Kevin McConway

Emeritus professor of statistics @OpenUniversity; Milton Keynes inhabitant; choral singer; perpetually puzzled person, interested in anything interesting.

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@bbcnickrobinson @BorisJohnson @BBCr4today Not something you fix with a hands up, Nick

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@joseph_gellman Sadly, balance and honesty are never good bedfellows.

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@joseph_gellman Hmm. I still won't bother. BBC news can paint itself into a multitude of corners simultaneously. It has so many great journalists but wastes them because of this.

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@mgtmccartney To be honest, I wouldn't bother, Margaret. Despair tends not to be constructive, I fear. People will be less likely to read it if you write about the whole thing than if you pick off the occasional bit. But maybe I'm getting too old for this kind of struggle. One must survive.

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@DrLimeback @OpenUniversity Overall, the low-bias-risk studies going to 0.7mg/l or below are inconclusive, in my view. Doesn’t mean there’s no association between fluoride and IQ at that level, just that we don’t know either way from this review. 12/12

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@DrLimeback @OpenUniversity But the new paper reports that those subgroup and sensitivity analyses didn’t affect the findings much, so the overall conclusion is the same. 11/12

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@BristOliver Also, given the high priority given to policy work (point 2 on https://t.co/yEk6iKffQA), with which I agree, and given what's been said often on underfunding of math sci, maybe we're just not very good at getting our point across to govt, including on the academy itself.

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@BristOliver In political terms, I think there are questions on expecting to rely on funding from a source that was so close to a personal initiative of the previous prime minister (whether or not one agreed with his priorities for mathematics - I generally did agree).

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@BristOliver And there are charitable foundations, even commercial sponsorship, and so on. If we, the mathematical sci community, want this to continue, it's up to us to make sure it does. If we don't want it to continue unless we get Govt money with strings attached, we need to say so. 6/6

[Kevin McConway @kjm2]

@BristOliver The 5 learned and professional societies in the Council for the Mathematical Science have, in total, an annual income of nearly £9m (and free reserves of £8m), and something like 22k members. Can't just take £2m a year for 3 years out of that, but something could be done. 5/n