Kevin J. Black @kjbinstl@qoto.org

Just generated three ChatGPT short answers on social science prompts that I might expect in undergrad exams. The results weren’t outstanding, but they weren’t bad—definitely a passing grade. The fact that they weren’t really bad or really great makes them stand out even less—they’re on the high end of the fat part of the bell curve, right where a cheater would want to be. Most troubling, they sailed past plagiarism detection (6%, 2%, 0% of text flagged).

“Bonferonni correction”, an invaluable method in #statistics, refers to the act of repeatedly correcting misspellings of the word Bonferroni at multiple places in a draft manuscript.
#science #academia

Dear early career researchers: I have been writing papers for 17 years. A professional editor just sent back edits on a first draft of a 4 page text. Except for 5 lines, the whole document was red. This is how it goes! Don't feel bad if you get a massive amount of suggested changes on early drafts. The paper will most likely be better for it in the end.

See the comment tab. It appears that fluvoxamine taken during the acute illness does not totally prevent long COVID symptoms months later, but there is a hint that it may cut the risk for severe long COVID in half. Larger studies are needed to see if this is true.

Open registration begins for the 2023 session of my annual anti-statistics course focusing on causal inference & Bayesian data analsysis & fully coded examples. Lectures will be free online, so no need to register unless you want to join discussions. All details at link: https://github.com/rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2023/blob/main/README.md

There are four schools of thought that each have their own ideas on how scientific peer review can be improved. Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, @stephenpinfield, Helen Woods and I have revised our paper on this topic https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/v8ghj. We have also created a visualization that summarizes the key tensions between the four schools. We are grateful to the reviewers of our paper for their very useful feedback.

Mercator size vs. true country size
by Neil Kaye

Worried about how your reviewed preprints can contribute to funding, grant and job applications?

Today, we're pleased to announce some of the funders and research organisations embracing reviewed preprints as an alternative way to assess researchers: https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/e5423e39/funders-support-use-of-reviewed-preprints-in-research-assessment?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

"As the field progresses, it will become increasingly important to build a reference library of comparative reliabilities for different fMRI tasks across age groups."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929316300299?via%3Dihub

In 2 hrs 37 min (midnight UTC), we're implementing our long-announced December shutdown of Peer Community in Registered Reports, meaning no new or revised manuscripts can be submitted until 3 Jan 2023 (reviews can still be sought & received, & editorial decisions issued).

In the last 48 hrs we've received...wait for it...19 submissions!! 😂 😍 😭

If that doesn't set some record for the most Registered Reports received by any journal or platform in the shortest space of time, I'll eat this toot

@kevlin @cwebber described ChatGPT as Mansplaining As A Service, and honestly I can’t think of a better description. A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures at an instant with unflagging confidence in it’s own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or awareness even of the level of expertise of it’s audience.

@pwgtennant @JLRohmann PAY SCHOLARS TO DO REVIEWS. The expectation that everyone has the time available for this is unfair and part of what is broken in academia today, and I see it frustrating and burning out so many scholars.

Dear fellow scientists, I know it's been said many times before but please please make a Google Scholar page and make it public? It makes life so much easier when going through tens and tens of unknown names (like I'm doing right now to help select symposia for a conference): one can find your latest papers, your most cited papers, etc. And if you have some principled objection to Scholar or to their stock-market-style citation counter, I get it and that's fine, but at least do orcid.org?

In our new podcast episode, Dr. Joel Berger shares stories from his exciting adventures studying and conserving lesser-known species around the world. We also hear about his career path, life outside of science, books, and more!

https://www.peoplebehindthescience.com/dr-joel-berger/

#conservation #biology #ecology #research #podcasts #podcast #science #scicomm #travel #storytelling

My stupid mastodon toots get way fewer likes than my stupid tweets

The clear conclusion is people on mastodon have a more discerning sense of humor