Content tagged as 'Academic'

Seán Millar and I were recently asked to review a paper. In his review, he pointed out the difference in predicting an outcome vs. identifying risk factors for an outcome. It is an important point I have clumsily tried to convey in other reviews, but he put it so nicely I asked if I could quote him here (I’ve made a few small editorial changes, mainly intended to generalize what he wrote).

There is a recent PLoS ONE article on obesity getting quite a bit of attention. The article, Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity, reports research looking at total energy expenditure in a sample of adults from a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer tribe, the Hadza. Given their “traditional physically active lifestyle” the authors expected that Hadza to have lower body fat and to expend more energy than modern, Western populations, and the aim the research was to see if this was in fact true.

Have you been asked to peer-review the statistical aspects of a research paper? Here are some helpful resources.

People who know me know that I hate being asked how to lose weight. Yes, I study nutrition for a living. Yes, I teach a class called Obesity and Public Health. This doesn’t mean I have a satisfying answer to the question of how to lose weight. Instead, I have a very unsatisfying answer.

I eventually had to stop telling people that I studied obesity. Backyard barbeques, grocery stores, a friend’s house, it didn’t matter. It was always the same question. “How do I lose weight?” Again, and again, and again.

I recently read a paper (via @yusunbin) in the American Journal of Public Health concluding (among other things) that “infants sharing a sleep surface” was a contributor to Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUIDs; a classification that includes deaths due to SIDS, suffocation, or undetermined causes).

The Young Statisticians Section of the Royal Statistical Society recently hosted a Funding Day for Career Young Medical/Bio-Statisticians (flyer here). The aim was to help early career statisticians identify and successfully apply for MRC and NIHR fellowships.

People often question the equity and efficiency of how research is published. One problem is the cost to access scientific research. Publishers sell a product that is initially provided to them for free. While the publisher pays to administrate peer-review of the paper, the real value-added contribution is provided free of charge by editors and reviewers. The publisher incurs costs for dissemination, but these have certainly come down over time. However, the journal prices do not seem to reflect these savings, a clear indicator of monopolistic behaviour that has led to massive profits for some publishers.

Obesity can be defined as an accumulation of adipose tissue that deleteriously impacts health and well-being. How do we then measure obesity, as it’s defined here, for epidemiological studies aimed at identifying causes of obesity that may eventually form the basis for later public health intervention?

Mums thinking about homebirth were greeted this week with a host of conflicting headlines regarding its safety in the UK.