Embedded in Academia

Month: August 2013

  • Do Not Just Run a Few More Reps

    It’s frustrating when an experiment reveals an almost, but not quite, statistically significant effect. When this happens, the overwhelming temptation is to run a few more repetitions in order to see if the result creeps into significance. Intuitively, more data should provide more reliable experimental results. This is not necessarily the case. Let’s look at…

  • A Few Good Books

    I haven’t been getting a ton of reading done this summer, but here are a few books that you might find interesting or fun. The Psychopath Test I’m sort of emphatically not a fan of those lightweight nonfiction books we’ve been seeing a lot of in the past few years that would have made (and…

  • According to Googer

    This post is all Eddie’s fault. Things that are exquisitely fortuitous her sudden and unexpected departure with a drunken Hanes waving a gun timing positioning several kinds of parameters of the universe that they chose sh** to describe this newest of Beetoven’s competitors that Phaidon, the British publisher, is issuing new editions of Ungerer classics,…

  • Mt Washington

    Although I lived in the eastern USA for 10 years, all of my hiking experience has been in the west — so I was happy to take advantage of being in New England last week to climb Mt Washington, the highest mountain in that part of the world. The weather on Washington is famously erratic…

  • Cheating at Research

    My news feed this morning contained this article about an unpleasant local situation that has caused one person I know to lose her job (not because she was involved with the malfeasance, but as fallout from this lab shutting down). On the positive side (I’m going from the article and the investigating panel’s report here…