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More About Academics and Dodgy Statistics
The Wall Street Journal: Can statisticians “prove almost anything”? Canada’s National Post takes on one of the academic issues of the moment. The focus is a new article in Psychological Science, alluded to on Ideas Market last week, called “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” In it, three psychologists make their case by presenting a study in which people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m 64″ literally grew younger, relative to a control group.
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Babies may benefit from moms’ lasting melancholy
ScienceNews: A double dose of mom’s depression may do a baby good. Infants generally thrive physically and mentally if their mothers’ emotional condition, whether healthy or depressed, remains stable before and after birth, say psychologist Curt Sandman of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues. Kids whose mothers stayed depressed from the fourth month of pregnancy on displayed first-year mental and physical development comparable to that of youngsters whose mothers stayed emotionally healthy for the same stretch, Sandman’s team will report in Psychological Science.
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Seven healthy sins
Edmonton Journal: Everything in moderation. I think of those three words as my mother's superhero buzz-phrase. Not quite as catchy as Bart Simpson's "Don't have a cow, man," or Captain Marvel's "Shazam!" but possibly more instructive. After decades of scare stories on TV and in magazines and newspapers about the dangers of red meat, alcohol, marijuana and sexually transmitted diseases, it's a wonder anyone even gets out of bed in the morning. It's dangerous out there. Liquor, red meat and anger can seriously harm you. And let us not forget the moral, legal and medical complications that travel hand in glove with marijuana and sex.
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It’s flu season. Watch your prejudices.
I tried not to breathe too much on the elevator this morning. I was trying to avoid the germs of a fellow who clearly had the flu—or at least a nasty cold. There seems to be a lot of sickness going around right now, and I’m just being prudent. I know it would have been rude to cover my face or turn my back to this guy, so I just held my breath for the 10-story ride. That’s my behavioral immune system kicking in. Behavioral immune system is just a fancy way of summarizing what the mind and body have long known, that one of the most powerful tools we have for staying well is to watch out for sick people, and then give them wide berth.
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A defense for Thanksgiving
The Washington Post: Thanksgiving is under assault. Stores that once closed their doors in deference to the holiday are now touting Turkey Day deals starting as early as 9 p.m. Workers who should be on vacation are answering office e-mails on their smartphones. And those who plan on celebrating with a traditional dinner are finding that the cost of a bird is near its 30-year high, according to government data. “I think we have a sort of Norman Rockwell view of Thanksgiving,” said Kit Yarrow, head of the psychology department at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.
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Statisticians can prove almost anything, a new study finds
National Post: Catchy headlines about the latest counter-intuitive discovery in human psychology have a special place in journalism, offering a quirky distraction from the horrors of war and crime, the tedium of politics and the drudgery of economics. But even as readers smirk over the latest gee whizzery about human nature, it is generally assumed that behind the headlines, in the peer-reviewed pages of academia, most scientists are engaged in sober analysis of rigorously gathered data, and that this leads them reliably to the truth.
