There is a great article in the Weekly Standard titled Making It All Up, the Behavioral Sciences Scandal about how over 60 percent of published results in the field of Psychology are not reproducible. Here and here are articles from the journal Nature on the same subject along with another one from the journal Science. I sent my daughter, Kelly a link to the articles. She is working on a PhD in Marketing at University of Washington and takes research methodology classes from both the Sociology department and the Psychology department. Replicability is a big topic in those classes. Kelly made the argument that research done in marketing does not suffer from the same problem as in the social sciences or even the hard sciences because the measure of the quality of the research is whether more stuff gets sold. That is the point–selling stuff. So if the research does not lead to new insights into how to sell stuff, the funding dies. I think I might buy that idea. But then again, it was a Marketing researcher who told me that.
Betty Blonde #412 – 02/12/2010
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If I have the time right, Christian, at this very moment, is presenting his Information Theory research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the first time he has done this kind of formal presentation (with a tie and all that). It is the culmination of a full year of research in a brand new (to Christian) area of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. Lorena and I are on pins and needles waiting to hear how it went. If all goes well, this should eventually turn into a refereed conference paper and, with expanded research and content, possibly even a refereed journal article.
Christian is scheduled to fly to Boston tomorrow to give a talk on his research. He has all the technical material well in hand and a well organized presentation. Not so amazingly, one of his biggest challenges is to create professional and compelling PowerPoint slides that convey his ideas. It seems like none of the tools commonly used to create graphics for the slides have improved very much or gotten any easier to use in the last twenty years.
Christian dressed up today to go to the McKimmon Center at NCSU to show off a poster he made for the Spring 2013 Undergraduate Research Symposium. He made the poster for his work at 