Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
The Challenge of Regulating Research to Avoid Fraud
The more brazen the willingness to commit academic fraud, the harder it becomes to prevent, suggests Ian Freckelton. So while there is a role for codes of conduct or even criminal courts, finding ways to push temptation to deceive even further out of mind will likeley prove even more successful.
Statistical Association Takes on Use, Abuse of P-values
Even as it insists it’s not really saying anything new, the American Statistical Association Board of Directors has laid down a marker in the debate over what constitutes “statistical significance.”
Common Rule Revision – The Ethics Police Fight Back
Revisions to the U.S. government’s regulations on ethical treatment of human research subjects that would exempt some experiments from direct oversight by institutional review boards are facing pushback from paternalistic guardians, says our Robert Dingwall, who don’t seem to believe subjects are competent to make decisions on their own.
Deregulating Social Science Research Ethics – Clipping the Wings of IRBs?
The Federal Register is surely not everybody’s bedtime reading. It is where the US Government formally publishes certain official documents, including advance […]
Data Sharing in Historical Perspective
Who me? Share my data with strangers? Aren’t they my competitors? Would they use my data to criticize me? Would they take the credit (through publication) for my hard work? Would they understand my data well enough to arrive at valid results and conclusions? I recognize the importance of data sharing in some fields, but …
It’s Not the Lack of Replication, It’s the Lack of Trying to Replicate!
Psychology is still digesting the implications of a large study published last month, in which a team led by University of Virginia’s […]
We Found Only a Third of Top-Drawer Psych Studies Reliable
A small but vocal contingent of researchers has maintained that many, perhaps most, published studies are wrong. But how bad is this problem, exactly? And what features make a study more or less likely to turn out to be true? A team of 270 researchers asked the question of published psychology studies.
Beware! Big Data Is Not Free of Discrimination
Math can be immoral. too. Algorithms rarely come equipped with an explanation for why they behave the way they do, notes mathematician Jeremy Kun, and the easy (and dangerous) course of action is not to ask questions.
