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"The recent analysis published in JAMA reviewed the success of ClinicalTrials.gov in two time periods – 2004-2007 and 2007-2010. The findings are rather troubling if you want your studies to meet the highest possible standards — between 2007 and 2010, only 48% of eligible trials were registered before patient enrollment had commenced. Granted, this was up from 33% in the earlier period, but it’s still the minority. The majority (52%) were registered after patient enrollment had started.

This means that most clinical trials are being registered after it’s theoretically possible that investigators have had a chance to peek at early data and tweak the enrollment criteria to generate a “better” trial."

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"Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research."

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"Manzi wants to infuse government with a culture of experimentation. Set up an F.D.A.-like agency to institute thousands of randomized testing experiments throughout government. Decentralize policy experimentation as much as possible to encourage maximum variation.

His tour through the history of government learning is sobering, suggesting there may be a growing policy gap. The world is changing fast, producing enormous benefits and problems. Our ability to understand these problems is slow. Social policies designed to address them usually fail and almost always produce limited results. Most problems have too many interlocking causes to be explicable through modeling. "

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"techBASIC brings the power of a desktop computer to your iPhone/iPad for programming, collecting and analyzing data, and visualizing and manipulating stunning 3D graphics. It’s a full implementation of the famously easy to use BASIC Programming Language with specialized array and matrix commands built in."

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"A new study has looked at the reliability of fMRI brain scanning results over time, finding that the same experiment will only only be moderately reproducible when conducted at two different times, suggesting that fMRI is much less reliable than most researchers assume."

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A gedankenexperiment on "So here we go: the best argument I can think of for why research on string theory is a waste of time."

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"Go to any social gathering in your neighborhood and you will notice that people interact mostly with others who are similar in terms of age, gender, race, attributes, and behaviors. This tendency of people to have similar friends—known as homophily—is one of the most pervasive features of social networks (1). A key question is how much of the homophily in behavior can be attributed to social diffusion, that is, direct causal influence of one person on another through social ties (2, 3). Results from two clever Internet experiments reported by Centola last year (4) and on page 1269 of this issue (5) shed light on how the particular arrangement of social ties promotes social diffusion."

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To determine what effects sleep had on the flies, the team designed experiments to test two reigning theories: synaptic homeostasis, the idea that neuronal connections increase during wakefulness but are downscaled during sleep, pruning synapses created during the day so only the strongest connections remain intact; and memory consolidation, which proposes the purpose of sleep is to replay and consolidate memories from the previous day, reactivating certain connections to make them more powerful.

sleep biology science experiments

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., “artist,” “child”) that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups’ judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists’ intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.

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by Roger Schank - "Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way. But because we don't recognize this we fail to understand that we need to reason logically from evidence we gather, and that we need to carefully consider the conditions under which our experiments have been conducted, and that we need to decide when and how we might run the experiment again with better results."

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"One thing that organizational and economic sociology could use more of is experimental methods. While sociologists are not completely averse to experiments (see its prominent use in exchange theory), the method seems to occupy a small niche."

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"This experiment tests effects of passive, neutral reporting of contradictory factual claims on audiences. Exposure to such reporting is found to affect a new self-efficacy construct developed in this study called epistemic political efficacy (EPE), which taps confidence in one's own ability to determine truth in politics. Measurement of EPE is found to be reliable and valid, and effects of neutral reporting on it are found to be conditional on prior interest in the issues under dispute. Implications of this effect and of EPE are discussed. Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1982) suggests these short-term effects may accumulate over time. EPE may affect outcomes related to political understanding, opinion formation, and information seeking."

communication experiments self-efficacy political-science power perception control confidence

"The present research investigated whether the attribution process through which people explain self-disclosures differs in text-based computer-mediated interactions versus face to face, and whether differences in causal attributions account for the increased intimacy frequently observed in mediated communication. In the experiment participants were randomly assigned to a face-to-face or computer-mediated interaction with a confederate who made either high- or low-intimacy self-disclosures. Results indicated that computer-mediated interactions intensified the association between disclosure and intimacy relative to face-to-face interactions, and this intensification effect was fully mediated by increased interpersonal (relationship) attributions observed in the computer-mediated condition."

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"The experimental study reported here employed one of the most compelling visual cues of female sexual attractiveness (low waist-to-hip ratio) to test the influence of news anchor sexualization on audience evaluations of her as a professional and their memory for the news that she presents. "

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Interview with participant in Milgram obedience experiment and commentary on history of experiment.

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