Kevin McConway

@bbcnickrobinson @BorisJohnson @BBCr4today Not something you fix with a hands up, Nick

Hands up all those who think @BorisJohnson is well placed to lecture anyone else on upholding standards & admitting mistakes.  As I said this morning on @bbcr4today “it’s clear that there is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes. There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation…Both things are happening at the same time”

@joseph_gellman Sadly, balance and honesty are never good bedfellows.

@joseph_gellman Hmm. I still won't bother. BBC news can paint itself into a multitude of corners simultaneously. It has so many great journalists but wastes them because of this.

CCHQ apparently chipper tonight, I’m told. As Tim Davie resigns, they’re “utterly convinced” Susan Hall is being appointed as the BBC’s Director General

@mgtmccartney To be honest, I wouldn't bother, Margaret. Despair tends not to be constructive, I fear. People will be less likely to read it if you write about the whole thing than if you pick off the occasional bit. But maybe I'm getting too old for this kind of struggle. One must survive.

there is so much stuff I am not tweeting about because I think shame/blame doesn't work well/often: but that doesn't mean that I haven't kept detailed notes of despair and will one day write about the whole darned thing.

@DrLimeback @OpenUniversity Overall, the low-bias-risk studies going to 0.7mg/l or below are inconclusive, in my view. Doesn’t mean there’s no association between fluoride and IQ at that level, just that we don’t know either way from this review. 12/12

@DrLimeback @OpenUniversity But the new paper reports that those subgroup and sensitivity analyses didn’t affect the findings much, so the overall conclusion is the same. 11/12

Hi Prof McConway, @kjm2 of @OpenUniversity. Since you're a stats guy maybe you can tell us more about this systematic review of fluoride & IQ jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap… How was the limit 1.5 mg/L chosen when some studies on 0.7 ppm were low risk of bias? tinyurl.com/mu5be7jv Thx.

@BristOliver Also, given the high priority given to policy work (point 2 on acadmathsci.org.uk), with which I agree, and given what's been said often on underfunding of math sci, maybe we're just not very good at getting our point across to govt, including on the academy itself.

@BristOliver In political terms, I think there are questions on expecting to rely on funding from a source that was so close to a personal initiative of the previous prime minister (whether or not one agreed with his priorities for mathematics - I generally did agree).

Mathematician here: £2m/year over 3 years represents a saving of 0.000163% of the Government's annual budget. Establishing this academy was the first recommendation of the Bond Report, which reported that maths-related jobs are worth around £200bn/year to the UK economy

@BristOliver And there are charitable foundations, even commercial sponsorship, and so on. If we, the mathematical sci community, want this to continue, it's up to us to make sure it does. If we don't want it to continue unless we get Govt money with strings attached, we need to say so. 6/6

@BristOliver The 5 learned and professional societies in the Council for the Mathematical Science have, in total, an annual income of nearly £9m (and free reserves of £8m), and something like 22k members. Can't just take £2m a year for 3 years out of that, but something could be done. 5/n