flynn002

Inappropriate use of journal impact factors has been much in the spotlight. The impact factor is not only a poor indicator of research quality but it is also blamed for delaying publication of good science, and even encouraging dishonesty .   My own experience is in line with this: some of my most highly-cited work has appeared in relatively humble journals. In the age of the internet, there are three things that determine if a paper gets noticed: it needs to be tagged so that it will be found on a computer search, it needs to be accessible and not locked behind a paywall, and it needs to   be well-written and interesting. While I'm not a slave to metrics, I am, like all academics these days, fascinated by the citation data provided by sources such as Google Scholar, and pleased when I see that something I have written has been cited by others. The other side of the coin is the depression that ensues when   I find that a paper into which I have distilled my deepest wisdom...

The tap is a simple but genius piece of design. You turn a handle one way and water flows. You turn it the other way, and the water stops. The bathplug is even simpler. You find a pliable, waterproof substance and cut it to fit exactly into the hole out of which the water flows, and you equip it with handle or chain on top that you can grasp to remove it. Hotels the world over, however, are not satisfied with such simplicity. They conspire to make the task of producing water and containing it ever more baffling. I had wondered whether they were just more focused on appearance than function, but this website makes it clear that it's deliberate: It's worth quoting the blurb in full: " A lot of attention in the design world is focused on creating products that are intuitive and easy to use, but sometimes a little ambiguity can be a good thing. Designed for use in restaurant and hotel bathrooms these taps embrace ambiguity to create a sense of intrigue to provide a more engagi...

Psychology encompasses a wide range of subject areas, including social, clinical and developmental psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The costs of doing different types of psychology vary hugely. If you just want to see how people remember different types of material, for instance, or test children's understanding of numerosity, this can be done at very little cost. For most of the psychology I did as an undergraduate, data collection did not involve complex equipment, and data analysis was pretty straightforward - certainly well within the capabilities of a modern desktop computer. The main cost for a research proposal in this area would be for staff to do data collection and analysis. Neuroscience, however, is a different matter. Most kinds of brain imaging require not only expensive equipment, but also a building to house it and staff to maintain it, and all or part of these costs will be passed on to researchers. Furthermore, data analysis is usually highly tech...

© www.CartoonStock.com Here's an interesting test for those on Twitter. You see a tweet giving a link to an interesting topic. You click on the link and see it's a YouTube piece. Do you (a) feel pleased that it's something you can watch or (b) immediately lose interest. The answer is likely to depend on content, but also on how long it is. Typically, if I see a video is longer than 3 minutes, I'll give up unless it looks super-interesting. Test #2 is for those of you who are scientists. You have to give a presentation about a recent piece of work to a non-specialist audience. How long do you think you will need? (a) one hour; (b) 20 minutes; (c) 10 minutes; (d) 3 minutes. If you're anything like me, there's a disconnect between your reactions to these different scenarios. The time you feel you need to communicate to an audience is much greater than the time you are willing to spend watching others. Obviously, it's not a totally fair comparison: I'm willi...

Today's Time Newsfeed carries a remarkable story: parents of children attending Catholic schools in Calgary were sent a special letter to accompany details of a vaccination programme against human papillomavirus (HPV), which protects against cervical cancer. In it, local bishops wrote: "Although school-based immunization delivery systems generally result in high numbers of students completing immunization, a school-based approach to vaccination sends a message that early sexual intercourse is allowed.” I find this amazing for several reasons: There's a complete failure to understand what affects teenagers' behaviour. Do the bishops seriously think that teenaged girls who are thinking of having sex say to themselves "Oh, wait a minute. I might get HPV. Let's not do it." Potential consequences of sex include a host of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as pregnancy. If these don't put girls off, then why should a risk of HPV?  HPV is a sexually tra...

Experimental psychology depends heavily on statistics, but psychologists don’t always agree about the best ways of analyzing data. Take the following problem: I have two groups each of 30 children, dyslexics and controls. I give them a test of auditory discrimination and find a significant difference between the groups, with the dyslexic mean being lower. I want to see whether reading ability is related to the auditory task. I compute the correlation between the auditory measure and reading, and find it is .42, which in a sample of 64 cases is significant at the .001 level. I write up the results, concluding that poor auditory skill is a risk factor for poor reading. But reviewers are critical. So what’s wrong with this? I’ll deal quickly with two obvious points. First, there is the well-worn phrase that correlation does not equal causation. The correlation could reflect a causal link from auditory deficit to poor reading, but we need also to consider other causal routes, as I’ll illus...

Based on: King & Bearman (2011) American Sociological Review, 76 (2), 320-346;  Data from birth and diagnostic records for all children born in California 1992-2000 Everyone agrees there has been a remarkable increase in autism diagnosis across the world. There is, however, considerable debate about the reasons for this. Three very different kinds of explanation exist. Explanation #1 maintains that something in our modern environment has come along to increase the risk of autism. There are numerous candidates, as indicated in this b logpost by Emily Willingham .  Explanation #2 sees the risks as largely biological or genetic, with changing patterns of reproduction altering prevalence rates, either because of assortative mating (not much evidence, in my view) or because of an increase in older parents (more plausible).  Explanation #3 is very different: it says the increase is not a real increase - it’s just a change in what we count as autism. This has been termed ‘di...