Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label science is hard

Latest Post:

Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions  using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis.  I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data,  courtesy of Redditor  fevaah ,  showing  old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't).  If this idea was help...
Read more

CNN's "Science by press release"

One of my big pedagogy concerns, as a psychologist who teaches psychology majors, is this: Are we explicitly drawing the links between psychological science and ALL of the other sciences, and the fact that many of the lessons they learn in their psychology classes apply to other sciences?  I think this is an issue in statistics. I always emphasize that I do not simply teach statistics for psychologists: I am teaching them statistics, full stop. I think we also have to emphasize to our majors that the psychology research process is, in many ways, just the broad research process use in science. As such, our lessons aren't just teaching them major-specific content, but we are teaching them information that leaves them better prepared to interpret scientific research they encounter.  This includes a potential ugly part of the research process: Bad science reporting via over-hyped research press releases.  As such, I present this great piece from CNN, "Science by press release...
Read more

Harris's "Scientists Are Not So Hot At Predicting Which Cancer Studies Will Succeed"

This NPR story is about reproducibility in science that ISN'T psychology, the limitations of expert intuition, and the story is a summary of a recent research article from PLOS Biology  (so open science that isn't psychology, too!). Thrust of the story: Cancer researchers may be having a similar problem to psychologists in terms of replication.  I've blogged this issue before. In particular, concerns with replication in cancer research, possibly due to the variability with which lab rats are housed and fed . So, this story is about a study in which 200 cancer researchers, post-docs, and graduate students took a look at six pre-registered cancer stud y replications and guessed which studies would successfully replicate. And the participants systematically overestimated the likelihood of replication. However, researchers with high h-indices, were more accurate that the general sample. I wonder if the high h-indicies uncover super-experts or super-researchers who have be...
Read more