flynn002

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford ignited an impassioned debate about the presence of monuments to historical figures in our Universities. On the one hand, there are those who find it offensive that a major university should continue to commemorate a person such as Cecil Rhodes, given the historical reappraisal of his role in colonialism and suppression of African people. On the other hand, there are those who worry that removal of the Rhodes statue could be the thin end of a wedge that could lead to demands for Nelson to be removed from Trafalgar Square or Henry VIII from King’s College Cambridge. There are competing petitions online to remove and retain the Rhodes statue: with both having similar numbers of supporters. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign was back in the spotlight last week, when the Times Higher ran a lengthy article covering a range of controversial statues in Universities across the globe. A day before the article appeared, I had happened upon the Explorer'...

--> Replication studies have been much in the news lately, particularly in the field of psychology, where a great deal of discussion has been stimulated by the Reproducibility Project spearheaded by Brian Nosek. Replication of a study is an important way to test the the reproducibility and generalisability of the results. It has been a standard requirement for publication in reputable journals in the field of genetics for several years (see Kraft et al, 2009 ). However, at interdisciplinary boundaries, the need for replication may not be appreciated, especially where researchers from other disciplines include genetic associations in their analyses. I’m interested in documenting how far replications are routinely included in genetics papers that are published in neuroscience journals, and so I attempted to categorise a set of papers on this basis. I’ve encountered many unanticipated obstacles in the course of this study ( unintelligible papers and uncommunicative authors , to name ...

Together with some colleagues, I am reviewing a set of papers that combine genetic and neuroscience methods. We had noticed wide variation in methodological practices and thought it would be useful to evaluate the state of the field. Our ultimate aim of identifying both problems and instances of best practice, so that we could make some recommendations. I had anticipated that there would be wide differences between studies in statistical approaches and completeness of reporting, but I had not realised just what a daunting task it would be to review a set of papers. We had initially planned to include 50 papers, but we had to prune it down to 30, on realising just how much time we would need to spend reading and re-reading each article, just to extract some key statistics for a summary. In part the problem is the complexity that arises when you bring together two or more subject areas, each of which deals with complex, big datasets. I blogged recently about this. Another issue is incomp...