flynn002

The Thatcher Illusion (see below) I'm a great fan of pre-registration of studies. It is, to my mind, the most effective safeguard against p-hacking and publication bias , the twin scourges that have led to the literature being awash with false positive findings. When combined with a more formal process, as in Registered Reports , it also allows researchers to benefit from reviewer expertise before they do the study, and to take control of the publication timeline . But one salient objection to pre-registration comes up time and time again: if we pre-register our studies it will destroy the creative side of doing science , and turn it instead into a dull, robotic, cheerless process. We will have to anticipate what we might find, and close our eyes to what the data tell us. Now this is both silly and untrue. For a start, there's nobody stopping anyone from doing fairly unstructured exploration, which may be the only sensible approach when entering a completely new area. The m...

I'll say this for the White Paper on Higher Education " Success as a Knowledge Economy ": it's not as bad as the Green Paper that preceded it. The Green Paper had me abandoning my Christmas shopping for furious tirades against the errors and illogicality that were scattered among the exhausted clichés and management speak (see here , here , here , here and here ). So appalled was I at the shoddy standards evident in the Green Paper that I actually went through all the sources quoted in the first section of the White Paper to contact the authors to ask if they were happy with how their work had been reported. I'm pleased to say that out of 12 responses I got, ten were entirely satisfied, and one had just a minor quibble. But what about the twelfth, you ask. What indeed? When justifying the need for a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) last November, Jo Johnson used some extremely dodgy statistical analysis of the National Student Survey to support his case that t...

©Cartoonstock Twitter and Facebook were up in arms last week. "Merck wants its money back if University research is wrong" was the headline to the article that set off the outrage. Commentators various described the idea as dangerous, preposterous and outrageous, and a 'worrying development', while at the same time accusing Merck of hypocrisy for its history of misleading claims about its vaccines and drugs . In the comments beneath the article, similar points were made: 'No way any academic institutions will agree to this'; 'If you want absolute truth take up religion'; 'Merck wants risk-free profit'. But if you follow the link to the article that the story was based on, it's clear that the headline in the Technology Review piece was misleading. For a start, the author of the piece, Michael Rosenblatt, was clear that he was not representing an official position. Under 'competing interests' we are told: " M.R. is an employee o...