Tag Archives: experimental design

Exactly how independent should your research be?

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Joan E. Strassmann

The significance of a Ph.D. degree is that you can do much more than excellent research. You can also think of what questions to ask. You know how to push at the most important unknowns. You can read the literature … Continue reading →

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Two figures every paper should include

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Joan E. Strassmann

When you read a scientific study, you want to understand what the authors did to get to their conclusions and you want to understand it quickly. After all, the interesting stuff is about the hypotheses and the authors’ discoveries. Yet … Continue reading →

Posted in Publishing your work, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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 →

Posted in Experimental design, Scientific methods and pitfalls | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments