One of the most interesting ongoing problems in metascience right now is the replication crisis. This a methodological crisis around the difficulty of reproducing or replicating past studies. If we cannot repeat or recreate the results of a previous study then it casts doubt on if those ‘results’ were real or just artefacts of flawed methodology, bad statistics, or publication bias. If we view science as a collection of facts or empirical truths than this…

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A couple of days ago, Maylin and I went to pick blackberries along some trails near our house. We spent a number of hours doing it and eventually I turned all those berries into one half-litre jar of jam. On the way to the blackberry trails, we passed a perfectly fine Waitrose — a supermarket that sells (among countless other things) jam. A supermarket I had to go to later anyways to get jamming sugar.…

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‘Power-law’ is one of the biggest buzzwords in complexology. Almost everything is a power-law. I’ve even used it to sell my own work. But most work that deals in power-laws tends to lack rigour. And just establishing that something is a power-law shouldn’t make us feel that it is more connected to something else that is a power-law. Cosma Shalizi — the great critic of sloppy thinking in complexology — has an insightful passage on…

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A few weeks ago, David Basanta reached out to me (and many other members of the mathematical oncology community) about building a community blog together. This week, to coincide with the Society for Mathematical Biology meeting in Montreal, we launched the blog. In keeping with the community focus, we have an editorial board of 8 people that includes (in addition to David and me): Christina Curtis, Elana Fertig, Stacey Finley, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Jacob G.…

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Recently, trying to keep with my weekly post schedule, I’ve been a bit strapped for inspiration. As such, I’ve posted a few times on a major topic from my past life: quantum query complexity. I’ve mostly tried to describe some techniques for (lower) bounding query complexity like the negative adversary method and span programs. But I’ve never really showed how to use these methods to actually set up interesting bounds. Since I am again short…

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Since evolutionary fitness landscapes have been a recurrent theme on TheEGG, I want to return, yet again, to the question of finding local peaks in fitness landscapes. In particular, to the distinction between easy and hard fitness landscapes. Roughly, in easy landscapes, we can find local peaks quickly and in hard ones, we cannot. But this is very vague. To be a little more precise, I have to borrow the notion of orders of growth…

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I read and write a lot of science outside the traditional medium of papers. Most often on blogs, twitter, and Reddit. And these alternative media are colliding more and more with the ‘mainstream media’ of academic publishing. A particularly visible trend has been the twitter paper thread: a collection of tweets that advertise a new paper and summarize its results. I’ve even written such a thread (5-6 March) for my recent paper on how to…

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As I discussed towards the end of an old post on cross-validation and prediction: we don’t always want to have prediction as our primary goal, or metric of success. In fact, I think that if a discipline has not found a vocabulary for its basic terms, a grammar for combining those terms, and a framework for collecting, interpreting, and/or translating experimental practice into those terms then focusing on prediction can actually slow us down or…

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