I was going to title this post ‘How the Internet Is Facilitating Public Participation in Scientific Research’ but I decided the above was more catchy. Over the last week, I’ve come across a couple new ‘science experiments’ – that is, experiments in improving science by encouraging the involvement of the online public. The first one, [...]
Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren’t an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed – the articles are all way too short, and some of [...]
There’s another article out this month on all the false positives being published in psychology [pdf]. It deals with what the authors call “researcher degrees of freedom” – a series of somewhat arbitrary decisions about experimental design and data analysis that researchers have to make over the course of their study. Because researchers are a) [...]
I’m usually one of the first to criticize Facebook, but I’m really pleased about the new suicide prevention initiative they’ve rolled out. About six or seven years ago I did a research paper on suicide prevention policies among online social networking sites (Facebook, Livejournal, MySpace and a few smaller sites.) Most had no policy at [...]
I’ve given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent. The first talk was at Sprout, during one of their spaghetti dinners, which are festive occasions thrown monthly and organized around a particular theme. This month’s theme was brains: my [...]
