Today marks a special day: I visited the website Biblehub.com, whose existence has eluded me up until now, mostly because I don’t believe in (any) god, but also because I’m marginally interested at best in religious history. However, today I googled the etymology of the famous proverb “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. Apparently it’s an excerpt from John 8:7, referring to Jesus’s plea to not pass judgment onto others unless you can consider yourself an entirely flaw-, sin- and errorless person (which in my eyes, no matter how inflated some egos are, is pretty much impossible). The original quote, paraphrased and translated in different ways, refers to adultery, about which I have nothing to say at the moment, but obviously every religious saying can be interpreted in a number of ways, so I figured it would be a good opener to what I want to unroll in this post: I have reason to believe that I have discovered a rather serious case of scientific misconduct and I am not sure what to do about it.

Papers published in scientific journals tend to have a very specific tone. On the one hand, you're taught to write as clearly and neutral as possible. On the other hand, however, I suppose it is rather easy to get lost in big terms as a means of convincing the reader that your results are the most important to date. Andreas Brandmeier has a very entertaining Twitter called Psyc Title Generator, on which he posts random potential article titles which sound fancy but are complete bullshit (but see this commentary for a different view on a similar topic). The titles are generated in R, so everyone can download and run the script and have their tiny moments of ridiculous hubris. Here are some of my favourites:

Last time I briefly wrote about one of science’s biggest problems, that is, the fact that a disturbingly vast amount of (published) research turns out to be irreproducible, partly because of questionable research methods. One way to potentially fix this is to make results openly accessible to everyone, be it an original grant proposal*, raw data, or the publications resulting from this. Open Access, i.e., breaking down paywalls and making science purely public, has been a matter of debate for some 15 years now, and although there are tremendous efforts within the scientific and publishing community, it seems like the progress is only advancing very slowly. Initiatives like OpenCon, originally a conference held in Brussels in November, attempt to educate researchers about the merits of Open Science by giving a voice to people who in some way or another are engaged in promoting openness.

Michael Kane's Twitter led me to an article published the other day in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, entitled Any Effects of Social Orientation Priming on Object-Location Memory Are Smaller Than Initially Reported. For the record, (a) I admire Michael Kane's work, (b) JEP:G is a very respectable journal in the field of experimental psychology, and (c) in case this is your first day on the Interwebs, psychology -- and especially social psychology -- has suffered a tremendous reputational damage in the past couple of years. Just google "psychology replication crisis" and you'll get tens of thousands of examples of academics, pop-sci journalists, reasonable skeptics, and the inevitable ranters explaining the Reproducibility Project, p-hacking, questionable research practices, retractions, and so on and so forth. The gist of the story is that many results in the psychological sciences published as (and consequently claimed to be) "real", that is, statistically reliable and thus representative, have been found to be nonreplicable, i.e., they don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. Which is bad enough in itself, but the real problem behind this whole crisis is that failures to replicate published results (regardless of whether they were conducted out of curiosity, spite, or something in between) rarely make it through the peer-review process, with debatable justifications like "This doesn't add anything new" or "But wait... This has been shown before so you must be wrong!" (the wording here is paraphrased and based on anecdotal evidence, mind you). Now I leave the politics involved in that up to the reader's own interpretation, but a very immediate effect of this behaviour (and I bet it has a huge effect size) is that labs all over the world will waste a lot of time and money on trying to replicate result XY, simply because they have no way of being aware that many other labs have tried and failed before them. This actively delays scientific progress, and both frustrates and disillusions those involved.

It is for this reason that I applaud JEP:G's decision to set an example and publish a study (including four experiments conducted with 438 participants) which failed to replicate results published in 2002 and 2009. While its topic -- the influence of social priming on cognition -- is entirely beyond my expertise (and I would have no way of knowing about potential rivalries between the authors), I consider the effort to question extant evidence, and the subsequent gratification of a high-rank publication a huge step in the right direction. Psychology, like any other science, should be critical, and there should be reasonable outlets for new findings -- because not finding what others found is a finding as well.

Faith in academia restored for today. Over and out.

While in recent years, it has become a favourite pastime of popular media to bash Coldplay (two of the most notable examples being Family Guy's Peter Griffin getting kicked out of the band and Superhans from Peep Show likening the inability to trust people with an inclination for Chris Martin et al.), I am not afraid to admit that I proudly own the first two of their albums - everything that came out after was a bit shit indeed - and even listen to them every now and again. And today is one of these days where a specific line of their song "The Scientist" (oh the irony!) got stuck in my head:

"Nobody said it was easy."

My research proposal I submitted last November to get funding for a two-year postdoc position in the Netherlands got rejected today.

Homophones are words which are pronounced the same but have different meanings, and as this comic, courtesy of Mediocre Comic, shows, the wrong accent can even result in fatalities.

You don't have to be a statistician to know that correlation does not equal causation. However, the internet is full of news items propagating wrong inferences derived from coincidental relationships between two random facts. The website Spurious Correlations lets you look up and plot numerous of these correlations which, if misunderstood, would make great news articles--if only on platforms like The Borowitz Report or The Onion (or Nature?). After all, there are enough people out there who believe everything they read without double-checking source or facts. As a German citizen, I am especially intrigued by the fact that the number of German cars sold in the US and fatalities after falling out of a chair are at least moderately correlated (r = .536).

One of my favourite webcomics, xkcd, frequently picks up language-related topics, which is hardly surprising, since it is described as "a webcomic of romance, math, and language". A recent one spoke to the fact that syntactic elements of an utterance can be created completely anew by reassigning a new syntactic role to elements that are normally used differently. In other words, "legit" in this case is used as an adverb although it actually is an adjective, or, more interestingly, "adverbed" is used as a verb when it is usually known as a noun.

Technically, one could accuse Megan, xkcd's female protagonist, as simply getting her language wrong. However, the fact that we implicitly understand what she's saying although it is extremely likely that we've never heard this specific sentence before, is one of the (many!) fascinating properties of human language. (Good ol' Chomsky, coincidentally, shares this view with me when he says, "The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.'") The way specific words are used, then, continuously changes, and as we integrate more phrases into our daily parlance, our vocabulary can be expanded infinitely. (Sadly, this flexibility can also be abused.) So next time somebody accuses you of using a word in the wrong form, blame it on your linguistic creativity--but make sure to have a valid explanation up your sleeve.

This phrase, however, does not apply to blogging. Blogs are extremely easy to implement, but equally difficult to maintain. Thus the second step should be considered the hardest, i.e., continuing a blog. While I am in no way giving any guarantees that this will be updated regularly, I do intend to share some of the experiences I am going to make, things I am going to stumble upon, or topics I simply find interesting to talk about.