When we teach our first-year Psychology students about the “history of Psychology”, they usually get to see at least one slide that shows a “black box”. “This black box” – we tend to say – “is what Behaviorists like Watson and Skinner wanted to keep unopened, since all they were interested in was the relationship […]
Scientific Practice
There are no statistics that inflame the passions of statisticians and scientists as does the p value. The p value is, informally, a statistic used for assessing whether a “null hypothesis” (e.g., that the difference in performance between two conditions is 0) should be taken seriously. It is simultaneously the most used and most hated statistic in all of […]
Since the enlightenment, openness has been a core part of the ethos of science. Scientific openness takes many forms: from its inception the Royal Society, for instance, published reports from all over the world, not just Great Britain. Science is politically open, a collective search for truth and human well-being ideally not concerned with national […]
“You guys know an awful lot that could really benefit the public”—this is the motto of Lasting Learning (http://www.lastinglearning.com/), a start-up company run by Cameron Broumand, a former real estate man whom I interviewed recently about his vision for how Psychonomic knowledge can feature in a commercial enterprise. Cameron’s story starts with his experience as a […]
Legend has it that in Texas, and perhaps other jurisdictions where the value of pi is determined by political vote, sharpshooters market their skills by first firing a shotgun at a barn door and then painting a bull’s eye around their preferred hole. There has been much concern recently that parts of science are not immune […]
Government should be transparent. Science should be open. Government information belongs into the public domain, and scientific data should be publicly available to permit replication and scrutiny. Few would disagree with those calls for openness, and indeed there has been a flurry of activity within the sciences to upgrade research practices to achieve greater openness […]
I am posting this message on behalf of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences: There is a great deal of activity on Capitol Hill right now, and I want to give you an update. In Monday’s newsletter, I wrote articles about two bills affecting NSF funding (see links below). Here’s additional information on […]
As part of the Psychonomic Society’s efforts to upscale its digital presence, we are introducing a new service by enabling members to post links to online experiments on the Society’s webpage. The new facility will be given its own page, Online Studies for Members, and the guidelines governing the use of this page are as follows: […]
Ten days ago, Tim pulled me aside. “Jeff, there’s the keyboard from Room 2,” he said pointing at the trash. “When I pressed the ‘z’ key, I had to hit it three times for it to respond. I wanted to tell you first because I know it affects some of the experiments.” “Thanks, we’ll deal […]
In 2005 Amazon launched the Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk), a marketplace where requesters can pay “workers” from all over the world to complete tasks over the internet. MTurk is used to crowdsource many tasks that are still best completed by aggregate human intelligence (as opposed to machine intelligence), such as rating the relevance of search […]