Dr Will Ball

@wpball.com

3266 Followers 1150 Following

Interested in working out how to reduce unfair and avoidable differences in health. Mostly youth mental health. Chancellor's Fellow at Robert Gordon University | Social Epidemiologist | Pro Cycling | Rstats | Causal Inference 🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🍉

A hospital glove and apron dispenser that looks like a 3 eyed monster sticking it's tongue out.
"Evidence shows that one to one tutoring can accelerate a pupil’s learning by around five months, but access to tutoring is deeply unequal, with children from wealthier families far more likely to benefit. The government is running a tender for industry to co-create AI tutoring tools with teachers, with the goal of bringing these tools to a similar level of quality, so that we can offer, at scale, the kind of personalised one to one support often only available to a privileged few. By adapting to individual pupils’ needs, the tools could provide extra help when they get stuck and identify where they need more practice to master their lessons, with the potential to help them catch up with their peers. From Summer term this year, there will be teacher-led co-creation of AI tutoring tools with industry."
A very cute boston terrier lays on a bed being scratched on her belly.
A man holding a Boston terrier on front of a polling place sign
A lollipop chart made using R. It shows days on the x axis and height in cm on the y axis. Height has increased from 0cm on day 0, to 16cm on day 17
A very faint green aurora borealis in a clear night sky above the lights of some houses
A meme with a person happily reaching out towards a ball. The person is labelled 'chasing group' and the ball is labelled 'MvdP'. The second panel zooms out to show that the man is held by a larger person/thing labelled 'group 2 syndrome'.
A cool looking grass head guy.
A close up screenshot of the words 'choose good names for things'
A photograph of a PowerPoint slide for the Understanding Society Insights conference. The subheading reads 'Children and Young People's Futures'
A photographer of Central London taken out of the window of an aeroplane.
A directed acyclic graph (DAG) showing the relationship between an exposure (E) and outcome (D), including confounders (C) at different time-points (t0 and t1).
A wider shot of the frog guy in a shop window display.
A frog like character sat on top of a wrapped present with a Christmas tree hat.
Barney from the Simpsons saying "just hook it to my veins"
A cyclocross course set in the Aberdeenshire countryside. There are low clouds with sun shining through.
A photograph of a laptop screen showing a google sheet with a 3D bar chart in it. The chart shows counts for people's favourite sports. Made by a 7 year old.
A cute Boston Terrier puppy sat on a rug, looking innocently at the photographer.
A very cute Boston Terrier puppy curled up on a sofa and fast asleep.
An incredibly cute black and white Boston Terrier puppy is sitting on a green bean bag chair
A book cover for 'Causal inference and the people's health' by Sharon Schwartz and Seth J Prins. The top of the book says 'small books, big ideas in population health' and there is a foreword by Nancy Krieger.
A beer keg with the words 'Dog Beer' written on it
A photograph of a front door. A sign says 'Yarra House'
A bottle of drink labelled 'Professor Peppy'.
A plot of average speeds for different riders for each timing segment of the TdF 2025 stage 5 ITT. Plapp and Affini both started the fastest and died off in T2-T3. Pogacar and Evenepoel were slightly more conservative and had very strong T2-T3 and T3-Finish segments. Vingegaard was slowest by a clear margin until the final segment where he was quicker than Plapp and Affini.
A plot showing the difference to best time at each intermediate time check in the first 2025 Tour de France individual time trial. It shows the time checks for Vingegaard, Plapp, Affini, Pogacar and Evenepoel. Evenepoel won and was less than 10 seconds behind the best time at T2. Plapp was fastest until T3 where he was 30 seconds behind the leader, finishing over a minute back.
Distracted boyfriend meme. Boyfriend is UCI, girlfriend is 'Not having corners in sprint finishes', other woman is 'gear restrictions and banning aero helmets'
A screenshot of my Infant Mortality Explorer app. It shows a 3D 'lexis surface' plot of infant mortality rates over time by index of multiple deprivation decile for England (2008-2017)
A colourful garden with a brick wall in the background. A cat is laying on top of the wall.
"Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution; the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution”
Fancy Winnie the Pooh meme. Normal Winnie has the words t-test next to him and fancy Winnie has 'Artisanal Modeling' on his panel.
A BBC news headline: 'It missed us by inches': Witnesses describe car driving into crowd at Liverpool FC parade
A sneaky corvid is hiding in some long grass next to the bench I'm sitting on. It is trying to see if I have loose food that can be pilfered.
The river Dee as viewed from Robert Gordon University. It's a beautiful sunny day, there is grass in the forground and mature trees in the distance.
A book cover 'Causal inference and the people's health' by Sharon Schwartz amd Seth J Prins
A book on a desk. Health Inequality (3rd Ed) by Mel Bartley and Michelle Kelly-Irving
A cute cat sits serenely among some plants in my garden.
A photograph from the North side of the Firth of Forth, looking South towards Edinburgh and the Queensferry bridges. There is a sandy beach in the foreground and the sun is setting.
A photograph taken from a Eurostar train looking out over fields in the direction of the Carrefour de l'Arbe cobble sector. It is very dry.
A photograph of a train ticker showing a train from Gent to Brussel due at 08.41
A EuroCIM lanyard with my name on it.
A photograph of a lecture hall with slides entitled 'Target Trial Emulation in Practice'
Zinneke Pis, the pissing dog statue in Brussels
Some small cyclists in mini-Europe
A child's drawing of the pissing statues.
A photo of a postcard with Eddy Merckx on it eating a plate of frites.
Mannekin pis, brussels
A panorama of the Grand Place in Brussels
An orange filtered picture of the atomium in Brussels.
A miniature of the Houses of Parliament at the model Europe. There is a customs sign outside.
A frites sign that says "so delicious, so Belgian!"
A small sign saying Brussels 17:04
A station sign which says: Platform 1 for trains to Dundee and the South Platform 2 for trains to Aberdeen and the North.
A map showing the United Kingdom as well as a bit of NW Europe (Belgium, Netherlands and N. France). There is route map from Aberdeenshire in NE Scotland to London, then onto Brussels in Belgium. The annotation thinks the journey will take 9hrs & 26mins.
Aurora Borealis? At this time of year?
The input and output from running some r code online. 11/10 [1] 1.1
the Drake hotline bling meme, but with a picture of Rachel Reeves pointing and smiling in the bottom panel. Panel 1 has Drake looking upset, with his hand up and the word 'Austerity' Panel 2 has Reeves smiling with finger up, and the words 'Biggest UK spending cuts since austerity'
A Guardian headline which reads 'Reeves to reveal biggest UK spending cuts since austerity in spring statement'
Neville Chamberlain