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Category Archives: Experimental design
Scientific error, scientific fraud: why did Gould claim Morton mismeasured skulls?
False theories die with disproof, but false data may live forever, or so my undergraduate advisor, Richard D. Alexander, told me. A single false fact can corrupt a dataset, a study, even a field. I remembered this as I counted … Continue reading
Posted in Experimental design, Scientific methods and pitfalls
Tagged Brackenridge Field Laboratory, data falsification, experimental design, Gould, Mismeasure of Man, Morton, Paleontology, Richard D. Alexander, Samuel George Morton, scientific fraud, scientific misconduct, Stephen Jay Gould
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Introducing undergraduates to research: first tools, or first ideas?
If I want to chop up some DNA for an experiment, and get it to a certain size, I’ll learn all about which restriction enzymes work well together, and what size pieces they make. … But when undergraduates come into our laboratory for independent study, or as work-study students, there is a certain efficiency to teaching them a couple of months of tools. Continue reading
Can we teach the joy of research to undergraduates in one afternoon a week?
Another thing I could have done is found a lot of ponds of different sizes, but otherwise similar, and hypothesized that larger ponds would have more species diversity. … For example, they could hypothesize that gram for gram, they will find more social amoebae in samples of dung than in samples of soil because there are more bacteria in dung, and social amoebae eat bacteria. Continue reading
What do polymers and social amoebae have in common? Controls!
But all the time we spent agonizing over the right controls taught Alona in a visceral way that controls were important, that an experiment without the right controls would need to be repeated, and that the right controls were not always obvious. … In an experiment like this one, we can do the whole thing over with the exact same clones, just to be sure there wasn’t some bias on a given day. Continue reading
