flynn002

Pompeii mosaic Plato conversing with his students As time goes by, I am increasingly unable to enjoy big conferences. I'm not sure how much it's a change in me or a change in conferences, but my attention span shrivels after the first few talks. I don't think I'm alone. Look around any conference hall and everywhere you'll see people checking their email or texting. I usually end up thinking I'd be better off staying at home and just reading stuff. All this made me start to wonder, what is the point of conferences?  Interaction should be the key thing that a conference can deliver. I have in the past worked in small departments, grotting away on my own without a single colleague who is interested in what I'm doing. In that situation, a conference can reinvigorate your interest in the field, by providing contact with like-minded people who share your particular obsession. And for early-career academics, it can be fascinating to see the big names in action. Fo...

I read this piece in the Independent this morning and an icy chill gripped me. Fraudulent researchers have been damaging Britain's scientific reputation and we need to do something. But what? Sadly, it sounds like the plan is to do what is usually done when a moral panic occurs: increase the amount of regulation . So here is my, very quick, response – I really have lots of other things I should be doing, but this seemed urgent, so apologies for typos etc. According to the account in the Independent, Universities will not be eligible for research funding unless they sign up to a Concordat for Research Integrity which entails, among other things, that they "will have to demonstrate annually that each team member’s graphs and spreadsheets are precisely correct." We already have massive regulation around the ethics of research on human participants that works on the assumption that nobody can be trusted, so we all have to do mountains of paperwork to prove we aren't do...

A press release by Yale University Press Office was recently recycled on the Research Blogging website*, announcing that their researchers had made a major breakthroug h. Specifically they said "A new study of the genetic origins of dyslexia and other learning disabilities could allow for earlier diagnoses and more successful interventions, according to researchers at Yale School of Medicine. Many students now are not diagnosed until high school, at which point treatments are less effective." The breathless account by the Press Office is hard to square with the abstract of the paper, which makes no mention of early diagnosis or intervention, but rather focuses on characterising a putative functional risk variant in the DCDC2 gene, named READ1, and establishing its association with reading and language skills. I've discussed why this kind of thing is problematic in a previous blogpost, but perhaps a figure will help. The point is that in a large sample you can have a stat...

©www.cartoonstock.com Here's s question for researchers who use analysis of variance (ANOVA). Suppose I set up a study to see if one group (e.g. men) differs from another (women) on brain response to auditory stimuli (e.g. standard sounds vs deviant sounds – a classic mismatch negativity paradigm). I measure the brain response at frontal and central electrodes located on two sides of the head. The nerds among my readers will see that I have here a four-way ANOVA, with one between-subjects factor (sex) and three within-subjects factors (stimulus, hemisphere, electrode location). My hypothesis is that women have bigger mismatch effects than men, so I predict an interaction between sex and stimulus, but the only result significant at p < .05 is a three-way interaction between sex, stimulus and electrode location. What should I do? a) Describe this as my main effect of interest, revising my hypothesis to argue for a site-specific sex effect b) Describe the result as an exploratory...