My best known work, fading citations and a bit of history
This will be the second egocentric post in succession — for which, apologies in advance! (It’s a sign of age, I suspect.)
Posts
My academic ancestry: Cox,Daniels,,,,,,,,,,,,,Newton,,,Galileo!
Recently I wrote a short article in memory of David Cox, who died in January aged 97. David had been my PhD adviser (at Imperial College London in the 1980s)...
This blog has now moved to GitHub
After about 10 years of being hosted at wordpress.com, my personal blog “Let’s Look at the Figures” is now moving to GitHub. The reasons are various, includ...
Why we should trust the exit poll — but not too much!
I look ahead a few days here, to 10pm on UK General Election day. Polling stations will have just closed, and major broadcasters (BBC, ITV and Sky) will simu...
Robust measurement from a 2-way table
I work in a university. My department runs degree courses that allow students a lot of flexibility in their choice of course “modules”. (A typical student ta...
Simple maths of a fairer USS deal
In yesterday’s post I showed a graph, followed by some comments to suggest that future USS proposals with a flatter (or even increasing) “percent lost” curve...
USS proposals: Tail wagging the dog?
In response to my previous post, “Latest USS proposal: Who would lose most?”, someone asked me about doing the same calculation for the USS JNC-supported pro...
Latest USS proposal: Who would lose most?
Yesterday (March 12th) the UUK/UCU negotiations at ACAS concluded with an agreement document.
Future USS: Robin Hood can help?
In this post I’ll follow up on the previous one, USS pension scheme and fairness, in the light of this week’s UCU proposals (proposals which provide a basis ...
USS pension scheme and fairness
The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is among the largest pension schemes in the UK. It provides pensions for academic and other staff in most of th...
About heading soccer balls, and memory loss
This new research paper, by a group led from the University of Stirling, made the national news in the UK last week:
RSS discussion paper on model-based ranking of journals, using citation data
This paper has been around on arXiv for quite some time. Now, having survived various rounds of review — and having grown quite a bit as a result of reviewe...
Facts checked: The UK general election, 7-way TV debate between Westminster party leaders
I was part way through doing some of this myself, when I found that fullfact.org has done a great job already with checking some of the main numbers quoted i...
R and citations
We’re hosting the international useR! conference at Warwick this summer, and I thought it might be interesting to try to get some data on how the use of R is...
RAE 2008: How much weight did research outputs actually get?
In the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise each subject-area assessment panel specified and published in advance the weight to be given to each of the three...
RAE 2008: Assessed quality of research in different disciplines
I had the pleasure of being a member of one of the assessment sub-panels for RAE 2008, the “Research Assessment Exercise” for UK universities. I’m going to s...