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Are women more honest than men?
The journal Science recently published a fascinating article from Alain Cohn et al, which looked at cultural proclivities for civic honesty around the globe. They employed a rather ingenious method: they “lost” wallets all over the world and recorded when the receiver of the lost wallet attempted to return the wallet to its rightful owner. […]
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Hypothesis testing proves ESP is real
Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that ESP proves frequentist statistics isn’t real. In what has got to be one of the best object lessons in why hypothesis testing (the same statistical method usually used by the medical research industry to produce the Scare of the Week) is prone to generate false […]
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Do open-access electronic journals really help science?
The latest fad in the scientific publishing world is open access e-journals. In my field, for example, the Optical Society of America’s Optics Express has become one of the most popular journals, despite being only a decade old. The journal is basically a peer-reviewed website; people submit self-produced papers in either Word or LaTeX form, […]
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The Great Hudson Arc: A 250-mile-wide mystery
(Click for a larger view.) It’s nice to find out that there are still mysteries left in this world, let alone ones that are visible from space. On the southeast corner of Hudson Bay, the coast line traces a near perfect arc, roughly concentric on another ring of islands in the bay. So, what caused […]
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Studies show reading this essay will make you smarter
Thus, by focusing on studies that seek to overturn existing belief, there may be an inherent bias in the medical profession to find false results. If so, it’s possible that a significant percentage of published studies are wrong, far in excess of that suggested by the published significance level of the studies.