Correspondence: or, how not to belong

To belong or not to belong, that is the question: terror management and identification with gender and ethnicity.

The terror management prediction that reminders of death motivate in-group identification assumes people view their identifications positively. However, when the in-group is framed negatively, mortality salience should lead to disidentification. Study 1 found that mortality salience increased women's perceived similarity to other women except under gender-based stereotype threat. In Study 2, mo...

How to (or not to) communicate science.

Protagonists for 'the public understanding of science' still sometimes fail to recognize that there is also a need for 'the scientists' understanding of the public' and that for most of science most of the time we are all public. 'Science' is communicated to 'the public' through popular books, museums, TV, the Internet, but far too often the present state of scientific belief is presented uncri...

Folic Acid Supplementation: to Advise or not to Advise?

To Cluster, or Not to Cluster: How to Answer theestion

Clustering is an essential data mining tool that aims to discover inherent cluster structure in data. For most applications, applying clustering is only appropriate when cluster structure is present. As such, the study of clusterability, which evaluates whether data possesses such structure, is an integral part of cluster analysis. However, methods for evaluating clusterability vary radically, ...

How to Graph Badly or What NOT to Do

“Chartjunk” is Edward Tufte’s term for extraneous features that add nothing to the information content of a graph. The worst collections of chartjunk are illustrations in newspapers and non-technical magazines. These figures are drawn by professional artists who are art-school graduates. To them, aesthetic beauty or visual interest is more important than statistics or the shape of a transcenden...