Welcome
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 ‘Preview this title’ 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.
- Cardiac Surgery: Yet One More Research Field Highly Critical of p Values - Replacement heart valves, bypasses, transplants: Cardiac surgery research has given us these life-saving goodies, and more. Now this vital research field has joined many others in appreciating the damage that reliance on p values can bring. Our critical review (here) in the Journal of Cardiac Surgery has just been released… …
Cardiac Surgery: Yet One More Research Field Highly Critical of p Values Read More »
- Psychological Inoculation? Prebunking? Assessing the Bad News Game That Targets Fake News - Trying to debunk a conspiracy theory by presenting facts and evidence often doesn’t work ☹ Perhaps prebunking, by giving insight into why fake news can appear credible, might help? To put it another way, psychological inoculation presents a mild form of misinformation, preferably with explanation, in the hope of building… …
- The New APA Style: Try to Contain Your Excitement—and Watch Out for Dud Copies - This is a post for the nerds, fine people that we are. Actually, everyone needs to think about reporting style, especially for statistical stuff. Seventh edition, 2020 Sixth edition, 2010 The APA Publication Manual is the bible of APA Style, also perhaps the bane of some students’ lives. In ITNS… …
The New APA Style: Try to Contain Your Excitement—and Watch Out for Dud Copies Read More »
- The Myth (?) of the Lucky Golf Ball Lives On, Alas - The APS has just given a kick along to what’s most likely a myth: The Lucky Golf Ball. Alas! Golf.com recently ran a story titled ‘Lucky’ golf items might actually work, according to study. The story told of Tiger Woods sinking a very long putt to send the U.S. Open… …
The Myth (?) of the Lucky Golf Ball Lives On, Alas Read More »
- What Should We Call Our Estimate of Cohen’s δ: d-unbiased, Hedges’ g, or Something Else? - In ITNS we used ‘dunbiased’ to refer to the debiased estimate of Cohen’s δ, which is Cohen’s standardised effect size in the population. In UTNS I used ‘dunb’. But now ‘Hedges’s g’ seems to be gaining currency as a label for that debiased estimate, despite g having been introduced by… …
What Should We Call Our Estimate of Cohen’s δ: d-unbiased, Hedges’ g, or Something Else? Read More »
- Which Standardised Effect Size Measure Is Best When Variances Are Unequal? - A great new preprint by Marie Delacre (at Université Libre de Bruxelles, marie.delacre@ulb.be) and colleagues (Daniel Lakens, Christophe Ley, Limin Liu, & Christophe Leys) throws valuable light on this question. The title is: Why Hedges’ gs* based on the non-pooled standard deviation should be reported with Welch’s t-test The issue… …
Which Standardised Effect Size Measure Is Best When Variances Are Unequal? Read More »
- Teaching Statistics: Great Talks and Resources Now Online - This conference (as in pic below) was planned as a gathering of, maybe, 30 folks. But then it had to go online and the organisers (Kevin Peters and Fegal O’Hagan, of Trent University, and Rob Cribbie, of York University) found themselves scrambling to expand their Zoom limit, as more than… …
Teaching Statistics: Great Talks and Resources Now Online Read More »
- The Journal of Physiology Adopts Better Practices and Excoriates p Values - In brief The Journal of Physiology is embracing a number of Open Science practices and has just published an editorial highly critical of the p value. Yay! In less brief Simon Gandevia, of the NeuRA research institute in Sydney, has been awarded Honorary Membership of The Century Citation Club of… …
The Journal of Physiology Adopts Better Practices and Excoriates p Values Read More »
- jamovi—and esci—Just Keep Powering Ahead - Two beautiful numbers: 55,000 – the approx. number of times jamovi was downloaded in March 2,500 – the approx. number of times esci was added to jamovi in March Each of these is about double the number for three months earlier! At this rate, everyone on Earth will have their… …
- A Year Ago eNeuro Encouraged Estimation: It’s Working - Bob tweeted about a new eNeuro editorial. It’s a one-year progress report on encouragement for eNeuro authors to use estimation: fully 52 of 100 articles included estimation information! Bob’s tweet, 12 April 2021 The editorial is short, and a great read. Christophe Bernard, the editor-in-chief, includes links to his 2019… …
A Year Ago eNeuro Encouraged Estimation: It’s Working Read More »
- Cohen’s d for the Paired Design: A Better Way to Find the Confidence Interval - I’ve just read a great series of papers by Denis Cousineau and Jean-Christophe Goulet-Pelletier. They propose a new way to calculate a CI on Cohen’s d in the paired design (e.g., a pre-post study). It’s an approximation, but they show that it’s excellent. Great! We’ll be using it in esci… …
Cohen’s d for the Paired Design: A Better Way to Find the Confidence Interval Read More »
- What N Will Give Me the Precision I Want? Gordon’s New Pictures Tell All - We're delighted to release precision for planning (PfP), the sixth component of esci web. This completes esci web as currently planned. To access, click esci web and then the precision for planning button. Please let's know how you like it, and give us your suggestions. Precision for Planning tells us… …
What N Will Give Me the Precision I Want? Gordon’s New Pictures Tell All Read More »
- Gordon Does It Again: See the Correlations Dance - Here comes one more goodie from Gordon Moore: dance r. This follows his wonderful dances, introduced here, and three other goodies introduced here. Have a play with dance r, the latest component in esci web. Please tell us what you think. From dance r. Correlation in the population (grey cloud at top) is .80.… …
Gordon Does It Again: See the Correlations Dance Read More »
- WORLD STATISTICS DAY: “Connecting the world with data we can trust” (also, Open Science) - It's World Statistics Day, with the tagline "Connecting the world with data we can trust". Yes, Tuesday 20 October is the day. (Also the birthday of Lindy, my wife. Maybe there's a message there somewhere.) Science is under attack around the world, and vital data are being ignored--or totally rejected.… …
WORLD STATISTICS DAY: “Connecting the world with data we can trust” (also, Open Science) Read More »
- Goodies from Gordon: ‘distributions’, ‘d picture’, ‘correlation’–all part of ‘esci web’ - I'm delighted to say we're releasing three new goodies from Gordon Moore: distributions, d picture, and correlation. These follow his wonderful dances introduced here. As I explained, ITNS2 will be accompanied by Bob’s data analysis software, esci, in R, and Gordon’s web-based simulations and tools, all of which are based on, and… …
Goodies from Gordon: ‘distributions’, ‘d picture’, ‘correlation’–all part of ‘esci web’ Read More »
- “Which of the Books Should I Buy?” - ...as I was asked recently. A question every author loves to hear. The short answer is ITNS, preferably to be followed by ITNS2, coming in 2021 we hope. Here's an overview: ITNS, second edition, due 2021 Main changes from the first edition: fabulous new software: esci (in R) for data… …
- A Confidence Interval for the Diamond Ratio: Estimation of Heterogeneity in Meta-Analysis - A while back I posted (here) about the Diamond Ratio (DR), which is our simple visual indicator of the extent of heterogeneity in meta-analysis. (See ITNS, Chapter 9 for more on the DR.) I reported that Max Cairns, a PhD student in statistics at La Trobe University, and his supervisor Luke… …
- Gordon’s ‘dances’: Vivid Simulations Bring Statistical Ideas Alive - Bob and I are delighted to welcome Gordon Moore who joins us in working on the second edition of ITNS. Gordon, an independent tutor in computing, statistics and mathematics, is based in England, so our ITNS2 team of three now spans three continents. We are now releasing Gordon’s dances in… …
Gordon’s ‘dances’: Vivid Simulations Bring Statistical Ideas Alive Read More »
- Reminder: Significance Roulette Still Tells Us a p Value Can’t be Trusted - An appreciative comment on YouTube reminds me I haven't mentioned Significance Roulette for a while, yet its message that a p value can't be trusted remains as relevant as ever. Dance of the p Values The dance of the p values was my first go at making vivid the amazingly… …
Reminder: Significance Roulette Still Tells Us a p Value Can’t be Trusted Read More »
- Fiona’s Take on Richie’s New Book: ‘Science Fictions–How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype…’ - I haven't read this book--it won't reach here for a while--but Fiona has written a critique that's certainly worth reading. Out this week in Nature, you can find her assessment here. From Fiona's review: "Together with his overview of the replication crisis, this introduction would be useful for undergraduates or… …