Welcome to the ITNS blog, our internet home designed to help students, teachers, and others get the 
most out of Introduction to the New Statistics. For more information about the book, see the publisher’s page for ITNS here. At that page, click ‘Look inside’ to see the Contents, Preface, and Chapter 1 in full.
What will you find here?
- Blog posts from Geoff and Bob with musings and new articles related to the New Statistics and Open Science
- Information about the first book, Understanding the New Statistics
- Previous versions of ESCI: Use the ‘ESCI’ tab at the top of this page
Looking for instructor resources? These are on the publisher’s companion website for the book here.
Are you a student looking to download ESCI, data sets, flashcards, or other resources? These are on the publisher’s companion website for the book here.
- Positive Controls for Psychology – My pitch for a SIPS project - Positive controls are one of the most useful tools for ensuring interpretable and fruitful research. Strangely, though, positive controls are rarely used in psychological research. That's a shame, but also an opportunity--it would be an easy but substantial improvement for psychological researchers to start using regularly using positive controls. I …
- Precision for Planning: Great New Developments - --updated with a link from Ken Kelley to access the functions in the paper, 6/28/2018-- In a new-statistics world, the best way to choose N for a study is to use precision for planning (PfP), also known as accuracy in parameter estimation (AIPE). Both our new-statistics books explain PfP and …
- Effect Sizes for Open Science - For the last 20 years or so, many journals have emphasised the reporting of effect sizes. The new statistics emphasised also the reporting of CIs on those effect sizes. Now Open Science places effect sizes, CIs, and their interpretation centre stage. Here's a recent article with interesting discussion and much …
- APS in San Fran 3: Workshop on Teaching the New Stats - Tamarah Smith and Bob presented a workshop on Teaching the New Stats to an almost sold-out crowd. I wasn't there, but by all reports it went extremely well. Such a workshop seems to me a terrific way to help interested stats teachers introduce the new stats into their own teaching. …
- APS in San Fran 2: Symposium on Teaching the New Stats - Our symposium was titled Open Science and Its Statistics: What We Need to Teach Now. The room wasn't large, but it was packed, standing room only. I thought the energy was terrific. There were four presentations, as below. Bob and Tamarah Smith have set up an OSF page on Getting …
- APS in San Fran 1: Open Science is Maturing - It was, as ever, a great pleasure to catch up with Bob last weekend. We were in San Francisco for the APS Convention. That convention has been for the last five years or so a hotbed of discussion about Open Science--many times I felt I was witnessing decisions about what …
- The Perils of MTurk, Part 1: Fuel to the Publication Bias Fire? - It's not going to be a popular opinion, but I think MTurk has become a danger to sound psychological science. This breaks my heart. MTurk has helped transform my career for the better. Moreover, MTurk participants are amazing: they are primarily diligent and honest folks with a genuine interest in …
- Tony Hak 1950-2018: Champion of Better Methods, Better Statistics - It was a shock to receive the very sad news that Tony Hak died last week, unexpectedly. Too young! And only 3 years into an active retirement. Tony was an Emeritus Associate Professor, having retired in 2015 from the Department of Technology and Operations Management of RSM, the Rotterdam School …
- Badges, Badges, Badges: Open Science on the March - Here are two screen pics from today's notice about the latest issue of Psychological Science. Four of the first five articles earned all three badges, including Pre-reg! Gold! (OK, by showing just those five I'm cherry picking, but other articles also have lots of badges and, in any case, what …
- ITNS–A New Review on Amazon - The ITNS page on Amazon (U.S.) is here. Scroll down to see the 4 reviews by readers. Recently a five-star review was added by Edoardo Zamuner. Here it is: "I am an experimental psychologist with training in NHST. Cumming’s book has helped me realise that my understanding of key statistical …
- It’s not just Psychology: Questionable Research Practices in Ecology - Today's fine article from The Conversation is: Our survey found ‘questionable research practices’ by ecologists and biologists – here’s what that means The authors are Fiona Fidler and Hannah Fraser, of The University of Melbourne. Fidler and Fraser surveyed 807 researchers (494 ecologists and 313 evolutionary biologists) about their use …
- We’ve Been Here Before: The Replication Crisis over the Pygmalion Effect - [UPDATE: Thanks to twitter I came across this marvelous book(Jussim, 2012) that does a great job explaining the Pygmalion effect, the controversy around it, and the overall state of research on expectancy effects. I've amended parts of this post based on what I've learned from Chapter 3 of the book...looking forward …
- The National Association of Scholars Weighs in on ‘The Irreproducibility Crisis’ - STOP PRESS: Since first writing this post I've discovered that all may not be as it seems--especially to me at the other end of the Earth. As ever, we need to be vigilant for any dark forces wishing to use the replication crisis as an excuse to discredit science. Science …
- The Beautiful Face of a Confidence Interval: The Cat’s Eye Picture - Pawel (Pav) Kalinowski and Jerry Lai completed their PhDs a few years back. A recently published Frontiers article (citation below) reports what was primarily Pav's research on how people understand confidence intervals (CIs). The short version is "for many people, not very well, but there is hope". Kalinowski, P., Lai, …
- Measuring Heterogeneity in Meta-Analysis: The Diamond Ratio (DR) - This is a post about the Diamond Ratio (DR), a simple measure of the extent of heterogeneity in a meta-analysis. We introduced the DR in ITNS. But first, some background. Fixed Effect (FE) model for meta-analysis The diamond at the bottom of the forest plot picturing a meta-analysis reports the …
- Randomistas: Dare we hope for evidence-based decisions in public life? - I've just listened to a great 20-min podcast, published by The Conversation. The podcast is here. It's an interview by my colleague Fiona Fidler with Anthony Leigh, about his recently released book: Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World. Published by Black Inc. and La Trobe University Press. Andrew Leigh …
- Sample-size planning – a short video - Here's a short talk I gave at the 2017 Society for Neuroscience meeting on sample size planning. The talk discusses: Why you should plan your sample sizes in advance What not to do (how some common approaches can lead you astray) What an effect size is and why it's important …
- Open Science: This Time in Orthodontics - Last month it was the Antarctic Scientists, this month the Orthodontists, and once again I had a most enjoyable time. Lindsay my wife and I are just back from 5 days in Sydney. I was speaking at the 26th Australian Orthodontic Congress, which is the biennial meeting of the Australian …
- Why effect sizes? A tutorial (especially for Neuroscientists) - The New Statistics emphasizes effect sizes, confidence intervals, meta-analysis, and Open Science. There's a lot of momentum to adopt this change of focus. For example, the APA recently released new guidelines for reporting quantitative research and throughout it emphasizes reporting of "effect sizes and confidence intervals" (Appelbaum et al., 2018). It …
- What Medicine Can Teach Us About Low Probabilities: A Personal Experience - I'm recently home after 10 days in hospital. It was meant to be a simple procedure, home the next morning, but two low probability complications arose. I was largely out to it for a few days, but then I was fascinated to watch as my doctors monitored numerous measures, ordered …
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