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 […]