1. Systematic review: Does business coaching make a difference? In PLOSOne, Grover and Furnham present findings of their systematic review of coaching impacts within organizations. They found glimmers of hope for positive results from coaching, but also spotted numerous holes in research designs and data quality. Over the years, outcome measures have included job satisfaction, […]
1. What new analytics are fueling baseball decisions? [I spoke at Nerd Nite SF about recent developments in baseball analytics. -Tracy Allison Altman, Ed.] Highlights from my talk: – Data science and baseball analytics are following similar trajectories. There’s more and more data, but people struggle to find predictive value. Oftentimes, executives are less familiar […]
1. Confusing correlation with causation is not the Cardinal Sin of data science, say Gregory Piatetsky (@kdnuggets) and Anmol Rajpurohit (@hey_anmol): It’s overfitting. Oftentimes, researchers “test numerous hypotheses without proper statistical control, until they happen to find something interesting and report it. Not surprisingly, next time the effect, which was (at least partly) due to […]
People are recognizing the critical need for meta-research, or the ‘science of science’. One focus area is understanding whether research produces desired outcomes, and identifying how to ensure that truly happens going forward. Research impact assessment (RIA) is particularly important when holding organizations accountable for their management of public and donor funding. An RIA community […]
1. Academics use crazy tricks for clickbait. Turn to @TheWinnower for an insightful analysis of academic article titles, and how their authors sometimes mimic techniques used for clickbait. Positively framed titles (those stating a specific finding) fare better than vague ones: For example, ‘smoking causes lung cancer’ vs. ‘the relationship between smoking and lung cancer’. […]
1. Know someone who effectively promotes evidence? Nominations are open for the 2016 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science, recognizing an individual who promotes sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, facing difficulty or hostility in doing so. Researchers in any area of science or engineering, or those who work […]