You make Pearson cry

Three examples of misinterpreting correlations.

3rd variable illustration

'Healthier hearts' for cat owners

However the authors warned against impulsive cat purchases.

They said while cats may indeed have a calming effect, it was unclear whether the kind of people who opted for a cat in the first place may have a lower risk of heart attack.

read the BBC story

The quote directly addresses the third variable problem: could something else (such as a personality trait) cause both a lower risk of heart disease and cat ownership? But also, there's the directionality problem: could people who are less likely to develop heart disease prefer cats? If you think about this for a second, you realize that this explanation is either silly or the 3rd variable problem in disguise.

Aromatherapy

Putting pseudoscience claims to the test of controlled research.

Nostrums: Aromatherapy Rarely Stands Up to Testing
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
Published: March 11, 2008
When researchers set out to see if they could prove any of the claims about aromatherapy in the lab, most did not pan out.

One problem tho, the co-author's name: William B. Malarkey

Mythbusters

From XKCD

The skinny on Miss Cleo

Miss Cleo, the fake-Jamaican, psychic is back!

Now she's doing commercials for FUSE tv playing on her past notoriety. She also has a psychic website.

People just don't learn.

Here's a CourtTV article on the downfall of the 90's Miss Cleo.

And here's the script for a "live tarot reading."

Whose myth? Ph.D.'s, of course!

The following article was sent around among the York faculty this week:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/02/2008020101c/careers.html

This article makes three points about science and teaching:

1. Perspective

Us folks (professors, Ph.D.s, Psychologists) forget that we have a unique perspective about being human and being a college student: we were destined for Ph.D.s. That is, when we subjectively think about our experiences of being a plain old human or our experiences in college, they are being experienced by people who have the special traits which motivate and allow them to go on and excel intellectually.

We forget that we -- like everyone else -- are stuck in their own perspective.

The false consensus effect describes how everyone assumes a false consensus -- if I do x, most people do x. Saying, "teaching this say really had an effect on me in college, so therefore I should teach this way so my students will get the same benefit" is the false consensus effect!

2. Hypotheses

Ok 330 and 332 students: Is this (Clydesdale's work) empirical? Yes, he collects data systematically. Is it experimental? No. He creates no control conditions or other procedures to control for extraneous variables.

Students are often confused about sociology (Clydesdale's area) and social psychology. Both study normal people in social situations. The difference is in the level of study and methodology. Social Psychologists study individuals (i.e. psychology) while sociologists study groups. What attitudes do this social group hold? is a sociology question; how do people come to hold any attitude (the psychological process of attitude formation) is a social psychology question. Social Psychologists, as most psychologists, are experimental. We are more concerned about extraneous variables than realism. Sociologists are more concerned with realism (what is this real group thinking) than defending ourselves from extraneous variables.

3. Teaching

Clydesdale's conclusion is that classroom activities need to focus more on activities than lectures. Just wanted to mention that; my students are often uncomfortable with my teaching methods - for example, this week in Social Psych I won't lecture; I will do activities to teach basic psych skills.

What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests?

A Freakonomics Quorum

The New New Philosophy

Or is it social psychology?

Philosophers are increasingly eager to go out into the world and conduct experiments. But will their results settle any arguments?

Debunking The Commercial Press and Why Scientists Hate to Talk to the Media

The popular press ran a story over the weekend about the eventual split into two species of the human race. The sources cited were the preeminent London School of Economics and the work of Professor Oliver Curry. The story published as scientific fact is rebuked by Dr. Curry and this article explains how it all happened.

Searching for Literature Reviews

EBSCO has changed how to search for literature reviews again. Hopefully they stick to this method because it's very simple.

Click the Advanced Search tab.

Go down until you see the Methodology window:

click to enlarge

and select Literature Review. Go up and search as normal.

And EBSCO has always made it very easy to identify Lit Reviews on the abstract page:

click to enlarge

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

A magazine story from the NYT on how research (in this case medical) is communicated (and miscommunicated) to the public.

Much of what we’re told about diet, lifestyle and disease is based on epidemiologic studies. What if it is just bad science?

The catch with observational studies like the Nurses’ Health Study, no matter how well designed and how many tens of thousands of subjects they might include, is that they have a fundamental limitation. They can distinguish associations between two events — that women who take H.R.T. have less heart disease, for instance, than women who don’t. But they cannot inherently determine causation — the conclusion that one event causes the other; that H.R.T. protects against heart disease. As a result, observational studies can only provide what researchers call hypothesis-generating evidence — what a defense attorney would call circumstantial evidence.

Testing these hypotheses in any definitive way requires a randomized-controlled trial — an experiment, not an observational study — and these clinical trials typically provide the flop to the flip-flop rhythm of medical wisdom. Until August 1998, the faith that H.R.T. prevented heart disease was based primarily on observational evidence, from the Nurses’ Health Study most prominently. Since then, the conventional wisdom has been based on clinical trials — first HERS, which tested H.R.T. against a placebo in 2,700 women with heart disease, and then the Women’s Health Initiative, which tested the therapy against a placebo in 16,500 healthy women. When the Women’s Health Initiative concluded in 2002 that H.R.T. caused far more harm than good, the lesson to be learned, wrote Sackett in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, was about the “disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence” for shaping medical and public-health policy. The contentious wisdom circa mid-2007 — that estrogen benefits women who begin taking it around the time of menopause but not women who begin substantially later — is an attempt to reconcile the discordance between the observational studies and the experimental ones. And it may be right. It may not. The only way to tell for sure would be to do yet another randomized trial, one that now focused exclusively on women given H.R.T. when they begin their menopause.

why go to college?

click to enlarge & read

click to enlarge & read

click to enlarge & read

Real Behaviors in Virtual Reality?

The "corrupted blood" disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.

But, there are ethical/methodological problems in using virtual reality to study such behaviors. For example, one reason the WoW players' behavior in the game was similar to real behavior is that the WoW players cared about their characters because they had an investment in them. Thus, it would be unethical to release a disease in a virtual game of such stakes. If the players don't care about the virtual world, then their behaviors would more likely to be artificial - and not as useful to the researcher.

New study finds problems with Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs

A Congressional inquiry released in December of 2004 found that over 80% of the abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula used by over two-thirds of federal grantees in 2003, contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health," said Bill Smith, vice president for public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). "It is unacceptable that the federal government continues to dump millions of taxpayer dollars into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that contain false and misleading information, censor critical sexual health information, and contain scientific errors," Smith continued.

A Baby-Proof Method Tracks Just Where Little Ones Look

This is for 330 students doing research papers on developmental psych; this is how we measures if infants are aware of something.

New technology makes it easier to follow a baby’s gaze and to decipher the developing mind by looking at infants’ eye movements.

- yawn --

'Yawning may keep us 'on the ball'

IVs? DVs? (my answers below)





















At the vary least:
IV=experimental condition; levels = breathed nose, breathed mouth, ice pack, room-temp pack, hot pack
watching a video of people yawning was a control - all subjects watched this
DV = # of yawns (which had to have some type of operational definition - opened mouth wide, made non-verbal sound; and I'd have two raters and check to see if there was inter-rater reliability)

I suspect they did this:
IV1= video: people yawning/people not yawning
IV2= breathed: nose/mouth
IV3 = pack: hot/room/cold

same DV

science quote

"The job of a scientist is to generate wrong ideas as fast as possible."

-- Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize winning physicist

Sex abstinence classes

US students attending sexual abstinence classes are no more likely to abstain from sex than those who do not, according to a new study.
Participants in special programmes were just as likely to have sex a few years later as those who did not attend.

Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.
The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Time in the animal world

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/science/03time.html?ex=1333425600&en=c983aa1f96b5a3c5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Several experiments are described. Notice how difficult it was to design experiments to test the hypothesis and how the experimental results are interpreted to support the hypotheses.