“In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens further the conversation about normality instigated in the twentieth century by philosophers Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, then expanded by race studies, queer theory and disability rights. Cryle and Stephens introduce a needed…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Nov 17, 2018

“Fingerprint Source Identity Lacks Scientific Basis for Legal Certainty”

“Forensic examiners have long proclaimed high levels of certainty that latent prints, based on their analysis, originated from an “identified” person, statements that multiple reports have called…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Oct 1, 2018

“How likely is an all-male speakers list, statistically speaking? A mathematician weighs in.”

“If you’ve ever followed a debate about why an event has so few women speakers, you’re likely familiar with the argument that gender was not a factor (AKA “we chose the…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 10, 2018

“Let’s Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance”

“It can really happen because it is at heart a linguistic rule. Even if rigorously enforced, it just means that editors would force people in papers to say “statistically suggestive for a p of a little less…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 8, 2018

“Impossibly hungry judges”

“Some people dislike statistics. They are only interested in effects that are so large, you can see them by just plotting the data. This study might seem to be a convincing illustration of such an effect. My goal in this blog is to argue against this idea. You need statistics…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Jun 13, 2018

“The entire research literature on contagious yawning could be bogus”

“In a new paper, titled “Are Yawns Really Contagious? A Critique and Quantification of Yawn Contagion,” lead author Rohan Kapitány, a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University, argues that research on this topic…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Jan 16, 2018

“The problem with p-values”

“The problem of how to distinguish a genuine observation from random chance is a very old one. It’s been debated for centuries by philosophers and, more fruitfully, by statisticians. It turns on the distinction between induction and deduction. Science is an exercise in inductive…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Dec 31, 2017

“When are people gonna realize their studies are dead on arrival?”

“my message is that this noisy, N = 41, between-person study never had a chance. The researchers presumably thought they were doing solid science, but actually they’re trying to use a bathroom scale to weigh a…

Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Mar 15, 2017

“Why too much evidence can be a bad thing”

“In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very…