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The Valley of Shit
Having only started my PhD studies a few months ago, I am still eager and highly motivated to finish what I have just started. However, first doubts on the topic and the quality of my work already came (and went again, luckily), so I could relate to this post on the Valley of Shit: The…
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Replicability, Data Quality and Bayesian Methods
On the About page I wrote, that I blog about things I come across while researching for my PhD. So, you may very well ask what this PhD is supposed to be about. For the interested reader — researchers and the uninitiated alike —, here is some overview on my current plans and research focus.
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ASA statement on p-Values: Improving valid statistical reasoning
A lot of debate (and part of my thesis) revolve around replicability and the proper use of inferential methods. The American Statistical Association has now published a statement on the use and the interpretation of p-Values (freely available, yay). It includes six principles and how to handle p-Values. None of them are new in a theoretical…
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Scientific Hoaxes and Bad Academic Writing
A new case of scientific hoax, that happened six years ago, is currently circulating: Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of…
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Mixing up Standard Errors and Standard Deviations
Over at the Non Significance blog, the author describes the case of a paper that has some strange descriptive statistics: What surprised me were the tiny standard deviations for some of the Variable 1 and 2, especially in combination with the range given. In the blog post, the author outlines his approach to make sense…
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Birth Rates and Life Expectancy
Bad enough, that we have to read und hear current failures of thought by right wing populists (article in German only) and many relativizations (comments in German only). It seems like 70 years of History class did not help to stop utter racism in public debate. What, however, sparked my interest was the question what correlations…
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Sorting Data independently before Regression
This thread on StackExchange is circling around my Twitter timeline today and I couldn’t resist sharing it here: Suppose we have data set (X_i, Y_i) with n points. We want to perform a linear regression, but first we sort the X_i values and the Y_i values independently of each other, forming data set(X_i, Y_j). Is…
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Good Science – Bad Science? Panel Discussion at the University of Cologne
After I found out about the panel discussion on Good Scientific Practice at the University of Cologne via Twitter, I joined yesterday to watch the discussion as it was closely related to my thesis’ topic. The panel was filled with five professors and one junior professors from different faculties1, whose positions were related to “good…
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Two retractions as end of investigation
The German Society of Psychology (DGPs) today announced that the court of honor has put an end to its investigation on Jens Förster after they mutually agreed to the retraction of two papers in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General:1 By this [agreement] the proceedings against Prof. Dr. Jens Förster at the court of honor at the…
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We have more than one Genome
Inspired by a recently published article in the ZEIT (in German only), I did some further reads on the topic of mosaicism. The bottom line: contrary to common belief and what is taught in text books (and University courses), the human body does not consist of cells with a single, personal genome, but instead each cell or…