Category Archives: Science

EXPLAINING “THE END OF THE REIGN OF STATISTICS”. I think that what Michael Malone means by “the end of the reign of statistics” is more easily understood as “the end of the reign of making statistical inferences about populations by … Continue reading →

“THE END OF THE REIGN OF STATISTICS”—TONIGHT ON PBS. Michael S. Malone had an op ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday—February 23—with the headline “The Big-Data Future Has Arrived”. Malone writes about how big data—the crunching of mountains of … Continue reading →

GALAXIES. This article describes ten interesting galaxies. The casual mention of billions of years led me to look up this entry for “galaxy” in wikipedia, which says: “Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few thousand … stars … Continue reading →

WHAT CAME BEFORE WHAT EVER CAME BEFORE THE BIG BANG? Professor Michio Kaku had an article in the Wall Street Journal (February 13-14) which argues that the new instruments used for the detection of gravity waves may open up a … Continue reading →

SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS THAT CAN DETECT GRAVITATIONAL WAVES. This article on the sciencemag website by Adrian Cho announces the observation of a gravitational wave, a phenomenon which was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity but had never been observed until … Continue reading →

“SANDWICH”. This story by Ollie Gillman in the Daily Mail for February 10 provides a timely example of Professor Nisbett’s theory that “…minimal cues, which ought to have no part in determining your behavior, do have an impact.” An WNBC … Continue reading →

CAN A THEORY BE ESTABLISHED BY A LARGE NUMBER OF EXPERIMENTS THAT CAN’T BE REPLICATED? Professor Nisbett argues that even if many individual studies have not been replicable, a large number of studies in different experimental contexts which support an … Continue reading →

“THE CRUSADE AGAINST MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS”. Professor Nisbett has concluded that the villain in the reproducibility failures is multiple regression analysis, saying: “A huge range of science projects are done with multiple regression analysis. The results are often somewhere between … Continue reading →

HOW SHOULD SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS REACT IF THERE ARE REPRODUCIBILITY PROBLEMS WITH TWO THIRDS OF STUDIES?. I have tried to imagine the impact on researchers when a substantial percentage of the published work in their field is called into question. In … Continue reading →