10.31234/osf.io/xn9ey

Background: On 20th March 2020, in response to COVID-19, UK schools were closed to most pupils. Teachers were required to put remote teaching and learning in place with only two days’ notice from the government. Aims: The current study explores teachers’ experiences of this abrupt change to their working practices, and during the 5-6 weeks that followed. Sample: Twenty-four teachers from English state schools were interviewed, representing mainstream primary and secondary schools and a range of years of experience and seniority. Methods: Participants were asked to tell stories of three key scenes during the first 5-6 weeks of lockdown: a low point, a high point and a turning point. A reflexive thematic analysis of their narratives was conducted. Results and Conclusions: Six themes were identified: uncertainty, finding a way, worry for the vulnerable, importance of relationships, teacher identity and reflections. Teachers’ narratives suggest that, after an initial period of uncertainty they settled into the situation and found a way forward, supported by strong relationships. However, they remain extremely worried about the most vulnerable pupils and want more joined up thinking from the government on how to support them effectively, along with clarity from policymakers to enable planning ahead. Teachers reflected on how to use their learning during this period to improve pupils’ experiences of education post COVID-19, and on how aspects of shared teacher identity have worked as stressors and coping mechanisms. These initial interviews form the baseline for a longitudinal interview study of teachers’ experiences of COVID-19 in England.

Teachers' initial experiences of COVID-19

10.1038/d41586-020-01824-5

In a large trial, a cheap and widely available steroid cut deaths by one-third among patients critically ill with COVID-19.

Coronavirus breakthrough: dexamethasone is first drug shown to save lives

10.31234/osf.io/ezusb

The day-to-day variations of sleep and physical activity are associated with various health outcomes in adults, and previous studies suggested a bidirectional association between these behaviors. The daily associations between sleep and physical activity have been examined in observational or interventional contexts. The primary goal of the current systematic review and meta-analysis was to summarize existing evidence about daily associations between sleep and physical activity outcomes at inter- and intra-individual level in adults. A systematic search of records in eight databases from inception to July 2019 identified 33 peer-reviewed empirical publications that examined daily sleep – physical activity association in adults. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of included studies did not support a bidirectional daily association between sleep outcomes and physical activity. Multilevel meta-analyses showed that three sleep parameters were associated with physical activity the following day: sleep quality, sleep efficiency, and wake after sleep onset. However, the associations were small, and varied in terms of direction and level of variability (e.g. inter- or intra-individual). Daytime physical activity was associated with lower total sleep time the following night at an inter-person level with a small effect size. Future studies should examine sleep and physical activity during a longer period and perform additional sophisticated statistical analyses.

Daily associations between sleep and physical activity: A systematic review and meta-analysis

10.31234/osf.io/pe5z8

As direct telehealth therapy sessions are being increasingly provided for safety reasons during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to ensure that sessions are implemented with integrity by direct service providers. While existing research addresses the efficacy of the telehealth model, there is no literature on integrity measures tied to this service model. Without a framework or point of reference, clinicians new to the field or telehealth therapy may not be able or willing to attempt to implement telehealth therapy. The telehealth therapy treatment integrity measure (TTTIM) is designed to delineate components of effective telehealth therapy, including both aspects of instruction that should be generalized from in-person sessions to telehealth therapy sessions as well as new elements that are unique to telehealth therapy. A description of how the measure can be utilized to support training, both initial and ongoing, of direct service providers is included. This measure can support clinicians in ensuring that direct service providers are working within their scope of competence when providing telehealth therapy.

A Measure for Supporting Implementation of Direct Telehealth Therapy with Treatment Integrity

10.31234/osf.io/rge9k

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption during the spring of 2020. Many college students were told to leave campus at spring break and to complete the semester remotely. This study evaluates effects of this disruption on student well-being. A sample of 148 students (86.5% female, 49.3% White) completed measures of psychological symptoms, perceived stress, and alcohol use during the spring 2020 semester at a university in the southeastern U.S. Their results were compared to those of 240 students (87.9% female, 64.2% White) who completed the same measures in the fall 2019 semester. Participants in spring 2020 reported more mood disorder symptoms, perceived stress, and alcohol use than did pre-pandemic participants. Worry about COVID-19 was negatively associated with well-being in multiple domains. Additionally, White students reported a greater effect of the pandemic on well-being than did African American students. Young adults appear to be less vulnerable to the most serious medical complications associated with COVID-19 but nonetheless experience psychological effects from the pandemic. Universities and practitioners who work with college students can help young adults manage their symptoms and avoid behaviors like risky alcohol use when confronted with stressors such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Increased mood disorder symptoms, perceived stress, and alcohol use among college students during the COVID-19 pandemic

10.31234/osf.io/dcynw

Background: Extant research relating to the psychological impact of infectious respiratory disease epidemics/pandemics suggests that frontline workers are particularly vulnerable. Methods: The current study used data from the first two waves of the United Kingdom (UK) survey of the COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study to compare frontline workers with the rest of the UK population on prevalence estimates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD during the first week of ‘lockdown’ (Wave 1) and one month later (Wave 2). Results: Compared to the rest of the population, frontline workers generally, and individual frontline worker groups, had significantly higher prevalence estimates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD during both wave 1 and wave 2. While prevalence estimates of depression significantly increased among Local & National Government Workers from Wave 1 (15.4%) to Wave 2 (38.5%), no significant improvement or deterioration in mental health status was recorded for any other frontline worker group. Multivariate binary logistic regression analysis showed that, beyond other risk factors, food workers were nearly twice as likely as others to screen positive for anxiety, while all frontline worker groups, other than transport workers, were significantly more likely to screen positive for PTSD (Odds Ratios ranged from 1.74 – 3.43). Finally, while frontline workers, generally, were significantly more likely than the general public to have received mental health advice during the pandemic (26.9% versus 20.3% respectively), this was largely reflective of health and social care workers (37.9%). Conclusions: These findings offer timely and valuable information on the psychological health status of UK’s frontline workforce during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and may aid in preparations for their future psychological and mental health support.

The psychological wellbeing of frontline workers in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic: First and second wave findings from the COVID-19 Psychological Research Consortium (C19PRC) Study

10.31234/osf.io/58yeb

The cortisol awakening response (CAR) is associated with various aspects of cognition, including executive function, in older adult and clinical samples. However, the association between these variables in the healthy functioning population is not well understood due to the limited number of appropriately controlled studies. This study explored the association between the CAR and a set shifting index of executive function in 55 (44 females) healthy participants aged 20.2±3.0 years. Notoriously, assessment of the CAR from self-collected saliva samples within the domestic setting is subject to sample timing error, so electronic monitoring of both awakening and sampling times were employed. Participants attended the laboratory in the afternoon of CAR assessment for testing on the Attention Switching Task of the CANTAB neuropsychological testing battery. A positive association was found between CAR magnitude and attention-switching performance in the afternoon of the same day. This was independent of known relevant CAR covariates, but only evident in CAR data collected without delay exceeding 8 min post-awakening. These findings offer insight into a potential role for the CAR in modulating cognitive functions associated with the pre-frontal cortex.

The cortisol awakening response predicts a same-day index of executive function in healthy young adults

10.1038/d41586-020-01747-1

A new breed of researcher is turning to computation to understand society — and then change it.

How Facebook, Twitter and other data troves are revolutionizing social science

2006.09829

We show that the dynamics of the number of deaths due to Covid in different countries is to a large extent universal once the origin of time is chosen to be the start of the lockdown, and the number of death is rescaled by the total number of deaths after the lockdown, itself a proxy of the number of infections at the start of the lockdown. Such a curve collapse is much less convincing when normalizing by the total population. Sweden, with its no-lockdown, light-touch approach, is the only outlier that deviates considerably from the average behavior. We argue that these model-free findings provide strong support for the effectiveness of the lockdowns in mitigating the lethality of the virus.

Did lockdowns serve their purpose?

As our country battles two simultaneous major public health crises—COVID-19 and systemic racism—our now endemic public health crisis of gun violence looms over the United States and leaves many of us in health care sleepless at night. American gun violence predates and will far outlive COVID-19—and its threat has burgeoned in the pandemic’s shadow as nearly two million Americans purchased new guns in March alone. With increasing evidence that new handgun ownership is strongly associated with suicide—especially immediately after purchasing the weapon—it’s only a matter of time before gun violence explodes once again. And we’re already starting to see a spike in gun violence this year, with shootings doubling in some areas compared to last year. In light of this, temporary Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs), also known as “red flag” laws, may be your best bet to urgently disarm and save the life of a loved one. And making sure you’re familiar with ERPOs can make all the difference during these turbulent times.

Pandemic-Related Gun Purchases Raise Suicide Risks

About the talk: Psychological science has been at the forefront of improving research practices. Yet, psychology is also a strongly norm driven field, and we risk replacing old norms with new norms, without increasing true understanding or the ability to justify our actions. I will unsuccessfully try to prevent you from just adopting the New Heuristics of scientific reform. About the speaker: Professor Daniel Lakens is based at Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focuses on how to design and interpret studies, applied (meta)-statistics, and reward structures in science, as well as having research interests in conceptual thought and meaning. Daniel is noted for his teaching and creation of useful resources. He received the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal prize for Open Social Science as a Leader in Education, and his course on research methods for young scholars (here) is widely praised and highly subscribed, along with his blog on methods and statistics and practical primers on effect sizes, sequential analysis, and equivalence tests. Recently, Daniel has developed an interest in the importance of (preferably pre-registered) replications and ways to improve how we interpret and design studies. Daniel believes that we can try a little harder to make science as open and robust as possible, and give the tax payer as much value for money as we can, and that science should be a much more collaborative enterprise.

Major crises have major consequences, usually unforeseen. The Great Depression spurred isolationism, nationalism, fascism, and World War II—but also led to the New Deal, the rise of the United States as a global superpower, and eventually decolonization. The 9/11 attacks produced two failed American interventions, the rise of Iran, and new forms of Islamic radicalism. The 2008 financial crisis generated a surge in antiestablishment populism that replaced leaders across the globe. Future historians will trace comparably large effects to the current coronavirus pandemic; the challenge is figuring them out ahead of time.

The Pandemic and Political Order

JUST how many people have been infected with the coronavirus? Statistics are trickling in from cities and countries around the world, but the figures vary hugely. Some regions are reporting that less than 1 per cent of people have been infected, and others that over half the population has had the virus. How are these figures calculated, and which can we trust? Determining the true prevalence of coronavirus infection will be important for understanding how the virus spreads and limiting its damage. The reporting of coronavirus cases varies drastically around the world. Tim Russell and his colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have estimated that, as of 15 June, more than 95 per cent of symptomatic cases have been reported in some countries, including Ghana, Kazakhstan, Morocco and Oman. Advertisement googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('mpu-mid-article'); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('video-mid-article'); }); However, the team estimates that only 35 per cent of symptomatic cases have been reported in the US, and the figure is even lower for some other countries. The UK is estimated to have reported only 14 per cent, Sweden about 19 per cent and Yemen just 3 per cent. What these statistics don’t reflect is the number of symptomless cases, which some evidence suggests can account for between a quarter and half of all coronavirus infections.

How many of us are likely to have caught the coronavirus so far?

10.1016/S2468-1253(20)30159-X

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has, it is frequently said, changed everything. But to appreciate its effects fully, one must not only look at the ways in which clinical services have been reorganised to cope with the flood of patients with COVID-19, or even at the public health measures aimed at flattening the epidemic curve. Globally significant health issues that existed before COVID-19 have not gone away: in many instances, the pandemic may have exacerbated the problem.Alcohol-related harm is one such case. In the UK, which went into lockdown on March 22, data from the Office for National Statistics show that sales in alcohol stores in March had increased in month-on-month volume by 31·4%. Alcohol consumption patterns have also altered, according to a survey by the charity Alcohol Change UK. Reassuringly, more than a third of the 1555 people surveyed who reported drinking alcohol before lockdown stated that they had stopped drinking or reduced how often they drank in the 2 weeks after lockdown commenced. However, around a fifth responded that they had been drinking more frequently in the same period. And while about half of drinkers said they were consuming about the same amount on a typical drinking day, 15% said they had been drinking more per session since lockdown began. Of particular concern was that almost one in five of those who drank alcohol on a daily basis had further increased the amount they drink since lockdown. While these preliminary data must be treated with caution, they hint at the emergence of a subgroup of drinkers at risk of establishing potentially dangerous patterns of alcohol consumption during lockdown.

Drinking alone: COVID-19, lockdown, and alcohol-related harm

10.1038/d41586-020-01622-z

Nature asked authors and editors for advice on how to improve peer-review communication.

Peer review should be an honest, but collegial, conversation

The coronavirus pandemic has had a severe impact on Europe. While not all EU member states have suffered equally, none has been spared social and economic hardship either. Early on, national impulses led to border closures and export restrictions on medical supplies, which lifted only recently as the crisis continued to unfold. Nevertheless, even in the earliest days of Europe’s exposure to the novel coronavirus, pan-European solidarity was on display. Individual acts of solidarity paved the way for donations of hundreds of thousands of protective masks and other medical supplies to those countries most affected. The institutions of the European Union eventually assumed a critical role in coordinating Europe’s response to the crisis. And as discussions shift toward economic recovery after months of lockdown measures and restrictions on cross-border trade and travel, different proposals are emerging for how to kickstart Europe’s economies and return to something approaching normal life. The European Solidarity Tracker collects and displays instances of pan-European solidarity throughout the coronavirus crisis. It will be updated and expanded continuously throughout the summer of 2020.

European Solidarity Tracker

Richard Horton is editor-in-chief of The Lancet, one of the world’s most influential medical journals. In his new book, The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s gone wrong and how to stop it happening again, Horton condemns most countries’ responses to coronavirus. He spoke to New Scientist about how the crisis has been mishandled around the world.

The Lancet’s Richard Horton calls for international pandemic inquiry

Some nations weren't prepared, others ignored best-laid plans. Why getting ready for next time has to start now

We knew how to prevent a pandemic like covid-19, so what went wrong?

this piece has excellent advice!the role that researchers need to play after they release a preprint ....(1) Give realistic statements of the limitations within the paper. You should be well aware of what can go wrong with research. This should be trivial to include.(2) When you make public comments, attempt to give perspective. Prepare for this because you know the interest will be immediate and extreme. Make a decision about what is and isn’t responsible to represent simply to the media and general public.(3) Deliberately engage experts in the appropriate areas to assess your information publicly. If the work needs to be read by experts, find them yourself. In particular, put your work in front of people who might disagree with it.(4) Admit that criticism of your work exists and then engage with it. You release a paper in advance of formal publication for DISCUSSION. Well, if that’s the case, get into the weeds and discuss it.(5) Update your pre-print! It isn’t published yet. You can do whatever you like to it.Especially in the middle of a large crisis.

Great piece by James Heathers on how preprints have turned into publicity vehicles and researchers are being irresponsible in not responding to criticism

A new discussion paper:"Psychology we argue, is unsuitable for making policy decisions. We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in Evidence Readiness Levels to be suitable for policy; we caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to applications."

Psychological Science is not yet crisis-ready

Academic peer review of scientific manuscripts often falls short. It invariably slows and sometimes prevents the publication of good research. And it sometimes leads to the distribution and amplification of flawed research. Prestigious journals sometimes publish research grounded on shaking theory that used weak measures and inappropriate analyses to reach dubious conclusions. Failings of peer review play a principal role in those problems. Journal editors typically perform journal tasks off the side of their desks, on top of everything else. They may handle manuscripts outside of their expertise. Sometimes it’s difficult for them to know who to ask to review. When they do identify prospective reviewers, many decline the request or don’t reply. When I was Editor of Psych Science, I often sent 6 or more invitations to get 2 acceptances. Thus, it sometimes takes weeks to get a few people to commit to reviewing. Some of those fail to deliver on time or at all, despite multiple prompts (doubtless sometimes for good reasons – one never knows what’s going on in another person’s life). So even under the best conditions, peer review takes a long time. And rarely is the decision to accept as is. Good news for authors is a reject/revise/resubmit decision. Thus, it typically takes many months between initial submission and eventual acceptance. The other day I saw an email about a manuscript submitted to Psych Science in January that had just been accepted. I thought, “Wow! Quick!” Is that time well spent? I believe that generally it is. Many reviewers provide assessments that are detailed, clear, insightful, well-informed, and constructive. Many editors strive to understand the work well enough to fairly assess the manuscript and, if it has potential for their journal, making the manuscript as good as it can be. As an author/co-author I have many times been furious with editors and/or reviewers (indeed, even now it takes me days to steel myself to read an action letter), but very often editors’ and reviewers’ input has (I believe) led to major improvements.

Enhancing Peer Review of Scientific Reports

2006.07586

We used an ecological approach based on a neutral model to study the competition for attention in an online social network. This novel approach allow us to analyze some ecological patterns that has also an insightful meaning in the context of information ecosystem. Specifically, we focus on the study of patterns related with the persistence of a meme within the network and the capacity of the system to sustain coexisting memes. Not only are we able of doing such analysis in an approximated continuum limit, but also we get exact results of the finite-size discrete system.

Neutral Theory for competing attention in social networks

Professor Helen Margetts, Professor of Society and the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute and Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute, in conversation with Professor Ben MacArthur, Professor in Mathematics at the Life Science Interface, Schools of Mathematics and Medicine at the University of Southampton.Covid-19 poses an extraordinary challenge for policy-makers. In the face of a new disease that has brought the world to a standstill, policy-makers have to identify at breakneck speed the optimal measures needed to save lives and restart the economy. Good data and solid modelling are crucial, yet we are seeing government after government fail at harnessing the power of these two critical tools. Policy-makers are struggling to understand what data they need to collect, what models they need to build, and what safeguards they must put in place in order to find a resilient and fair way out of this crisis. In this talk, we provide clarity and make concrete recommendations as to how policy-makers can ensure that data and data science are our ticket back to normality.

Data, data (science), get us out of here! Recommendations for resilient and fair policy-making in a crisis

There has been confusion about whether people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who do not have symptoms can transmit to others. In fact, we do have evidence that individuals without symptoms can spread the virus. This is the likely reason why SARS-CoV-2 has been harder to contain than its relative, SARS-CoV. Nonetheless, it is hard to detect this type of transmission, and it is even harder to measure how frequently it occurs.

Asymptomatic Transmission? We Just Don't Know Yet for Certain

restaurants re-opened for business, now that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has lifted restrictions placed on businesses in an effort to fend off COVID-19.

What I Found When My Favorite Local Restaurants Re-Opened

The virus isn’t simply a health crisis; it is also a design problem.

How Architecture Could Help Us Adapt to the Pandemic

10.1038/d41586-020-01818-3

A tool that quantifies global happiness on social media recorded an unprecedented dip in mood starting in May.

Has Twitter just had its saddest fortnight ever?

10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30264-3

BackgroundThe risk of severe COVID-19 if an individual becomes infected is known to be higher in older individuals and those with underlying health conditions. Understanding the number of individuals at increased risk of severe COVID-19 and how this varies between countries should inform the design of possible strategies to shield or vaccinate those at highest risk.MethodsWe estimated the number of individuals at increased risk of severe disease (defined as those with at least one condition listed as “at increased risk of severe COVID-19” in current guidelines) by age (5-year age groups), sex, and country for 188 countries using prevalence data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017 and UN population estimates for 2020. The list of underlying conditions relevant to COVID-19 was determined by mapping the conditions listed in GBD 2017 to those listed in guidelines published by WHO and public health agencies in the UK and the USA. We analysed data from two large multimorbidity studies to determine appropriate adjustment factors for clustering and multimorbidity. To help interpretation of the degree of risk among those at increased risk, we also estimated the number of individuals at high risk (defined as those that would require hospital admission if infected) using age-specific infection–hospitalisation ratios for COVID-19 estimated for mainland China and making adjustments to reflect country-specific differences in the prevalence of underlying conditions and frailty. We assumed males were twice at likely as females to be at high risk. We also calculated the number of individuals without an underlying condition that could be considered at increased risk because of their age, using minimum ages from 50 to 70 years. We generated uncertainty intervals (UIs) for our estimates by running low and high scenarios using the lower and upper 95% confidence limits for country population size, disease prevalences, multimorbidity fractions, and infection–hospitalisation ratios, and plausible low and high estimates for the degree of clustering, informed by multimorbidity studies.FindingsWe estimated that 1·7 billion (UI 1·0–2·4) people, comprising 22% (UI 15–28) of the global population, have at least one underlying condition that puts them at increased risk of severe COVID-19 if infected (ranging from <5% of those younger than 20 years to >66% of those aged 70 years or older). We estimated that 349 million (186–787) people (4% [3–9] of the global population) are at high risk of severe COVID-19 and would require hospital admission if infected (ranging from <1% of those younger than 20 years to approximately 20% of those aged 70 years or older). We estimated 6% (3–12) of males to be at high risk compared with 3% (2–7) of females. The share of the population at increased risk was highest in countries with older populations, African countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence, and small island nations with high diabetes prevalence. Estimates of the number of individuals at increased risk were most sensitive to the prevalence of chronic kidney disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic respiratory disease.InterpretationAbout one in five individuals worldwide could be at increased risk of severe COVID-19, should they become infected, due to underlying health conditions, but this risk varies considerably by age. Our estimates are uncertain, and focus on underlying conditions rather than other risk factors such as ethnicity, socioeconomic deprivation, and obesity, but provide a starting point for considering the number of individuals that might need to be shielded or vaccinated as the global pandemic unfolds.

Global, regional, and national estimates of the population at increased risk of severe COVID-19 due to underlying health conditions in 2020: a modelling study

A fixation on specific distances encourages a false, binary distinction between safety and danger

The two-metre rule and other imperfect Covid-19 risk calculations

Die Expertengruppen der Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force befassen sich in Policy Briefs mit dringenden Fragen zur COVID-19-Krise. Diese Policy Briefs werden anschliessend vom Beratungsgremium geprüft und genehmigt und auf unserer Webseite veröffentlicht. Sie geben die Ansichten der Task Force zu diesem Thema zum betreffenden Zeitpunkt wieder und werden gegebenenfalls im Lichte neuer Studien oder anderer Daten aktualisiert.

Policy Briefs

Le groupe d’experts de la Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force traite les questions urgentes en lien avec la crise du Covid-19 dans des policy briefs. Ces dossiers thématiques sont examinés et approuvés par le Comité consultatif et publiés sur notre site internet. Les policy briefs reflètent les points de vue de la Task Force sur la situation actuelle. Si cela s’avère nécessaire, ils sont mis à jour selon les nouvelles données ou les nouvelles études en la matière.

Policy Briefs

Nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said Wednesday. Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans. It is too early to say conclusively which individuals or groups are behind the bot accounts, but researchers said the tweets appeared aimed at sowing division in America.

Researchers: Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots

Here's Hillary Clinton posting the NPR coverage of the article. Again: no study, no data, just claims made by people who have not done very good research in this area in the past. Makes for a great headline, though.

I think I am going to have to do a more formal analysis of how this misinformation *about* misinformation makes the rounds and affects the conversation. I promise I will publish my data before making any press releases.

Just scrolling through the replies and quote tweets of the NPR and MIT Tech Review articles I have found hundreds of discussions and comments mostly supporting these articles, which are themselves unsupported information!

One irony is I *want* to believe that 1) there is a COVID bot problem on Twitter and 2) the bots have a measurable effect on the discourse. It would be a relief, in a way, to know that people are being manipulated into behaving poorly. But so far, no evidence either way.

I'm very mad today at news outlets who fall for the "trust us" line and will publish an article about the claims of scientists without linking to a published paper or at least a preview of the paper.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this particular claim is accompanied by literally zero evidence. Instead, they are trading on the name of Carnegie Mellon University, saying "trust us, we're CMU scientists."

Here is my original thread responding to NPR's coverage of this press release without a study.

This story continues to be widely circulated today, this time though MIT Technology Review. Again: this is based on a press release with no published data or methodology, and the bot detection work by this research lab in the past is questionable. See my tweets above for why.

@BobbyAllyn I would happily talk to you about this issue and help set the record straight, you are welcome to look up my name on Google Scholar if you need to see the wide range of citations of my (non academic) work on bots

Also if you're interested in this you can check out my blog post on "The Bot Scare" which is not peer-reviewed but I try to cite lots of sources and make a decent argument that most of this kind of research is pretty flimsy.

Also worth looking at is this informal audit of a few "bots" that were identified by these researchers back in April, some of which are humans with faces and lives who post videos of themselves like, talking and living and stuff

COVID-19 is all anyone is talking about, and unless we posit that there are more bots than people out there on social media, there needs to be extremely good data to make a claim that half of all conversation about COVID-19 is from bots. The burden of proof is huge and not met.

But even on top of that, use your brain: of the human people in your life, your friends and family and coworkers who you follow on Twitter... what percentage of their posts have been about the pandemic in one way or another for the last 2 months? For me it's easily above 50%.

The short of it is: knowing what we know about the study, which is very little, it seems like these researchers have in the past used a very loose and nearly useless definition of "bot"

NPR is promoting this article again. Without access to the study we have no way of knowing how "bot" was estimated or measured, we simply have to go on the reputation and past research of this lab, which I dug into last night here: https://twitter.com/tinysubversions/status/1263675864568356864?s=19

An experienced systematic reviewer: to be in charge of the majority of SR tasks (e.g. screening, extracting) A second systematic reviewer: to work with the first reviewer on  the majority of SR tasks (e.g. screening, extracting) Information specialist: to ensure a high precision search is designed and run in a fast time Systematic review methodologist: to provide advice on what is needed to perform the SR to a high quality Content expert: to ensure the SR is done in a way of interest to its potential user base, also to provide content specific information to the protocol and manuscript Epidemiologist/Statistician: to make sure your stats are done properly

2 week systematic reviews (2weekSR)

Massachusetts created a pioneering program to track COVID-19 cases. Its challenges are multiplying as the state reopens.

Can Coronavirus Contact Tracing Survive Reopening?

"Having once brought Boston-style medicine to Haiti, now PIH was trying to bring some elements of Haiti-style medicine to Boston. 'Reverse innovation.'" It's a call for us to spend more time listening to the collective wisdom of people who've done this before. 8/8