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.
- 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 …
- The persistence of NHST: “Wilfully stupid”? - I recently gave a research talk to Psychology at La Trobe, my old University--although I now live an hour out of the city and rarely visit the campus. I decided to turn things around from my previous few talks: Instead of starting with Open Science then discussing the move from …
- Castles made of sand in the land of cancer research - Not all problems with scientific practice are statistical. Sometimes, methods and protocols are introduced and accepted without sufficient vetting and quality control. Hopefully this is rare, but in the biological sciences there is an ongoing worry that too many 'accepted' techniques might not be well founded. Here is one striking …
- p intervals: Replicate and p is likely to be *very* different! - The Significance Roulette videos (here and here) are based on the probability distribution of the p value, in various situations. There's more to the second video than I mentioned in my recent post about it. The video pictures the distribution of replication p, which is the p value of a single replication …
- Significance Roulette 2 - In my post of a couple of days ago I gave the link to Significance Roulette 1, a video that explains how to generate the roulette wheel for a 'typical experiment', by which I meant an independent groups experiment, N = 32 in each group, with half a standard deviation difference between …
- Significance Roulette 1 - If you run an experiment, obtain p = .05, then repeat the experiment--exactly the same but with a new sample--what p value are you likely to get? The answer, surprisingly, is just about any value! In other words, the sampling variability of the p value is enormous, although most people …
- The long road towards clinical trials registries – Sackler Colloquim on Reproducibility Field Report 4 - Science only works if we have the whole story. This is especially important in clinical trials, where the results of these studies are used to guide medical practice. Unfortunately, getting the whole story can be difficult--there are strong incentives to bury negative results. This radically distorts the published information on …
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