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🔗 A manifesto for reproducible science - Nature Human Behaviour

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"Improving the reliability and efficiency of scientific research will increase the credibility of the published scientific literature and accelerate discovery. Here we argue for the adoption of measures to optimize key elements of the scientific process: methods, reporting and dissemination, reproducibility, evaluation and incentives. There is some evidence from both simulations and empirical studies supporting the likely effectiveness of these measures, but their broad adoption by researchers, institutions, funders and journals will require iterative evaluation and improvement. We discuss the goals of these measures, and how they can be implemented, in the hope that this will facilitate action toward improving the transparency, reproducibility and efficiency of scientific research."

🔗 Rat Park: How a rat paradise changed the narrative of addiction - Gage - 2019 - Addiction - Wiley Online Library

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‘Rat Park’ is the name given to a series of studies undertaken in the late 1970s by Bruce K. Alexander and colleagues. They found that rats housed in enriched environments consumed less morphine solution than those in isolated cages, when rats were pre‐exposed to morphine, naive to morphine, and whether they had spent their early life in isolation or in enriched housing. The measured conclusions from the authors at the time have become somewhat lost in translation.

🔗 Association between particulate matter air pollution and risk of depression and suicide: systematic review and meta-analysis

"The meta-analysis suggested that an increase in ambient PM2.5 concentration was strongly associated with increased depression risk in the general population, and the association appeared stronger at long-term lag and cumulative lag patterns, suggesting a potential cumulative exposure effect over time."

🔗 National Centre for Text Mining — NaCTeM — RobotAnalyst

RobotAnalyst was developed as part of the Supporting Evidence-based Public Health Interventions using Text Mining project to support the literature screening phase of systematic reviews. RobotAnalyst is designed for searching and screening reference collections obtained from literature database queries. It combines search engine functionality with machine learning and text mining technology, including topic modelling and relevancy feedback-based text classification models, to minimise the human workload involved in identifying relevant references

🔗 Transwomen in elite women’s sport – clarifying the nuances of our approach | Journal of Medical Ethics blog

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"We propose replacing the gender binary in elite sport with a more nuanced approach – an algorithm to be applied to all elite athletes (cisgender and transgender) that accounts for a range of physiological factors (including, but not limited to, testosterone levels), and gender identity.  In addition to providing fairness to elite ciswomen athletes, an algorithm could also provide fairness to elite transmen athletes. Although not discussed in the paper, elite transmen athletes are highly likely to be physiologically disadvantaged in comparison to elite cismen athletes. Even if (via hormone therapy) a transman’s testosterone level reached that of an elite cismen athlete, some of his previous female physiology is unlikely to change (e.g. bone structure and lung size) meaning that, in this respect, they are disadvantaged in …

🔗 abstrackr: home

"abstrackR is a web-application that makes citation-screening process of systematic reviews easier (or, we hope it does, anyway). It is a collaborative tool that facilitates screening of citations by multiple reviewers in tandem. Citations are imported and then screened by participants. The screening decisions (or, 'labels') can subsequently be exported."

🔗 Everything you wanted to know about e-cigarettes and vaping but were afraid to ask: a guide for mental health clinicians

This article provides a historical and contemporary overview of e-cigarettes and vaping. The reader will gain an understanding of e-cigarette usage, risks and benefits, the current position on use of e-cigarettes in mental health settings, and tips on how to take an e-cigarette/vaping history and how to offer advice about use.