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.
- Enthusiasm for teaching and learning - It's a joy to be with faculty who are deeply enthusiastic about teaching and about student learning. I'm just back from AusPLAT (Australian Psychology Learning and Teaching), the first Australian conference on learning and teaching, under the auspices of the Australian Psychological Society. Only about 60-70 folks participated, but the …
- Adventures in Replication: p values and Illusions of Incompatibility - Here's an idea I run into a lot in peer reviews of replication studies: If the original study found p < .05 but the replication found p > .05, then the results are incompatible and additional research is needed to explain the difference. Poor p values. I'm sure they want …
- Something a bit different: maintaining memories - I'm wondering off the topic of the New Statistics today just to mention that my lab has published a new paper that characterizes the the changes in gene expression that accompany storing and maintaining a new long-term memory (Conte et al., 2017) . This is my main research passion, and …
- Adventures in Replication: Your replication appears to be somewhat underpowered - Many journals now proclaim their openness to replication research. Behind the scenes, though, replication manuscripts are often met with impossible demands and/or insane double-standards. Here's an example from an editor at a prominent social psychology journal: the studies appear to be somewhat underpowered. This is (as reviewer 1 notes) because …
- The joy of many disciplines - One of the great things about working in psychology, or statistics, or--just imagine!-- both, is that you can get to play in the backyards of many other folks. As science becomes more and more fragmented, and many researchers feel that their best strategy is to aim for expertise in some …
- Adventures in Replication: Scientific journals are not scientific - The essence of science is seeking and weighing evidence on both sides of a proposition. One might think, then, that when a scientific journal publishes a research paper it then acquires a special interest in publishing subsequent replications or commentary on that topic. We might call this the "principle of …
- Adventures in Replication: Introduction - Over the past 5 years or so, I (Bob) have been a bit replication crazy--I've conducted about 10 direct replication projects in collaboration with undergraduate students at Dominican. I became obsessed in part because I wanted to know for myself if the alarm bells being raised during the 'replication crisis' …
- 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 …
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