Colin Cooper

@colincooperish.bsky.social

Retired psychologist in Ontario... Editor in Chief of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, and author of textbooks on individual differences . Previous president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID).

Something deeply troubling & shocking is happening at Exeter University*, where a mass cull of staff is planned, even though it's in surplus. No good justifications given. @jamesgdyke.info provides the details: www.technosphere.earth/the-bonfire-... *Disclosure: I have a Visiting Fellowship here. +🧵

The bonfire of the humanities

150 academic posts at the University of Exeter are to be cut, most in the humanities but also in social sciences, engineering and environmental sciences

technosphere.earth

Selecting an effect size for power analysis is hard. Many researchers fall back on Cohen's thresholds, but they have no empirical basis and vary wildly by field. Our new paper offers a better option: field-specific effect size distributions built from meta-analytic data doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Abstract
Effect sizes are useful for understanding the magnitude of study results and for planning new studies via power analysis.
However, despite their wide usage, effect sizes are often misinterpreted. This is mostly due to an over-reliance on general
effect size benchmarks that were not intended for broad application across diverse research fields. Inaccurate effect size
interpretations can lead to incorrect conclusions about the magnitude of study results and incorrect sample size estimates,
thereby increasing the likelihood of false-positive results. This article introduces the ESDist R package, which is designed
to calculate empirically derived effect-size benchmarks or a range of reliably detectable empirical effect sizes for a specific
research question or field of interest by computing effect size distributions (ESDs). This package can be used on data that
can be easily extracted from pre-existing meta-analyses to help researchers more accurately plan new studies or to better
understand how an individual study might relate to other studies in their field. ESDist includes a set of features that make it
easy to use in a priori power analysis. Moreover, the package includes a feature for estimating effect size benchmarks that
account for publication bias and are weighted by effect sizes' variances, which addresses existing limitations of using ESDs
for study planning or interpretation.

This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.

Bild

A dominant theme of Hitler's speeches in the late 1930s is that Germany was surrounded by threats. These threats were imaginary: it was Nazi Germany that threatened other nations. But they were used to justify pre-emptive attacks. Trump is following this script.

My therapist suggested that I write letters to all the people who have wronged me and then throw them into a big fire. I did that, and I do feel better, but I don’t know what I am supposed to do with all these letters.

21 gun salute is for KINGS. I suppose Trump can pretend that the parade was to celebrate the anniversary of the US army, and not his birthday. But the 21 gun salute is normally reserved for royalty in Europe. Pah.

Brexit has never looked quite so ruinously insane as it does right now. And it’s always been idiotic. Alone, outside the EU, needing to improve our relationship with our own continent but also terrified of the wrecking-ball lunatic in the White House. Cornered by our own ‘sovereign’ stupidity.