Tasty » Adam Sampson's research bookmarks

Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Slate Star Codex edit / delete

"The studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen. They go wrong in ways I didn’t even realize research could go wrong before." Worth reading for this bit alone, but there is a serious (and pretty interesting) point here.

to academia experimental-design research science ... on 23 March 2015

Copy, Shake, and Paste: Homebrew Collusion Detection edit / delete

Scanning for plagiarism (or, rather, repeated text, which I guess would also catch things like university boilerplate as well) in a large corpus of theses.

to academia plagiarism research teaching text ... on 13 March 2015

The people behind research software edit / delete

"The people behind research software - Research Software Engineers (RSEs) - lack recognition and reward for the incredible contribution they make to research. The RSE Community have come together to raise awareness of this issue, to campaign for change, and to share knowledge and collaborate to improve research software."

to research software-engineering ... on 03 October 2014

Academic urban legends edit / delete

"Many of the messages presented in respectable scientific publications are, in fact, based on various forms of rumors. [...] To illustrate this phenomenon, I draw upon a remarkable case in which a decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron." It's more complicated than it sounds. Recommended reading for students who wonder why we complain about inadequate references -- and for seasoned researchers who may well have exactly the same problems...

to academia ag0700 citation nutrition referencing research spinach writing ... on 24 August 2014

Using Emacs, Org-mode and R for Research Writing in Social Sciences: A Toolkit for Writing Reproducible Research Papers and Monographs edit / delete

Writing using org-mode as an outliner, and embedding analysis.

to academia org outliner research typesetting writing ... on 26 July 2014

STABILIZER: statistically sound performance evaluation edit / delete

Neat trick: this uses some LLVM instrumentation to shuffle memory layout around in a program while it's running, to randomise the effects of layout on performance. As a result of the central limit theorem, this tends to normalise the distribution of timing errors too (provided your program runs long enough to have been thoroughly shuffled).

to benchmarking compiler llvm performance research statistics timing ... on 01 April 2014

Sixteen is not magic: Comment on Friston (2012) | [citation needed] edit / delete

Review of "Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers". Read the original paper first, since it's got some good points -- particularly on exactly what the limitations on normality are, and why you need to be careful about very large studies -- but it probably overstates its case a bit, as this review suggests.

to hypothesis normality research statistics testing ... on 01 April 2014

Social Science Research Ethics: Home Page edit / delete

Ethics documentation produced by an ESRC project -- of general use for UK researchers. This has a particularly good overview of confidentiality/anonymity requirements in the "Core Issues" section (often a tricky point to deal with for our students).

to anonymity confidentiality ethics research ... on 26 March 2014

Statement of Ethical Practice for the British Sociological Association edit / delete

Excellent overview of research ethics issues (even if you're not a sociologist).

to ethics research ... on 26 March 2014

Welcome to the Evaluate Collaboratory! | Evaluate Collaboratory edit / delete

Tomas and Richard are involved in this project for empirical measurement in CS. Their position paper would be sensible reading for students; it explains some of the common pitfalls of performance measurement.

to ag0803 benchmarking cs empirical performance research statistics ... on 26 March 2014