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 […]
Scientific Practice
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 […]
We all want more power. Statistical power, that is, to detect an effect in the presence of noise even if it is small. But is this always true? Power seems to be something we should all strive for, just like replicability. The reality is however a bit more nuanced: A few weeks ago I wrote about the […]
“I see a train wreck looming”—Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman did not mince words in a 2012 email to colleagues in which he drew attention to what he considered a potential replication crisis in at least some areas of psychology. Kahneman’s skepticism was fed by failed attempts to replicate classic priming studies, increasing concerns about replicability in psychology more […]
What’s the value of knowing the Emissions of CH4 from Enteric Fermentation in Cattle in the Caribbean in 2010? (It’s 536.8272 gigagrams, by the way.) According to McKinsey and Company, publicly available “open data”—particularly government data—can add between $3 and $5 trillion to the global economy each year. The availability of such data is said to help companies […]