Seeing the Forest for the Splotchy Green Blob

Lesson for today: statistics is hard. Specifically, it's hard to sort out real patterns from random noise, especially when you don't have a lot of data. Nonetheless, people sure do their darndest.

These are a few of my favorite sciences.

What's your favorite thing about the natural world? There are lots of things to choose from. The profound tension between natural selection and biological diversity. The fact that no matter how fast you're going, you'll never catch up with a beam of light. The way snowflakes form.

How to read graphs: The public policy version

I follow The New Teacher Project on ye olde Facebooks, and lately they've been on a rant/rave/something about what they call irreplaceable teachers. This morning, TNTP posted this statement and the following graph:

Brain Regions, Errors of Logic, and Willie Horton

Though the past few decades have yielded a wealth of information about how the brain works, there is much that remains mysterious. It therefore came as a surprise to many a neuroscientist when the hallowed New York Times published an editorial by "marketing expert" Martin Lindstrom claiming that we loved our iPhones in much the same way we love our families and our dogs.

In the meantime...Daryl Bem

I'm working on a number of things at the moment, but in the meantime I want to draw your attention to Jon Wilkins's post on the incredibly weird things Daryl Bem has been up to. Jon understates a little how famous Bem is in social psychology circles—he is absolutely huge. He is first-year social psychology material, literally.