Dr Will Ball
@wpball.com
Interested in working out how to reduce unfair and avoidable differences in health. Mostly youth mental health. Chancellor's Fellow at Robert Gordon University | Social Epidemiologist | Pro Cycling | Rstats | Causal Inference 🇮🇪🏴🍉
Six of the ten hottest Tour de France stages on record happened this year. The average stage temperature was 29.4°C, nearly 3.5°C above the previous hottest edition in recent seasons. Link: willpball.substack.com/p/was-2026-t...
Yes, average speeds have gone up but that's not purely down to physiology. If it was possible to look at the distribution of speeds during the stages that would likely tell the true story - more time spent at higher speeds because the racing starts earlier & there are fewer soft breakaways.
road.cc@roadcc.bsky.social · last mo.Tadej Pogačar obliterated record after record on his way to a fifth career Tour de France title, in the fastest edition in the race’s history. But what do the peloton’s ever-increasing speeds mean for the sport, its safety, and its credibility?
Behind the scenes with the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony planning team. "Fuck it, let's just have a massive Tunnocks tea cake with sparklers"
As much as I enjoy England and their coach/tactics being the reason for their loss, it seems a bit 'Brits at it again' behaviour to ignore that Argentina may have influenced the result somewhat too.
Irish and Scots fans can legitimately support Argentina because of Alexis Mac Allister right?
As this is unconsented, identifiable patient data being used for non-clinical purposes, surely they should be receiving a massive fine for this?
I've been building the etverse: R packages for causal inference in epi. The idea is triangulation: come at the same question from angles that fail for unrelated reasons (different methods, designs, assumptions) and trust it more when they agree. etverse.github.io #episky #causalsky #RStats
etverse — triangulating causal evidence in epidemiology – etverse
etverse.github.io
Instead of funnelling yet more cash to tech companies who over promise and under-deliver, can we perhaps trying to reducing social and economic inequalities first?
This should be made available publicly as an official statistical ouput after each election as a matter of course.
Ballot Box Scotland@ballotbox.scot · 3mo agoThere's also a link on that page to download a spreadsheet containing the full breakdown of results, for both votes, for every constituency, for every party. Isn't it absurd that (doesn't appear to be) available from any official source? Imagine I didn't exist and didn't put the legwork in!
What's the term for knowing an above average amount about a topic but nowhere near as much as true 'experts'?
Article submitted 🥳 Now to wait for the emails about inevitable mistakes I made in the formatting etc
Reasons to be cheerful in the Scottish elections. Reform + Cons have 2 fewer MSPs than Cons got in 2021 SNP + Greens have the same number of MSPs as they got in 2021 A majority for Independence supporting parties once again.
So far there's been a larger drop off (vs 2021) in regional list vote share for SNP than in the constituency vote. One interpretation of that is more people realising that an SNP list vote is next to worthless in the additional member system.
If you're interested in elections, nobody does it better than @ballotbox.scot
Ballot Box Scotland@ballotbox.scot · 4mo agoExcited to share the BBS results page for the 2026 Scottish Parliament election. True to form, there's going to be more data on here than you can shake a stick at, giving you the most in-depth rundown available anywhere! This will all update automatically throughout the day, so refresh often!
Tadej Pogačar's last 17 races days: 12 wins (+1 GC victory) including World & European Champs and 4 of the 5 monuments 2nd place at Paris-Roubaix and GP Montreal His worst finishing position was 6th in the Romandie prologue.
Petition to make it so that the originally named place comes up first when searching for weather forecasts, regardless of relative population size. Perth, Scotland before Perth, Australia!
My daughter (7) and I have been recording the height of a sunflower she's been growing. Here's the graph so far.
When you get the 'your grant application was unsuccessful' email, you get the rest of the day off right?
It's not bad when you get to see the Northern Lights on a semi-regular basis from your window.
I'm disappointed that Ireland didn't end up winning the Men's 6 Nations, but at least Henry Pollock didn't get the satisfaction of winning that game. 🇮🇪☘️