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.
- The Cookie-Monster Study: The highly influential memory of a long-lost study - In psychology, there are a few studies so famous and influential that they have proper names: The Good Samaritan Study, the Asch Obedience Study, the Marshmallow test, etc, etc. Approaching this echelon is the "Cookie Monster Study", an increasingly-famous study of social power. If you don't already know it, here's… …
- Reply to Lakens: The correctly-used p value needs an effect size and CI - Updated 5/21: fixed a typo, added a section on when p > .05 demonstrates a negligible effect, and added a figure at the end. Daniel Lakens recently posted a pre-print with a rousing defense of the much-maligned p-value: In essence, the problems we have with how p-values are used is human… …
- The TAS Articles: Geoff’s Take - Yay! I salute the editors and everyone else who toiled for more than a year to create this wonderful collection of TAS articles. Yes, let’s move to a “post p<.05 world” as quickly as we can. Much to applaud Numerous good practices are identified in multiple articles. For example: Recognise… …
- Preregistration: Why and How - Prereg Workshop at APS Steve Lindsay usefully posted a comment to draw our attention to the Preregistration Workshop on offer at the APS Convention coming up shortly in D.C.. You can scan the full list of Workshops here--there are lots of goodies on offer, including Tamara and Bob on Teaching… …
- Judging Replicability: Fiona’s repliCATS Project - Judging Replicability Whenever we read a research article we almost certainly form a judgment of its believability. To what extent is it plausible? To what extent could it be replicated? What are the chances that the findings are true? What features of the article drive our judgment? Likely influences include:… …
- APS Publicises the TAS Articles - The APS has just released this Research Spotlight item: Suddenly it's more than 5 years since APS made some important and very early steps to promote Open Science and new-statistics practices. Back in Jan 2014, then Editor-in-Chief of Psychological Science, Eric Eich, explained in an editorial a whole set of… …
- Ditching Statistical Significance: The Most Talked-About Paper Ever? - Well, that might be a stretch, but in relation to the Nature Comment that Bob and I signed to support, Altmetric tweeted: John Ioannidis published this criticism of the Comment, with the subtitle Do Not Abandon Significance. Much of what he writes is sensible, and in agreement with the Comment,… …
- Moving Beyond p < .05: The Latest - A couple of days ago, the three authors of the Nature paper accompanying the special issue of TAS on moving beyond p < .05 sent the update below. (See below for lots of links.) We are writing with a brief update on the Nature comment "Retire statistical significance" that you… …
- Moving to a World Beyond “p < 0.05” - The 43 articles in The American Statistician discussing what researchers should do in a "post p<.05" world are now online. See here for a list of them all, with links to each article. The collection starts with an editorial: Go here to get the full editorial as a pdf. Bob… …
- Ditching Statistical Significance?! - Nature (!) has just published an editorial discussing and advocating that statistical significance should be ditched. For me, that's the stuff of dreams, but I have lived to see it happen! I'm so happy! Here's one para from the editorial: The 'call for scientists to abandon statistical significance', by Valentin… …
- Microworlds - Last month I (Bob) visited a local elementary school for a "Science Alliance" visit. This is a program in our community to being local scientists into the classroom. I brought the Cartoon Network simulator I have been developing (Calin-Jageman, 2017, 2018). This simulator is simple-enough that kids can use, but… …
- The Multiverse! Dances, and More, From Pierre in Paris - Our Open Science superego tells us that we must preregister our data analysis plan, follow that plan exactly, then emphasise just those results as most believable. Death to cherry-picking! Yay! The Multiverse But one of the advantages of open data is that other folks can apply different analyses to our… …
- Joining the fractious debate over how to do science best - At the end of the month (March 2019) the American Statistical Association will publish a special issue on statistical inference "after p values". The goal of the issue is to focus on the statistical "dos" rather than statistical "don'ts". Across these articles there are some common themes, but also some… …
- Journal Articles Without p Values - Once we have a CI, a p value adds nothing, and is likely to mislead and to tempt the writer or readers to fall back into mere dichotomous decision making (boo!). So let's simply use estimation and never report p values, right? Of course, that's what we advocate in UTNS… …
- Teaching The New Statistics: The Action’s in D.C. - The Academy Awards are out of the way, so we can focus on what's really important: the APS Convention, May 23-26, 2019, in Washington D.C. For the first time for many years I won't be there, but new-statistics action continues at the top level. After Tamarah and Bob's great success… …
- Statistical Cognition: An Invitation - Statistical Cognition (SC) is the study of how people understand--or, quite often, misunderstand--statistical concepts or presentations. Is it better to report results using numbers, or graphs? Are confidence intervals (CIs) appreciated better if shown as error bars in a graph or as numerical values? And so on. These are all… …
- A Second Edition of ITNS? Here’s the Latest - Our first blog post about a possible second edition of ITNS is here. All the comments I made there, and the questions I asked, remain relevant. We've had some very useful feedback and suggestions, but we'd love more. You could even tell us about aspects of ITNS that you think… …
- Play, Wonder, Empathy – Latest Educational Trends, Says The Open University - My long-time friend and colleague Mike Sharples told me about the recently released Innovating Pedagogy 2019 report from The Open University (U.K.). It's the seventh in an annual series initiated by Mike. Each report aims to describe a number of promising trends in learning and teaching. There's not much by… …
- Sizing up behavioral neuroscience – a meta-analysis of the fear-conditioning literature - Inadequate sample sizes are kryptonite to good science--they produce waste, spurious results, and inflated effect sizes. Doing science with an inadequate sample is worse than doing nothing. In the neurosciences, large-scale surveys of the literature show that inadequate sample sizes are pervasive in some subfields, but not in others (Button… …
- Sadly, Dichotomous Thinking Persists in HCI Research - A few words about the latest from Pierre Dragicevic. He's an HCI researcher in Paris who totally gets the need for the new statistics. I've written about his work before, here and here. Now, with colleague Lonni Besançon, he reports a study of how HCI researchers have reported statistical inference… …
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