Also this week: Data Colada vs. Francesca Gino, John Stuart Mill vs. blogs, Stephen Heard vs. your graduate students, remembering the guy who was in the thing, and more. Lots of good stuff this week!
From Jeremy:
Ooh, this is both fun and instructive: online time series guessing game. Each day, it shows you a time series plot, and invites you to guess what data is being plotted, from among five choices. When you get it right, it gives you a brief explanation and a link to the dataset. Looks like you can also use the site to create your own quizzes, but I haven’t tried that.
We’re not going to run out of new anatomy any time soon. Fascinating piece. It’s about human anatomy, but it also helped explain to me how we’re still making new anatomical discoveries about even fairly well-studied non-human species. For instances, just in the last few years we’ve learned that Komodo dragons are actually venomous. I remember reading about that discovery and thinking, “Wait, how did we not know that already?” Now I think I know the answer.
A syllabus for an imaginary course on medieval basket weaving. Good piece. Which is actually serious, not a joke–the point is that a course that sounds like a joke could actually be a great course. Although it doesn’t entirely work for me, because in my mind the paradigmatic “imaginary useless college course” is underwater basket weaving.
Good news! Scientific fraudster Francesca Gino’s defamation lawsuit against the Data Colada folks who exposed her fraud has been dismissed. Gino’s defamation lawsuit against her former employer Harvard University also has been dismissed. She can still try to sue Harvard for breach of contract (basically, for not following its own stated policies and procedures for dismissing faculty). That last link goes to the judge’s decision; here’s the Chronicle article. As Kieran Healy notes, the most likely outcome now is that Harvard just pays her a confidential settlement to go away.
A blast from the blogging past, in more ways than one. Way back in 2008, Kieran Healy blogged about how John Stuart Mill articulated the value of scholarly blogging. Mill wasn’t literally talking about scholarly blogging, of course, but he might as well have been. He reads like a great advocate for scholarly blogging! I found this interesting because elsewhere, Mill complained about newspapers in a way that today reads very much like a complaint about blogs.
Uri Simonsohn on what constitutes a good study preregistration. tl;dr: he argues they should be very brief (so that people will actually read them), and that their only purpose is to demarcate exploratory and confirmatory statistical analyses. I don’t have a dog in this fight, and so I’m very curious to hear from others who’ve thought about preregistration more than I have.
Retired ecologist, blogger, and Scientist’s Guide To Writing author Stephen Heard will come to your university and teach an intensive one-week writing course to your graduate students. This sounds like a great deal to me!
Interview with Australian veterinarian Jordan Hampton on animal welfare-based approaches to conservation. Some of the ideas mentioned seem so radical to me that I’m not sure how to react. Example: the idea that we should ban farming, hunting, and pet ownership, on grounds of impact on the welfare of wild animals (!) Should I work extra-hard to set aside my own intuitions and preconceptions, at least temporarily, so as to give these ideas the fairest shake possible? Or should I just roll my eyes and forget I ever read about these ideas? (Aside: it’s not clear to me from the interview which of these radical ideas Hampton endorses, if any.)
Another retraction for Jonathan Pruitt. This one is a 2012 Ethology paper. At this point, seeing a new Pruitt retraction feels to me like, I dunno…going to the grocery store and spotting somebody who used to be famous a long time ago? [looks down the cereal aisle] “Oh hey, isn’t that the guy who was in the thing back in the day?” Your mileage may vary as how you feel, obviously.
Athene Donald on doing things for the last time.