From The Blog
5 October 2022
Senior staff at universities are increasingly concerned that the faction of the Tory Party now in government is significantly less interested in science than the one that wrote the manifesto on which it was elected.
Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor is professor of health informatics at UCL.
From The Blog
17 May 2022
The results of REF2021, the latest iteration of the Research Excellence Framework assessing the quality of research at UK universities, were published last week. My institution, UCL, is boasting that it came second, above Cambridge and beaten only by Oxford. Cambridge is boasting that it came third, but behind Imperial and the Institute of Cancer Research; institutions that shouldn’t quite count, it implies, since neither covers the full range of academic endeavour. Imperial, however, is clear that it has been shown to be the UK’s top university. The same claim is made by Oxford.
Letter
Excess Deaths
10 February 2022
Paul Taylor writes: I am sympathetic to the view that lockdowns represent a failure of public health policy and wouldn’t want my piece to be read as an argument for the use of lockdowns in preference to any other instrument for controlling a pandemic. However, the UK had not prepared for this pandemic, did not respond well in the early stages and failed to implement an effective test and trace...
Bad Judgment: How many people died?
Paul Taylor, 10 February 2022
Estimated weekly excess deaths in England and Wales in 2021.
One of the tactics used over the past few weeks by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and by loyal MPs and dutiful ministers touring broadcasting studios, has been to claim that his successful management of the pandemic is more worthy of the public’s attention than trivial issues of garden parties or...
From The Blog
26 August 2021
Researchers led by a team from Emory University recently announced that they had used artificial intelligence to predict patients’ self-reported racial identity from medical images. It is an unexpected, unsettling result.
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