Category Archives: Scientific methods and pitfalls

You can’t be too careful with documenting your science

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Joan E. Strassmann

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 →

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Keep your research honest, unbiased, comprehensive, and blind

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Joan E. Strassmann

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 →

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How to solve hard, important research problems

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Joan E. Strassmann

People keep talking about low hanging fruit, but the low hanging tomatoes in my garden are the first to rot. Maybe other people can find easy and amazing things to study. I don’t think there is much hope for that. … Continue reading →

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Be careful when you generalize

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Joan E. Strassmann

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 →

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Scientific error, scientific fraud: why did Gould claim Morton mismeasured skulls?

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Joan E. Strassmann

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 →

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