You may have a bad back and not even know it. One of the commonest back problems physicians treat, called spinal stenosis, gives leg symptoms: pain, tingling, numbness and weakness down the legs, ...

Low statistical power undermines the purpose of scientific research; it reduces the chance of detecting a true effect. Perhaps less intuitively, low power also reduces the likelihood that a ...

The fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience have had some rough sledding in recent years. The bumps have come from high-profile fraudsters, concerns about findings that can't be replicated, ...

Significance testing, with appropriate multiple testing correction, is currently the most convenient method for summarizing the evidence for association between a disease and a genetic variant.

What archaeological discoveries are considered newsworthy by U.S. media outlets and audiences? A new analysis of "pop-science" reporting reveals topical and regional disparities, including an apparent ...

Here’s a short version of this post (spoiler! I’m making two intentional rhetorical missteps): Last week, the Columbia University Community College Research Center (CCRC) released a working paper ...

In the middle of the 20 th century, the field of psychology had a problem. In the wake of the Manhattan Project and in the early days of the space race, the so-called “hard sciences” were producing ...

How do you measure influence? What is notability? It might seem that before the social ranking site Klout came along to assign people numbers by cold, numerical, social media calculation, the only way ...

The Statistical & Data Sciences (SDS) Program links faculty and students from across the college interested in learning things from data. At Smith, students learn statistics by doing—class time ...

Vast amounts of data are generated every day. Statistics transforms data into meaningful information. People who practice the science of learning from data are called statisticians. Statisticians ...