Random audits could shift the incentive for researchers from quantity to quality

The drive to publish papers has created a hyper-competitive research environment in which researchers who take care to produce relatively few high-quality papers are out-competed by those who cut corners so their bibliometrics look good. Adrian Barnett suggests one way to push back against the pressure to "publish or perish" is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation. Concern over the possibility of being audited would also encourage good research practice across the community

Hot temperatures and morbidity : a systematic review and meta–analysis

Extreme temperatures have been shown to have a detrimental effect on health. Hot temperatures can increase the risk of mortality, particularly in people suffering from cardiorespiratory diseases. Given the onset of climate change, it is critical that the impact of temperature on health is understood, so that effective public health strategies can correctly identify vulnerable groups within the population. However, while effects on mortality have been extensively studied, temperature–related morbidity has received less attention. This study applied a systematic review and meta–analysis to examine the current literature relating to hot temperatures and morbidity

The State of News Photography 2018

First paragraph: In 2015 the World Press Photo Foundation, the University of Stirling, and Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism launched the State of News Photography survey to document the hopes, fears, practices and changes in the work lives of those who make a living from taking photographs in the digital age. Over the last four years, these annual surveys produced an unrivalled database of insights. Along with the reports published by the World Press Photo Foundation (see Hadland, Campbell and Lambert 2015, Hadland Lambert and Barnett 2016), the data has enabled scholars to publish more detailed research on issues such as gender within photojournalism (Hadland and Barnett 2018), the state of sports photojournalism (Haynes, Hadland and Lambert 2016), as well as to further investigate the high degree of risk to which so many photographers are frequently exposed (Hadland, Lambert and Campbell 2016). While a survey of photographers who have entered the annual World Press Photo Contest between 2015 and 2018 provides detailed insights into the lives of working photographers, many photographers do not enter the competition for a variety of reasons. As a result, we do not claim that this data represents all photographers or the industry as a whole. However, detailed responses from 5,202 photographers from more than 100 countries over four years does capture many of the key issues facing people who choose to make a living from photography. This report will summarise some of our key findings over the last four years, identify new areas of interest, and reflect, in particular, on issues of gender and diversity and their impact on the industry going forward

The gender crisis in professional photojournalism: demise of the female gaze?

To date there has been very little research or data available concerning the interests, work patterns or challenges facing women photojournalists, in spite of the profound impact women have had on photography since its inception. As the digital era places professional photojournalists as a whole under more pressure than ever, this study seeks to unravel the particular challenges facing women in the business of visual storytelling. Based on data from 545 women photojournalists from 71 countries collected between 2015 and 2016, this article finds that women photojournalists face even more demanding circumstances than their male counterparts, in spite of the fact that they are generally better educated and have more often received a higher level of training in photog-raphy. The data, collected in partnership with the World Press Photo Foundation, suggests the his-torical underrepresentation of women in photography is ongoing. Structural biases will likely con-tinue to prevent women taking up full-time employment in this area in the future with widespread self-employment among them in the sector, meaning an even smaller proportion of women news photographers presenting visual stories on the world’s most pressing issues and the further decline of the female gaze

Competing risks models and time-dependent covariates

New statistical models for analysing survival data in an intensive care unit context have recently been developed. Two models that offer significant advantages over standard survival analyses are competing risks models and multistate models. Wolkewitz and colleagues used a competing risks model to examine survival times for nosocomial pneumonia and mortality. Their model was able to incorporate time-dependent covariates and so examine how risk factors that changed with time affected the chances of infection or death. We briefly explain how an alternative modelling technique (using logistic regression) can more fully exploit time-dependent covariates for this type of data

Compensating for Missing Data from Longitudinal Studies Using WinBUGS

Missing data is a common problem in survey based research. There are many packages that compensate for missing data but few can easily compensate for missing longitudinal data. WinBUGS compensates for missing data using multiple imputation, and is able to incorporate longitudinal structure using random effects. We demonstrate the superiority of longitudinal imputation over cross-sectional imputation using WinBUGS. We use example data from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health. We give a SAS macro that uses WinBUGS to analyze longitudinal models with missing covariate date, and demonstrate its use in a longitudinal study of terminal cancer patients and their carers.

A Time-Domain Test for Some Types of Non-Linearity

The bispectrum and third-order moment can be viewed as equivalent tools for testing for the presence of non-linearity in stationary time series. This is because the bispectrum is the Fourier transform of the third order moment. An advantage of the bispectrum is that its estimator comprises terms which are asymptotically independent at distinct bifrequencies under the null hypothesis of linearity. An advantage of the third order moment is that its values at any subset of joint lags can be used in the test, whereas when using the bispectrum the entire (or truncated) third order moment is required to construct the Fourier transform. In this paper we propose a test for non-linearity based upon the estimated third order moment. We use the phase scrambling bootstrap method to give a non-parametric estimate of the variance of our test statistic under the null hypothesis. Using a simulation study we demonstrate that the test obtains its target significance level, with large power, when compared to an existing standard parametric test that uses the bispectrum. Further we show how the proposed test can be used to identify the source of non-linearity due to interactions at specific frequencies. We also investigate implications for heuristic diagnosis of non-stationarity.Third-order moment, bispectrum, non-linear, nonstationary,

The State of News Photography 2016

First paragraph: The power of the image to draw public attention and generate debate was evident in the news photography of 2016. To understand who and what is behind the production and publication of those images, this report describes the results of a survey of 1,991 photojournalists from more than 100 countries and territories