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.
- 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 …
- The complexity of measuring a ‘simple’ behavior (novelty preference tests seem terrible) - The replication crisis isn't just about sample size and statistical inference. Another key issue is measurement: the process of turning observations into quantitative statements about our sample. It's tricky. In many cases we've run before we learned to walk, adopting methods of measurement without adequately determining sources of error and bias, …
- Pre-Print – The New Statistics for Better Science - We have a new preprint on how the New Statistics can save the world (sort of): https://psyarxiv.com/3mztg It's for a special issue of the American Statistician on the them of "Beyond p values". We welcome your feedback on via email, twitter (@TheNewStats), or via comment on this blog.
- Open Science Goes to the Antarctic–Well, Nearly - Have you ever met a Professor of Seaweed? No, nor had I, but now I have: Catriona Hurd. More about her in a moment. I'm just back from two highly enjoyable days visiting IMAS, the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, part of the University of Tasmania. IMAS occupies an …
- Not replicable, but citable - What happens to the reputation of a paper when the results reported cannot be replicated? Here's a graph of citations/year from two studies--an original and a replication study that found little to no effect. It's just one example, but it doesn't seem like the replication study has had much impact …
- It’s not all bad news - Here's a cool pre-print examining the quality of evidence in studies of the genetics of short-term memory in fruit flies (Tumkaya, Ott, & Claridge-Chang, 2018). The paper conducts a meta-analysis of different genes that have been linked to altered olfactory memory. There's lots of good news. Most genes were identified …
- Banning p values? The journal ‘Political Analysis’ does it - Back in the 1980s, epidemiologist Kenneth Rothman was a leader of those trying to persuade researchers across medicine and the biosciences to use CIs routinely. The campaign was successful to the extent that the International Council of Medical Editors stated that CIs, or equivalent, should always be reported and that …
- Pre-registration challenge met! - I (Bob) have met the pre-registration challenge! I pre-registered a set of replication studies (Calin-Jageman, 2018), and now that they are published, I've received confirmation from the Center for Open Science that I have met the challenge--a check for $1,000 will arrive in my mail around July 1st. What a …
- A bracing call for better science when linking genes to brain function - There's a fantastic editorial out in the European Journal of Neuroscience (Mitchell, 2018) arguing that standards need to be much higher in the field of neurogenomics--that's the study of how genes relate to differences in brain structure and function. The editorial is spot on--it concisely reviews the issues of low …
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