Many people are familiar with the idea that reformatting a probability as a frequency can sometimes help people better reason with it (such as on classic Bayesian reasoning problems involving conditional probability). In a visualization context, discretizing a representation of uncertainty, or really any probability distribution, can be useful for other reasons. For instance, by […]
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Authors retract the Nature Communications paper on female mentors
The paper “The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance” that I (Jessica) previously blogged about has been retracted from Nature Communications. Here’s the authors’ statement: The Authors are retracting this Article in response to criticisms about the assumptions underpinning the Article in terms of the identification of mentorship […]
Update on IEEE’s refusal to issue corrections
This is Jessica. Below is an update from Steve Haroz on his previously shared attempt to get a correction to an IEEE published paper. A week ago, I wrote about IEEE’s refusal to issue corrections for errors we made in our paper, “Skipping the Replication Crisis in Visualization: Threats to Study Validity and How to […]
The NeurIPS 2020 broader impacts experiment
This year NeurIPS, a top machine learning conference, required a broader impacts statement from authors. From the call: In order to provide a balanced perspective, authors are required to include a statement of the potential broader impact of their work, including its ethical aspects and future societal consequences. Authors should take care to discuss both […]
IEEE’s Refusal to Issue Corrections
This is Jessica. The following was written by a colleague Steve Haroz on his attempt to make corrections to a paper he wrote published by IEEE (which, according to Wikipedia, publishes “over 30% of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields.”) One of the basic Mertonion norms of science […]
What’s Google’s definition of retractable?
Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist known best for her work on ethics and algorithmic bias in AI/ML applications like face recognition, was fired yesterday from co-leading Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Apparently this was triggered by an email she sent to members of her team. Social media is exploding over this, and I don’t have […]
Are female scientists worse mentors? This study pretends to know
A new paper in Nature communications, The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance, by AlShebli, Makovi, and Rahwan, caught my attention. There are a number of issues but what bothered me the most is the post-hoc speculation about what might be driving the associations. Here’s the abstract: We […]
Can we stop talking about how we’re better off without election forecasting?
This is a public service post of sorts, meant to collect some reasons why getting rid of election forecasts is a non-starter in one place. First to set context: what are the reasons people argue we should give them up? This is far from an exhaustive list (and some of these reasons overlap) but a […]
Is there a middle ground in communicating uncertainty in election forecasts?
Beyond razing forecasting to the ground, over the last few days there’s been renewed discussion online about how election forecast communication again failed the public. I’m not convinced there are easy answers here, but it’s worth considering some of the possible avenues forward. Let’s put aside any possibility of not doing forecasts, and assume the […]