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.
- Red, Romance, and Replication - I have a new replication paper out today, a collaboration with DU student Elle Lehmann (Lehmann & Calin-Jageman, 2017) . The OSF page for the paper with all the materials and data is here: https://osf.io/j3fyq/ (Calin-Jageman & Lehmann, 2015) The paper replicates a set of previous findings showing that the …
- “The best conference…”: More about SIPS - Here's more about the recent SIPS Conference, from my colleague Fiona Fidler who was clever enough to be there. (Some background: Fiona, of The University of Melbourne, is among other things a psychologist, ecologist, and historian of science. Her PhD thesis, From statistical significance to effect estimation: Statistical reform in …
- Today’s news from SIPS: Getting better… - A while ago I wrote about SIPS. Today came an email following the second SIPS meeting, a couple of weeks ago at COS in Charlottesville, VA. Below is some of the email: "We had an invigorating conference, and are humbled by the amount of energy and support from all of …
- p values and outrageous results - If you were researching a muscle-building supplement and read that a test of the supplement produced an increase in muscle mass by 200% within a month, you'd be right to be skeptical. Perhaps randomization had broken down, perhaps there was a problem of measurement, or perhaps differential dropout had skewed …
- Open Science is not all the same: What archaeology can teach us - There's no simple dot point way to adopt Open Science and improve the trustworthiness of science. A fascinating story from archaeology illustrates that reality nicely. First, the story. Archaeologists have long studied when the out-of-Africa spreading of modern humans first reached Australia. About 47,000 years ago has been the recent …
- Pictures of uncertainty: Dancing with Pierre in Paris - A while back I wrote a post about Pierre Dragicevic, an HCI researcher in Paris who for years has been working to persuade researchers in his field to adopt better statistical methods. I wrote about his wonderful talk that presents lots of different dances--not only of means, but p values, …
- Danny Kahneman: From p values to Nobel Prize - You meet a red-headed person who is a bit short-tempered then, later, another who is similarly touchy. You start to believe that red hair signals 'watch out'. Really? You are leaping to a conclusion from an extremely small sample! But humans seem to have a strong tendency to draw conclusions …
- Funnel plots, publication bias, and the power of blogs - On March 21, 2017 Uri Simonsohn revealed an interesting new blog post on funnel plots, arguing based on some simulations that they are not as useful for detecting publication bias as might be thought http://datacolada.org/58. It's an interesting post, and worth reading. As far as I could tell, though, the …
- To what extent do new statistical guidelines change statistical practice? - In 2012 the Psychonomic Society (PS) adopted a set of forward-thinking guidelines for the use of statistics in its journals . The guidelines stressed the use of a priori sample-size planning, the reporting of effect sizes, and the use of confidence intervals for both raw scores and standardized effect-size measures. Nice! To …
- From NHST to the New Statistics — How do we get there? - APS just wrapped up. Geoff and I were privileges to help host a symposium on making progress moving the field away from p values towards the New Statistics. Our co-conspirators were fellow text-book author Susan Nolan, Psychological Science editor Stephen Lindsay, and stats teaching wizard Tamarah Smith. We each offered …
- Getting the whole story: journals could be more encouraging - Even though replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, psychology journals rarely publish direct replications (though that situation may be changing). Why not? Is it self-censorship, with authors not bothering to conduct or submit such studies? Or is it that the journals discourage replications? Here's a paper with some …
- from the APS Convention in Boston - Bob and I are in Boston this weekend for the annual APS Convention. It's great to catch up, and discuss a million things about ITNS and this blog, and our future plans. Our publisher told us yesterday that early signs from the field are super-encouraging, which is great. It can …
- Confirmatory Research – A special issue of JESP - Catching up a bit, but in November of 2016 the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology published a special issue dedicated just to confirmatory research. http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/science/journal/00221031/67/supp/C The whole issue is well-worth reading: There is an excellent guide to pre-registration (ostensibly for social psychologists, but really for anyone). (van ’t Veer …
- A cool new journal is Open - APS (The Association for Psychological Science) recently launched its sixth journal: Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. A dreadful mouthful of a title--why not drop 'Advances in' for a start--but it looks highly promising. Maybe it will become known as AIMPIPS? The foundation editor is Dan Simons, perhaps …
- Publishing unexpected results as a moral obligation for scientists - Amen! A revised European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity now specifically calls on researchers and publishers to not bury negative results. Specifically, the guidelines formulate this principle for publication and dissemination: Authors and publishers consider negative results to be as valid as positive findings for publication and dissemination. My …
- What the datasaurus tells us: Data pictures are cool - In various places in ITNS, especially Chapter 11 (Correlation) we discuss how important it is to make good pictures of data, to reveal what's really going on. Calculating a few summary statistics--or even CIs--often just doesn't do the job. Many statistics textbooks use Anscombe's Quartet to make the point: the …
- Now for some good news: SIPS - The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) held its first meeting last year, with around 100 good folks attending. Working groups have been--would you believe--working hard since then. The second meeting is 30 July to 1 August, in Charlottesville VA. More than 250 are expected to participate. Today's …
- Methodological awakening: backlash against the backlash - Science has had some rough times lately, no doubt. No need to rehearse the many findings indicating that we have some problems that need a fixing. As Will Gervais put it, we're in the midst of a "methodological awakening". The good news is this is normal. Science is always self-critical, …
- Replication problems are not competence problems - Why do some replication studies fail to produce the expected results? There are lots of possible reasons: the expectation might have been poorly founded, the replication study could have been under-powered, there could be some unknown moderator, etc. Sure, but let's be real for a moment. We all know that …
- Don’t fool yourself: Facilitated Communication continues to be a cautionary tale - When I (Bob) was an undergrad, I took methods/stats in the psychology department. I wasn't a psych major, but I wanted to take a class on brain and behavior, and I was told I had to take methods/stats first. At the time, I had no plans on pursuing a career …
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