Statistics Done Wrong: How scientists abuse statistics
Statistical results are everywhere in science. When the Higgs boson discovery was announced, nearly every news article mentioned how there was just a one in 1.7...
Author: capnrefsmmat
Shut up and listen to your students
Are conventional lectures the best method of teaching scientific concepts? After all, we’ve been using the same lecture model for hundreds of years —...
Independence Day 2.0
SUPERBOWL SUNDAY, 22,000 MILES ABOVE THE EQUATOR Life as a satellite is disappointing. The first few hours are exhilarating, full of rocket blast, thrusters, an...
Gnome Physics
All subatomic particles — electrons, protons, neutrons and so on — are composed of extremely small gnomes. While relatively unknown, the gnome theor...
Statistical Significance of Doom (part 2)
False positives are somewhat scarier than false negatives. What if my research claims a drug cures cancer, giving thousands of sufferers hope, but it turns out ...
Statistical Significance of Doom (part 1)
I was recently assigned to give a 25-minute presentation on a subject of my choice. After choosing “scientific dishonesty and fraud,” I happened upo...
Psychic Powers
Skeptics sometimes remark that if psychic powers were real, psychics would have a genuine evolutionary advantage, and so eventually everyone would evolve to be ...
Breaking News
ATLANTA — In a news conference Saturday, CNN president Ken Jautz announced that CNN’s hyperbole reserves will be empty by the end of next week. R...
Releasing ipbLatex
At SFN, we use a custom LaTeX solution to render LaTeX equations in Invision’s IP.Board. The implementation is based on Dave’s vbLatex, which produc...
Blog Searching
SFN now has global blog searching. Use the search box in the upper right to search for terms in blog posts, or use View New Content or View Active Content to se...