![[two red and blue carton human figures are climbing a normal distribution curve that is decorated with the American flag.]](https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/files/2020/10/politicalhill.jpg)
The election is almost here and the election forecasters are in full swing. As of October 23rd, the Economist gives Biden a 92% chance of winning, and FiveThirtyEight has him winning 88 out of 100 “simulated” elections. How should we interpret these claims? If you have a coin and you flip it a thousand times, and it lands on heads 500 times and tails 500 times then you may infer it has a 50% probability of landing on heads and a 50% probability tails. Sounds simple, except, we’re not going to run this election thousands of times, we’re only going to run it once.
Scientific Methods and Techniques
How many people has COVID-19 really killed in the U.S.?
In late August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their provisional death counts page to indicate that COVID-19 was the sole cause of death listed on death certificates in only 6% of cases. This fact was interpreted by some as only 6% of reported fatalities, or around 10,000 people, actually died of… Read more »
Ethics in Research: What is the IACUC?
![[Picture is Kanzi, a male bonobo, participating in a touchscreen research task investigating syntax processing in great apes]](https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/files/2020/04/Kanzi-touchscreen.png)
The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 was brought about by two major media publications. In Sports Illustrated, Pepper, the Dalmatian, had disappeared from her family’s front yard, only to have been found at an east coast hospital and after having been euthanized, following an experimental medical research study involving an early model of a pacemaker. Pepper had been snatched from her owner’s front yard, and then sold for use in medical research, all without their knowledge…
Ethics in Research: What is the IRB?
![[A human silhouette made of small data points.]](https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/files/2020/04/data.png)
Across many fields, scientific research involving humans has a dark history, and many studies conducted in the past are completely unethical both in their original contexts and now. In America, examples include the Tuskegee Study on syphilis, which ran for over 40 years, and Henrietta Lacks’ ovarian cancer cells which were used in scientific research for decades without her or her family’s knowledge…
Science without a Degree: What is Citizen Science and How to Get Involved
Louis Pasteur once said, “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.” The act of doing science should not, and cannot, be confined to people in lab coats with multiple degrees squinting at computer screens and scribbling on whiteboards. Exploring the natural world around us should be something everyone can take part in, and that’s what citizen science is…
Groundhog Day 2020: Probability in perspective
This post is from ScIU’s archives. It was originally published by Lana Ruck in February 2018 and has been lightly edited to reflect current events. Tomorrow will be the 134th official Groundhog Day in the United States. Celebrated in Canada, Germany, and the U.S., the holiday derives from a long-standing German-Dutch tradition, which we’ve been… Read more »
An Archaeological Introduction to Coding in Python
Programming skills are not only becoming more in demand in industry jobs, they’re also becoming a required skill in academia as well. Programming is now used in almost every discipline for tasks such as data collection, organization, and analysis. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how some basic programming in Python can be used… Read more »
Brain technology in Black Mirror: Technological myths or real possibilities? Part III
In the third part of this blog series, we will finish looking into human consciousness by thinking about what happens to it after death. If you have not seen the episodes, do not worry, spoilers are kept at a minimum! You can read parts 1 and 2 here. San Junipero is a virtual afterlife into… Read more »
Brain technology in Black Mirror: Technological myths or real possibilities? Part II
In the second part of this blog series, we will look at three episodes where proposed technologies involve human consciousness. We will see if these technologies can become real possibilities in the near future. If you have not seen the episodes, do not worry, spoilers are kept at a minimum! You can also read part… Read more »
Strength in Numbers? The Meaning of Scientific Consensus
“Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”… Read more »