Science is flawed. So what?

The results of the Reproducibility Project – a very cool endeavour to repeat a bunch of published studies in psychology – came out this week [1]. The authors (a team of psychologists from around to world) found that they were able to successfully replicate the results of 39 out of 100 studies, leaving 61% unreplicated. This seems like an awful lot of negatives, but the authors argue that it’s more or less what you’d expect. A good chunk of published research is wrong, because of sampling error, experimenter bias, an emphasis on publishing surprising findings that turn out to be false, or more than one of the above. No one study can ever represent the truth – nor is it intended to. The idea is that with time and collective effort, scientific knowledge progresses towards certainty.

So science crowd-sources certainty.

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Dennis Hlynsky’s small brains en masse

Dennis Hlynsky’s videos are among the best things I’ve seen online recently. Check ’em out:

Hlynsky uses frame-blending to great effect, to give you a sense of overall motion trajectories. When he turns his lens on animals, the results are both beautiful (see fruit flies paint a still life here), and an exciting way to visualize huge amounts of data. It’s got me thinking I could use this method to illustrate the 100s of hummingbird flights in our latest experiment here at UBC in a single animation.

Thanks to Suzanne Amador Kane for pointing these out to me!