Bad science in the headlines

Videogames: Dispelling myths and tabloid headlines that videogames are bad

Christian M Jones Laura Scholes Daniel Johnson Mary Katsikitis Michelle C. Carras University of the Sunshine Coast University of the Sunshine Coast Queensland University of Technology University of the Sunshine Coast Johns Hopkins University Queensland, Australia Queensland, Australia Queensland, Australia Queensland, Australia Baltimore, MD, USA [email protected] [email protected] dm.johns...

Explaining December 4, 2015: Cognitive Science Ripped from the Headlines

Do the discoveries of cognitive science generalize beyond artificial lab experiments? Or do they have little hope of helping us to understand real-world events? Fretting on this question, I bought a copy of the Wall Street Journal and found that the three front page headlines each connect to my own research on explanatory reasoning. I report tests of the phenomena of inferred evidence, belief d...

The Good and Bad Science of Autism

The natural selection of bad science

Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing-no...

Bioassay bashing is bad science.

The Spheres of Influence, “Assessing Assays” (Schmidt 2002), in the May 2002 issue of EHP criticizes the National Toxicology Program rodent bioassay (NTPRB) without discussing its importance in regulation and public health. The Spheres article (Schmidt 2002) does not express concern for the validity of alternative transgenic methods proposed to replace the NTPRB for detecting carcinogens. By fo...