The Still Not Significant blog lists lots of ways to mutter, in professional language, if your research findings are statistically marginal. Among them: What to do if your p-value is just over the arbitrary threshold for ‘significance’ of p=0.05? … The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as […]
Tag: research
“No shit Sherlock science – why it’s still worth it”
“No shit Sherlock science – why it’s still worth it, ” politely screams the headline on an essay by Justin Waring, Professor of Organisational Sociology at University of Nottingham, in The Conversation. Waring begins: One of the great fears for scientists is that their work will be met with derision, especially when someone has been […]
Hospital study pushes the buttons of bacteria-phobes
Canadian elevator buttons just might hold the key to a return in popularity for the “anti-microbial” cleaning products industry. Recently, three doctors in Toronto wrote a little study about the bacteria they found on hospital elevator buttons. The great washed public, reading that report (or scary reports about that report — maybe scarier than the one you are reading right […]
A call to help unexpected discoveries get discovered
Several well-known, much-respected scientists published this letter in The Guardian: We need more scientific mavericks “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” said Richard Feynman in the 1960s. But times change…. [But now,] applicants’ proposals must convince their peers that they serve national policies and are the best possible uses of resources. [A large […]