jun 10

Using the wonderful longitudinal ALSPAC data, we tried to answer whether concern over climate change causes subsequent mental health.

Lots of previous work has looked at climate anxiety/concern and mental health, but most is X-sectional, so is almost impossible to learn anything about causality

Climate change concern doesn't impact the subsequent mental heal...

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Jun 10

The world may be a burning shit-storm, but we're trying to do our little bit to make science slightly better - Our new Registered Report on climate concern and mental health was just recommended/accepted at @pci-regreports.bsky.social

doi.org/10.24072/pci...

Associations between religiosity and climate change beliefs and behaviours in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Abbey Page @abbeyepage.bsky.social · May 14

📣 New paper by myself @djsmith90.bsky.social and colleagues published today in @royalsociety.org Proc B 📣

Grandmothers are often seen as key carers, but this isn’t always the case.

We explore why in Agta forgers reflecting on the implications of demography for evolution of grandmothering 👵🌍

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

AnthroTools: A Package in R @anthrotools.bsky.social · Apr 30

AnthroTools 2.0 is live! Nine new functions that propagate, plot, and summarize uncertainty around item and cultural salience values. @djsmith90.bsky.social @bgpurzycki.bsky.social @rcc-au.bsky.social

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Apr 11

Can religious beliefs shape peoples' attitudes and behaviours regarding climate change?

We explored this using data from a large-scale UK cohort study (ALSPAC)

In short: Perhaps, but it's complicated. Answer depends on generation, religiosity measure and climate question

doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Individual actions are crucial to mitigating the impact of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding the factors shaping individuals’ climate beliefs and behaviours is therefore essential to help en...

GitHub - djsmith-90/FreeListUncertainty_CompanionCode: Companion code and data for 'Modelling uncertainty around free-list cultural salience scores' paper.

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Apr 9

As a side note, even if you don't give a hoot about free-list data, check out the paper for the sweet use of LaTeX - Looks pretty legit, right? (What are we paying journals the big bucks for again...?)

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Apr 9

The paper includes code to play around with these different methods, with more juicy deets and extras in the companion code: github.com/djsmith-90/F...

(We'll also be updating the @anthrotools.bsky.social package with these methods, so stay tuned!)

Companion code and data for 'Modelling uncertainty around free-list cultural salience scores' paper. - djsmith-90/FreeListUncertainty_CompanionCode

github.com

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Apr 9

We focus on salience scores, starting simple with bootstrapping methods, followed by more principled/bad-ass Bayesian ZOIB and ordered Beta models (they sound scary, but are super-cool).

This approach can be also applied to other free-list metrics as well (Jaccard's similarity, cultural FST, etc).

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Apr 9

Are you into free-list methods and want to incorporate uncertainty into your group-level estimates (eg Smith's S)?

Of course you do!

Then @bgpurzycki.bsky.social and I have a new preprint for your delectation!

doi.org/10.31219/osf...

OSF

Reviewer notes: Avoid any ambiguity about analysis aims

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Aarhus University's Religion, Cognition, and Culture Unit @rcc-au.bsky.social · Mar 19

No clear co-causal evidence of religion and mental health! Hot off the digital press from RCC's @djsmith90.bsky.social!

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · Feb 17

New blog post!

Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly.

So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost.
www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...

For any central statistical analysis that you report in your manuscript, it should be absolutely clear for readers why the analysis is being conducted in the first place – that is, the analysis goal s...

www.the100.ci

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Abbey Page @abbeyepage.bsky.social · Jan 21

1/ 🧵 New preprint out today 🤩

With @djsmith90.bsky.social and co we have done deep-dive into grandmothering in the Agta to unpick the role of demography in shaping the role of grandmothers in direct childcare 👇🧪🏺

#Grandmothering #demography #BioAnth #EvPsych

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Centre for Culture and Evolution @brunelcce.bsky.social · Dec 5

📢 The final CCE seminar of 2024 is coming up soon with @djsmith90.bsky.social leading us into the 🎄 festive 🎄season with a presentation on

*Religion and mental health: a causal Christmas carol* 🎅

📆 18th Dec 2024 - 12:45 in person start with food, 13:00 online talk start

🔓Open to all

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Nov 16

Did not expect my first inclusion in a starter pack to be "people named Dan Smith with PhDs"! 😅

Still, at least you now know where to find us!

Dan Smith @dlsmith.dev · Nov 16

Everybody should have a few Dan Smith, PhDs in their feed.

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Reposted by Dan Major-Smith

Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · Oct 8

I found @djsmith90.bsky.social's figure about ethical publishing so helpful for students I added it to my guide to academic reading/writing/publishing (osf.io/p37zj)

Screenshot from article including meme and figure of more and less ethical academic publishing options

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Oct 4

Yeah, I'd reckon probably somewhere around there, or a bit to the left with the 'society' journals - technically AAAS is non-profit, and it doesn't act as much like a commercial publisher than CUP and OUP.

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Oct 4

Ace, thanks Pat!

And very cool (I mean, depressing as hell, but still very cool) - Thanks for sharing 😅

Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Oct 4

Alas, I agree with @drbeth.bsky.social that it's still super-common (eg, anecdotes about hiring decisions made on having a Nature/Science/Whatever paper)... Hopefully will start changing more soon though! 🤞

V. interested to know what you find if you do a deep-dive into this 🙂

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Dan Major-Smith @djsmith90.bsky.social · Oct 4

A lot has been written about this recently, but I think it's still useful to remind ourselves just how warped and unfair the academic publishing system is

The blog goes through:
- How the system is unfair
- How it got that way
- What we can do to (try and) change it

Hope it's of some use! 🙂