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Category Archives: Experimental design
Teach statistics the same way you teach baking a chocolate cake
We have wonderful undergraduates and we are failing them. We are failing in something important and I plan to fix it. That we are failing became very clear to me this past spring at their poster presentations. Generally the posters … Continue reading
What if you assume your hypothesis is wrong when you design an experiment?
Designing experiments is deceptively simple. After all, you know what’s going on, right? So you just design an experiment that manipulates or otherwise examines the variable of interest, with an appropriate control, then show the pattern you expected, write it … Continue reading
Posted in Experimental design
Tagged Design of experiments, Experiment, history of science, science
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Help your writing with this clear rubric
What goes in the introduction? Why did she tell me to write the methods first? Why should anyone care about my results? How can I convince them? Why did I do this project anyway? An excellent rubric can help. In … Continue reading
Posted in Data and analysis, Experimental design, Publishing your work, Writing
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You can’t be too careful with documenting your science
Once upon a time we simply kept graphs and tables in our lab notebooks. We kept videos of behavior and the transcripts from those videos. For decades I kept huge binders of printed computer output. I kept those long hole-punched … Continue reading
Keep your research honest, unbiased, comprehensive, and blind
Science cannot advance on fraudulent publications, whether the problems are big or small. We all know the basics of honest research, but there are also things we need to be taught. These are based on understanding our inadvertent tendencies to … Continue reading
What E. O. Wilson got right, what confused him, and what he disrespected
The brilliant conservation and ant biologist E. O. Wilson wrote a bizarre piece for the Wall Street Journal recently. It is modified from an upcoming book of advice for young students. It has inspired an intense flurry of highly negative … Continue reading
Be careful when you generalize
One of the things we learned at the Xenophobia meeting we went to a few months ago at Arizona State University, was how quick humans are to generalize. We can learn to be careful when we apply those generalizations to … Continue reading
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
Sociobiology 