iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I'm increasingly convinced that Alice B Toklas was the prototype for Joyce Meadowcroft in Thursday Murder Club.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

6 (phew!) on Wordle—that's how I know I'm not sleeping well.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

I've found that asking students "how would Mr Beast design a randomised trial to evaluate X" can elicit some much more creative responses than "how would *you* design it?"

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

I asked a class of students if they'd ever watched Tipping Point and they looked at me blankly. Scratch that example.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

These lyrics were one of the readings at my wedding.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Should we put together a "sorry you're leaving" card or something? (I asked AI for help) help.researchfish.com/en_US/resear...

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Crystal Palace Park will look amazing when its refurbishment is finished.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Almost nobody in the office today, naturally, but they still managed to steal most of the milk I'd tried to stash in the fridge [waves fist like an angry old man]. Happy Friday everyone

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Idea for TV show: Traitors x Inheritance x Marple: Each player keeps the money they personally win in tasks, and has a “will” naming another current player as their sole beneficiary if they’re murdered.

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Crystal Palace Dinos @cpdinosaurs.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Wishing all our friends, followers, and well-wishers a peaceful and relaxing few days ahead x

Illustrated London News...illustration, of the NYE 1853 Iguanodon dinner, with added Xmas hat and tree

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The best bit about the show Tipping Point is when the host, Ben Shephard, says "let's find out what would have happened if you'd decided to play". There's always a nagging doubt at the back of my mind: that's not really what *would* have happened, is it?

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ArXiv Paperboy (Stat.ME+Econ.EM) @paperposterbot.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

link 📈🤖 Personalised Decision-Making without Counterfactuals (Dawid, Senn) This article is a response to recent proposals by Pearl and others for a new approach to personalised treatment decisions, in contrast to the traditional one based on statistical decision theory. We argue that this approac

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

You know how as a reviewer/editor you dislike that rush of end-of-year manuscripts that are slipped under the wire, before the Christmas shut-down, but without a hope anyone will action them until January? Well, I just did it myself. The lure of getting that manuscript off my desk was too strong...

media.tenor.com

a person is laying on the ground in a dark room with a window .

ALT: a person is laying on the ground in a dark room with a window .

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

They understood principles of good data analysis in Gertrude Stein's day, if not good data governance.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Software companies who add annoying, random pop-ups to their products asking if I would recommend them to a colleague will, ironically, never know how much greater their customer satisfaction would be if only they stopped doing that..

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

📢 As one of the next round of TRMP PhD students (below) you could join me, Clare Robinson, @averoniki.bsky.social and @marionkcampbell.bsky.social to work on developing a typology of research outputs in trials methodology, based at @wiphcem.bsky.social. Details here: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

findaphd.com

Developing a typology of research outputs in trials methodology at Queen Mary University of London on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Developing a typology of research outputs in trials methodology at Queen Mary University of London, listed on FindAPhD.com

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Katie Gillies @katiegillies.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

One of my 2026 goals is to be more present on BlueSky! Another is to recruit a great candidate to this 4-yr PhD studentship with us at the Aberdeen Centre for Evaluation -applying behavioural science to the design and delivery of clinical trials. Please share. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

findaphd.com

Improving health by improving trials – applying behavioural science to improve the design and delivery of clinical trials. at University of Aberdeen on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Improving health by improving trials – applying behavioural science to improve the design and delivery of clinical trials. at University of Aberdeen , listed on FindAPhD.com

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Dinosaur scene of crime officers at Crystal Palace Park today.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

Another day of Teams calls, but just watched a whippet eating a raw carrot, so feeling much better now.

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Michael "Shapes Dude" Betancourt @betanalpha.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

That's just frequents statistics.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

I really enjoyed this inaugural—an academic and a personal journey—thanks @vcornelius.bsky.social

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

[Shamelessly recycling from my "old twitter"] I think my "introductory stats for ER doctors" session went well—everyone seemed enthused by the homework I set.

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Dan Lewer @danlewer.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Idea for a Christmas BMJ paper: submit loads of Christmas BMJ papers, then do a survival analysis of time to rejection. Then submit the survival analysis as a Christmas BMJ paper the following year

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The BMJ @bmj.com · 27/10/2025

📝 New Research Methods & Reporting article: Covariate adjustment in cluster randomised trials 📝 A practical guide for when and how to adjust for covariates. Read more ⬇️ www.bmj.com/content/391/...

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Annie Wright @anniestats.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

💡 Have you ever taken part in a clinical trial or thought about it? We want to hear your views on how health data is collected using technology like apps, wearable devices, and medical records. 🕐 5 mins, anonymous. imperial.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... #PPIE #ClinicalTrials #DigitalHealth

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

📢 Interested in a PhD in clinical trials methodology? The Trials Methodology Research Partnership are advertising projects for PhDs starting Oct 2026, in statistics, health economics, epidemiology, social science, and more, hosted at one of 12 UK partner institutions. mrctmrpdtp.com/current-oppo...

mrctmrpdtp.com

Current Opportunities

We have an iCASE studentship available to start for the 2025/2026 academic year, and applications to our fifth round of recruitment to our DTP to start in October 2026 are now also open. Please see…

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Just had a review request where these seem to be the only options. I'm not clicking.

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Family history can turn up some surprising connections. My grandfather, Oliphant Murray Brown, worked at Guinness from the 1930s. I discovered for the first time this week, reading through some of his notes and recollections, that he used to car-share with W. S. Gosset (aka Student, of the t-test)!

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Lots of feedback and engagement after this session. Some gentle push-back still: "But what if there's even just a *perception* from sites that a stepped wedge is preferable?" 🧵

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

The recording of this webinar is now available on the @nihr-rss.bsky.social YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cNz...

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 14/10/2025

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Trial statisticians (this may be a well-worn/tedious question)—do you have views/experience of integrating randomised allocation sequences in Qualtrics? Is the built-in randomisation module in Qualtrics fit for purpose? Are there ways of integrating, say, stratified block randomisation?

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

This is apropos of nothing, but if the plural of quiz is quizzes, why is the plural of bus buses?

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Slightly open-mouthed on reading this pre-print (thanks @statsepi.bsky.social): "If achievable, this ...[using LLMs] would enable researchers to predict the responses of vulnerable and/or hard-to-reach populations of participants without the need for time- and resource-intensive research studies."

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

I'm doing a webinar in two weeks (15 Oct 1-2pm BST), part of NIHR Research Support Service's Methods Academy series, on the age-old question: should I do a stepped wedge trial? Free registration, details here: tinyurl.com/z6cjvce3 @nihr-rss.bsky.social @wiphcem.bsky.social @qmul-wiph.bsky.social

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

I really enjoyed this talk from @richarddriley.bsky.social today, particularly the football quotes! Looking forward to seeing this available on the NIHR YouTube channel soon. @nihr-rss.bsky.social

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Jess Butler @jessbutler.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

To be way too earnest for on here, I genuinely think nerds being careful is political activism these days and it cheers me up

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Stepped Wedgehog @steppedwedgehog.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

📢 Registration now open for the 11th annual meeting on Current Developments in Cluster Randomised Trials & Stepped Wedge Designs on 18th & 19th November 2025 in Birmingham UK. shop.bham.ac.uk/conferences-...

shop.bham.ac.uk

CRT Conference 2025 | University of Birmingham Online Shop

The 11th annual meeting on Current Developments in Cluster Randomised Trials & Stepped Wedge Designs

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Richard Hooper @richardhooper.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Our wild rocket went to seed in the heat of the summer and it's still putting on a beautiful show.

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Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Pet parrots which typically live alone (whilst those in the wild live in large flocks) were given the technology to call each other. They would use it for up to three hours a day, and developed favourite friends 💔 on.ft.com/3K05vhS

When a parrot wanted to connect with a distant friend, a touchscreen showed a selection of other birds available online. The parrots learned to activate the screen, designed specially for them, by touching it gently with their tongues rather than pecking aggressively with their beaks.
"We had 26 birds involved," said Hirskyj-Douglas. "They would use the system up to three hours a day, with each call lasting up to five minutes." The interactions ranged from preening and playing with toys to loud vocal exchanges.
"When we went through the data, we found that most of these parrots had favourite friends," said Hirskyj-Douglas.

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Stepped Wedgehog @steppedwedgehog.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Save the date: Fifth International Conference on Stepped Wedge Design 2026 12th-14th May (online) www.york.ac.uk/healthscienc...

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