RIOT Science Club

Beyond authorship: Introducing the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) by Dr Liz Allen
2020-07-16 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker

Liz Allen is Director of Strategic Initiatives at F1000Research. Prior to joining F1000Research in 2015, she spent over a decade leading the Evaluation Team at Wellcome. Liz is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Policy Institute at King’s College London, with a particular interest in science policy and research-related indicators. Liz is a Crossref Board Director, co-founder of CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), and serves on the Advisory Board for the Software Sustainability Institute.
About the talk
Original research articles with one author – particularly in the life sciences – are increasingly rare, and the concept of ‘authorship’ in science has become outdated and often unhelpful. CRediT was developed through a collaboration of research funders, publishers, researchers and institutions with the aim was to provide greater granularity, visibility and transparency to the myriad of contributions that researchers make to published scholarly research output today.
This talk explains the origins, rationale and current use of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) – leaving room for discussion of the challenges and opportunities for the future of this initiative.

Collaborative Assessment for Trustworthy Science: the repliCATS project by Prof Fiona Fidler
2020-07-23 11:00 - 12:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Fiona has a degree in Psychology, with a second major in Sociology, and was awarded her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne in 2006. She is now a Professor at the University of Melbourne, based between the School of BioSciences and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. Fiona is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, leading a range of meta-research projects across ecology and conservation science, as well as projects in psychology, and other social science fields. Her meta-research work is driven by an underlying interest in how scientists and other experts reason, make and justify decisions, and change their minds. She is co-lead (with Simine Vazire) of MetaMelb, a recently launched meta-science/meta-research group at the University of Melbourne, and she leads the repliCATS project, for Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science.
About the talk
The repliCATS project evaluates published scientific research. As the acronym—Collaborative Assessments for Trustworthy Science—suggests, repliCATS is a group activity, centred around assessing the trustworthiness of research claims. Reviewers first make private individual assessments about a research claim—judging its comprehensibility, the prior plausibility of underlying effect, and its likely replicability. Reviewers then share their judgements and reasoning with group members, providing both new information and the opportunity for feedback and calibration. The group interrogates differences in opinion and explores counterfactuals. After discussion, there is a final opportunity for privately updating individual judgements. Importantly the repliCATS process is not consensus-driven – reviewers can disagree, and their ratings and probability judgements are mathematically aggregated into a final assessment. At the moment, the repliCATS platform exists primarily to predict replicability. Launched in January 2019 as part of the DARPA SCORE program, over 18 months repliCATS elicited group assessments and captured associated reasoning and discussion, for 3,000 published social scientific research claims in 8 disciplines (Business, Criminology, Economics, Education, Political Science, Psychology, Public Administration, and Sociology). The repliCATS team are now working to extend the platform beyond merely predicting replicability, to deliver a more comprehensive peer review protocol. Suspected advantages of a repliCATS process over traditional peer review include: inbuilt training and calibration; feedback that is intrinsically rewarding; an inherently interactive process, but one which does not implicitly rely on ‘consensus by fatigue’; and a process that actively encourages interrogation. This talk will present some preliminary findings, and discuss the future of the platform.

Synthetic data: A primer by Dr Dan Quintana
2020-07-30 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Daniel S. Quintana is a researcher in biological psychiatry at the University of Oslo. His research interests include social behaviour, the oxytocin system, heart rate variability, and meta-analysis. He currently leads a project investigating the role of the oxytocin system in the development of severe mental illness and metabolic disorder, which is supported by an Excellence Project for Young Researchers grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Dan is also known for the Everything Hertz podcast, which he co-hosts with James Heathers. Widely praised for his training materials to support the adoption of open research practices, Dan is a strong advocate for disseminating scholarly outputs with the aid of social media, which was the subject of his talk for the Rotterdam RIOTS Club in May.
About the talk
Open research data provide considerable scientific, societal, and economic benefits. However, disclosure risks can sometimes limit the sharing of open data, especially in datasets that include sensitive details or information from individuals with rare disorders. This talk introduces the concept of synthetic datasets, which is an emerging method originally developed to permit the sharing of confidential census data. Synthetic datasets mimic real datasets by preserving their statistical properties and the relationships between variables. Importantly, this method also reduces disclosure risk to essentially nil as no record in the synthetic dataset represents a real individual. This practical guide with accompanying R script enables biobehavioural researchers to create synthetic datasets and assess their utility via the synthpop R package. By sharing synthetic datasets that mimic original datasets that could not otherwise be made open, researchers can ensure the reproducibility of their results and facilitate data exploration while maintaining participant privacy.

Pitfalls of functional MRI by Dr Marion Criaud
2020-09-24 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Marion Criaud is a postdoctoral research associate in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry department at King’s College London. Her current work focuses on developing a new non-medical treatment for children with ADHD called fMRI NeuroFeedback. She has a keen interest in identifying best practice in fMRI and understanding the limitations when applied in psychiatry.
About the talk
Functional MRI is not highly reproducible, and a lot of factors are influencing this. Some we can control, and some we can’t. fMRI data are extremely sensitive; we cannot always control the quality. But there are things we can do to improve reliability in fMRI. We are going to go over the fragility of fMRI data and what we can do to ensure the data is managed in the best way possible.

Why p-values can't tell you what you need to know and what to do about it by Prof David Colquhoun
2020-10-01 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Professor David Colquhoun is a pharmacologist notable for his insights into the biophysics of drug–receptor interactions of single ion channels. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1985, was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 1990 and made Honorary Fellow of UCL in 2004. Colquhoun joined the Pharmacology Department at UCL in 1964, and, apart from 9 years, has remained there ever since. He can be found on twitter (@david_colquhoun) and via his website DC’s Improbable Science, where he writes critically about pseudoscience and alternative medicine.
About the talk
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the literature has too many false positives. One reason, among many, for this is misunderstanding of p-values. There are three main reasons why a p-value can’t tell you much about whether a hypothesis is true or not. It transposes the conditional, It has the wrong denominator. It takes into account values that have not been observed. These will be explained, and suggestions made about possible solutions.

Five selfish reasons to work reproducibly by Dr Florian Markowetz
2020-10-08 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Florian Markowetz is a Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder and received a CRUK Future Leader in Cancer Research prize. He holds degrees in Mathematics (Dipl. math.) and Philosophy (M.A.) from the University of Heidelberg and a Dr. rer. nat. (PhD equivalent) in Computational Biology from Free University Berlin, for which he was awarded an Otto-Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society. His group at the CRUK Cambridge Institute combines computational work on cancer evolution and image analysis of the tumour tissue with experimental work on understanding key cancer mechanisms like the estrogen receptor.
About the talk
And so, my fellow scientists: ask not what you can do for reproducibility; ask what reproducibility can do for you! In my talk, I will present five reasons why working reproducibly pays off in the long run and is in the self-interest of every ambitious, career-oriented scientist.

Easing into open science: A guide for graduate students and their advisors by Dr Priya Silverstein
2020-10-15 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Priya Silverstein is a postdoctoral researcher in the CoGDeV Lab at the University of Surrey, studying the relationship between Lego construction ability, spatial thinking, and numeracy achievement in children. She is passionate about methods for studying development, and how we can do better, more transparent, reproducible, and diverse science.
About the talk
This talk provides a roadmap for engaging in open science practices, suggesting eight open science practices that novices could begin adopting today. The topics that will be covered include journal clubs, project workflow, preprints, reproducible code, data sharing, transparent writing, preregistration, and registered reports. To address concerns about not knowing how to engage in open science practices, we provide a difficulty rating of each behaviour (easy, medium, difficult), present them in order of suggested adoption, and follow the format of what, why, how, and worries. We emphasise that engaging in open science behaviours need not be an all or nothing approach and that you can engage with any number of the behaviours outlined. We also discuss the specific benefits of engaging with these practices now, at a time when a lot of our research has been disrupted.

A walk in the garden of forking paths by Dr Julia Rohrer
2020-10-22 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/London) | MS Teams
About the speaker
I am a personality psychologist by training and my work covers a broad range of topics, including the effects of birth order, age patterns in personality, and the correlates and determinants of subjective well-being. My methodological interests include causal inference on the basis of observational data and data analytic flexibility. I am an active advocate for increased research transparency and have frequently given talks on the topic.
I recently finished my doctoral degree as a fellow of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course and am now a lecturer (Akademische Assistentin) at the Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig.
Together with Anne Scheel, Malte Elson, and Ruben Arslan, I blog at The 100% CI. If you want to get in touch with me, I’m fairly active on Twitter.
To learn more, go to https://juliarohrer.com/.
About the talk
Data analysis requires researchers to make many decisions — and sometimes, they may not know which choices are most appropriate. In this talk, I will give an overview of ways to tackle researcher degrees of freedom in a transparent manner (such as robustness checks, multiverse and specification curve analyses), highlight their commonalities, and discuss some crucial concerns.

Theory building and testing in psychological research by Dr Eiko Fried
2020-10-29 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/London) | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Eiko Fried is an Assistant Professor in clinical psychology at Leiden University working in the fields of clinical psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology and methodology. His main focus is on studying individual symptoms of mental disorders and their causal relations. Broader, his interests include measurement (how to best assess whether someone is ill), modelling (what statistical models are most appropriate to model psychopathology), ontology (what are mental disorders) and nosology (how do we best classify them).
About the talk
The last decade has brought reforms to improve methodological practices, with the goal to increase the reliability and replicability of effects. However, explanations of effects remain scarce, and a growing chorus of scholars argues that the replicability crisis has distracted from a crisis of theory. In the same decade, the empirical literature using factor and network models has grown rapidly. In this talk, I discuss three ways in which this literature falls short of theory building and testing. First, statistical and theoretical models are conflated, leading to invalid inferences such as the existence of psychological constructs based on factor models, or recommendations for clinical interventions based on network models. I demonstrate this inferential gap in a simulation study on statistical equivalence: excellent model fit does little to corroborate a theory, regardless of quality or quantity of data. Second, researchers fail to explicate theories about psychological constructs, but use implicit causal beliefs to guide inferences. These latent theories have led to problematic best practices in psychological research where inferences are drawn based on one specific causal model that is assumed, but not explicated. Third, explicated theories are often weak theories: narrative and imprecise descriptions vulnerable to hidden assumptions and unknowns. They fail to make clear predictions, and it remains unclear whether statistical effects corroborate such theories or not. Weak theories are immune to refutation or revision. I argue that these three challenges to theory building and testing are common and harmful, and impede theory formation, failure, and reform. A renewed focus on theoretical psychology and formal models offers a way forward.
Related preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/zg84s/

Visualising variability and uncertainty in R by Jack Taylor
2020-11-05 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/London) | MS Teams
About the speaker
Jack Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. He is in interested in how we represent words, particularly how we represent and access concepts associated with words, like emotion and imageability. Jack is also interested in the extent to which we predict the visual features of words, given a semantic context. Jack also has a keen interest in supporting reproducible research practices, including data visualisation among others, and you can find some useful links below. Jack can also be found on Twitter @JackEdTaylor.
Useful links:

LexOPS is an R package I’ve written for generating word stimuli, to use in Psychology experiments.
Hack Your Data Beautiful (HYDB) was an introductory workshop for R, sponsored by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science.
Shiny Tutorials introduce Shiny to R users with a focus on Psychology research.
GitHub is where I share most of my code.
Twitter is where I am occasionally spotted.

About the talk
A picture is worth a thousand words, and good data visualisation is worth a thousand summary statistics. I’ll argue that good data visualisation is a key component of open and transparent science. I’ll highlight some example ways of visualising data transparently, focusing on presenting individual observations, visualising uncertainty, and embracing variability. Because it’s well-known, I’ll show some implementations in the ggplot2 package of R, highlighting some really useful functions and extensions for presenting informative features of data and statistical models.

Open science with OSF by Dr Courtney Soderberg
2020-11-12 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Courtney Soderberg is the Statistician and Data Scientist at the Center for Open Science. Before working at COS, she received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California, Davis.
About the talk
Open research practices around data, materials, code, and articles are becoming more common in many fields, but researchers often aren’t trained in how to best make their research open, or what they need to consider when doing this. Using OSF as an example tool, I will walk through efficient ways for researchers to make their work more open and reproducible. I’ll also discuss what can be done when there are ethical or legal reasons why some data/materials cannot be openly shared.

Measurement schmeasurement: Questionable measurement practices and how to avoid them by Dr Jessica Flake
2020-11-19 15:00 - 16:00 (Europe/London) | MS Teams
About the speaker
For details about the speaker, please see https://www.jessicakayflake.com.
About the talk
Questionable measurement practices are decisions researchers make that raise doubts about the validity of the measures, and ultimately the validity of study conclusions. They make it impossible to evaluate a wide range of potential validity threats to the study’s conclusions. I will demonstrate that psychology is plagued by a measurement schmeasurement attitude: QMPs are common, offer a stunning source of researcher degrees of freedom, pose a serious threat to cumulative psychological science, but are largely ignored. I will review a list of questions researchers and consumers of scientific research can consider to identify and avoid QMPs. Transparent answers to these measurement questions promote rigorous research, allow for thorough evaluations of a study’s inferences, and are necessary for meaningful replication studies.

How do we ask better questions and get better answers? by Prof Stephen Cole
2020-11-20 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Stephen R. Cole is a Professor in Epidemiology at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Stephen R. Cole works to build accurate and impactful knowledge, particularly population-health (epidemiologic) knowledge. Professor Cole is interested in study designs and analyses that accurately estimate parameters of central interest to population-health scientists, such as risk. These study designs include randomized experiments, pseudoexperiments (i.e., observational studies) and thought-experiments (e.g., simulation studies).
About the talk
What is a good question? Provisionally, good questions have proper syntax, are semantically meaningful, answerable, and important. Good epidemiologic questions require a measurable outcome, including the context; treatments or actions, if causal; and translate unambiguously to a parameter of interest. What is a good answer? Again provisionally, good answers are as robust and as accurate as possible. We present results from a simulation experiment of a minimal nontrivial example, motivated by epidemiology, which illustrates some features of good answers using estimators from nonparametric, parametric, and semiparametric models. In summary, an estimator from a semiparametric model performed best among candidate estimators that were not omnisciently correct.

Drifting into the world of open science and reproducibility by Dr Gavin Buckingham
2020-11-26 14:30 - 15:30 (Europe/London) | MS Teams
About the speaker
Gavin Buckingham was awarded his PhD in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen in 2008. Following the completion of his PhD, he moved to Canada to take up a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada working with Prof Mel Goodale. His work here mostly focused on how we perceive weight and interact with objects in the world around us. In January 2013, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Psychology Department at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Three years later he joined the Department Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter, where he is currently a senior lecturer and leads the Object Interaction Lab.
About the talk
I am going to talk about my perspectives on open science and reproducibility from the (slightly unusual) perspective of not being a significant part of the open science ecosystem. I have not developed any reproducibility initiatives. I have not devoted my career to improving science. I do not force my trainees to do things ‘my way’. But, since taking up a permanent position, I have been making small tangible steps toward improving my scientific practices. In this talk, I’ll give my reflections on how these many incremental changes to my research practices have improved the quality of my work which, hopefully, will be of interest to other scientists hoping to move in the right direction, but unsure where best to start.

Reproducible Research Oxford by Dr Malika Ihle
2020-12-03 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the talk
How can an open research working group help drive a research culture change at the institutional level? Reproducible Research Oxford a.k.a. RROx (“rocks”) has been working to achieve this by (i) building cross-disciplinary communities, (ii) providing training and promoting practices that are beneficial to research communities, and sustainable for researchers, and (iii) liaising with stakeholders to inform the design of policy.
About the speaker

Malika Ihle is the Reproducible Research Oxford Coordinator, supporting the Steering Group in developing a comprehensive approach to open scholarship and reproducible research that extends across all disciplines, using both bottom-up and top-down strategies.
Malika holds a Master degree in Biology from Université de Bourgogne and Université du Québec à Montréal, and a PhD in Behavioral Ecology from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. During her post-docs at the University of Sheffield and University of Florida, she organised a post-conference symposium on open science, she co-authored an invited idea in the journal Behavioral Ecology titled “Striving for transparent and credible research: practical guidelines for behavioural ecologist”, and she developed and taught a graduate course guiding students through the scientific pipeline, from preregistration to a reproducible and open workflow.
Malika is an Executive Committee member of the Society for Open Reliable Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology (SORTEE) and the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) local network lead at the University of Oxford.

Conflicts and complexities on the path to open data by Prof Louise Connell
2020-12-10 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the talk
Even with the best intentions and motivations, sharing your data in an open repository is not always as easy as it should be. Barriers can appear in a variety of forms, including uncertainty regarding copyright and data ownership, diverging interpretations of GDPR and ethical issues, and sheer lack of time and resources to curate your data into a shareable format. I discuss some ways my collaborators and I have navigated these barriers and share some tips and tricks for making the process as painless as possible.
About the speaker
My research interests surround cognitive science and embodied cognition. Specifically, I’m interested in how mental representations and conceptual knowledge are grounded, how we access and use these representations in language, and how we can create computational models to better understand human cognitive behaviour. I use a range of interdisciplinary methods from experimental psychology and cognitive modelling to corpus linguistics and machine learning. Some recent work has examined how sensorimotor experience (i.e., what we sense via different perceptual modalities, what we do via different action effectors) underpins word meaning, how distributional statistics from language capture important information about conceptual and social knowledge, how information about space and time is mentally represented, and how people combine concepts into new entities.

Open knowledge: A silent revolution in science by Alexandra Elbakyan
2021-01-28 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
A full autobiography is available here.
About the talk
On the 5th September 2011, aged 23, Alexandra Elbakyan created a PHP script that downloaded articles for free to make them open access to all. That script came to be known as Sci-Hub, “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers” (more information here). Now, in its 10th year, Sci-Hub has become one of – if not the – most popular means to access academic literature hidden behind a paywall. Sci-Hub’s creator will join us to talk about the origin of Sci-Hub, where it is now, and what the future holds. The talk will be composed of a 25 minute pre-recorded talk followed by a live Q&A.

The IGDORE project: Reinventing academia with open (science) mind by Dr Rebecca Willén
2021-02-04 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | Zoom, United Kingdom
About the speaker

Dr Willén is an independent researcher in psychology. Her main professional interests are research ethics, research methodology and investigative psychology (forensic psychology). She is the founder of IGDORE, an independent virtual research institute, and a strong proponent of open and replicable science. In 2016, she finished her PhD at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, with a thesis on police interviewing techniques and verbal deception detection. The thesis included retroactive disclosure statements (RDS; p’s 27-28 in the thesis) which she followed up on in 2018 with additional statements published on her website. Her decision to publish RDS has been covered in an episode of Everything Hertz, mentioned in a piece in Undark Magazine, and she has co-authored a paper (in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science) on similar statements. Curate Science has turned her RDS into a reporting standard badge called ‘Basic 7 (retroactive)’. After 5 years abroad (Indonesia, Canada, Netherlands), she returned to Sweden in December 2019. She now resides in Gothenburg with her two children and three rescue dogs. She’s a first generation university student, liberal leftist, and a proponent of viewpoint diversity.
You can find out more about Dr Willén here:
CV – ORCID – Publons – Google Scholar – Twitter – GitHub – Blog
About the talk

Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) is an independent research institute dedicated to improving the quality of science, science education, and quality of life for scientists, students and their families. Founded in 2016 with one single researcher, the founder herself, the institute today has over 110 researchers from 35 countries. Dr Willén’s talk will provide a brief background to why the IGDORE project was launched, an introduction to its goals, visions, and organisation, and how IGDORE hopes to further advance the movement for open and replicable science.

Chiral materials and finding your voice as an early career researcher by Dr Jess Wade
2021-02-10 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Bio available here and here.
About the talk
Dr Jess Wade is a Research Fellow at Imperial College London investigating spin selective charge transport through chiral systems in the Department of Materials. As well as speaking on this work and her career thus far, Jess will talk on work outside the lab. This work has included campaigning for greater diversity in science, such as involving more women in physics and STEM subjects more broadly, as well as tackling systemic gender and racial biases Wikipedia. Please join us for what will be a fascinating talk on the barriers in science and how to navigate them as an early career researcher.
To join, please follow this link.

Learning the hard way: Reproducible workflows by Dr James Bartlett
2021-02-16 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr James Bartlett completed his PhD at Coventry University on the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with addictive behaviour in daily and non-daily smokers. James is a lecturer in psychology at Arden University and leads undergraduate and postgraduate modules on research methods. He specialises in quantitative research methods and his research focuses on addictive behaviour. All his research and resources are available here.
About the talk
The lifecycle of a research project spans months and often years, with plenty of disruptions along the way. From preregistration to publication, there is plenty of room for error as you forget what settings you used for your analyses or make a mistake cleaning your data. In this seminar, I will outline how establishing a reproducible workflow helps yourself and the scientific community. Changing your approach can be daunting, so I will be outlining the mistakes I made along the way including a spreadsheet mix-up and a cringy preregistration. By the end of the seminar, you will see how you can incrementally create your own reproducible workflow.

Introduction to preregistration and registered reports by Dr Kaitlyn M. Werner
2021-02-19 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | Zoom, United Kingdom
About the speaker

I am a SSHRC Banting postdoctoral research fellow in the Affective Science and Health Laboratory (PI: Dr Brett Ford) at the University of Toronto. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand the factors that facilitate successful self-regulation and goal pursuit. I also have a strong interest in measurement (e.g., construct and ecological validity), advanced quantitative methods (e.g., multilevel SEM, Bayesian statistics), research design (e.g., experimental, longitudinal, experience sampling), and meta-science (e.g., transparent and reproducible research practices). Outside of the lab, I am also an Ambassador for the Center for Open Science.​
To learn more about Dr Werner, visit her website.
About the talk
This session will provide an overview of preregistration and registered reports.

Rmarkdown and Github: A walkthrough for sharing code and results by Dr Oliver Pain
2021-02-25 14:00 - 15:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Oliver Pain is a postdoctoral research associate at the Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre, King’s College London. His work uses statistical genetics to understand and predict outcomes related to mental health.
About the talk
This workshop will provide an introduction to Rmarkdown websites and how to host them online using GitHub pages. Oliver will take you through a few exercises to create a Rmarkdown website online.
Important note: for the practical, Oliver suggests using Rstudio and GitHub Desktop, but he will also provide instructions using R and Git on the command line. You will also need a GitHub account and to download the workshop materials in advance.

Psychology in a crisis by Dr Stuart Ritchie
2021-03-04 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Ritchie is a psychologist with research interests in a variety of areas, including intelligence, individual differences in cognitive abilities, behavioural genetics, and more recently in the replication crisis. In 2014, he completed his PhD at the university of Edinburgh, staying on to become a postdoctoral research fellow investigating difference in intelligence, working on the world renowned Lothian Birth Cohort dataset. In 2018, he became a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. In his recent book, Science Fictions, Stuart examines fraud, bias, error, and hype in scientific research, and the incentives that undermine scientific integrity. More recently, Stuart focused his energies on cross-examining scientific claims relevant to the coronavirus pandemic, and in pursuit of this has set up a Myth Busting website.
About the talk
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychologists and other behavioural scientists sprung into action, writing high-profile papers that described the application of their research findings to the crisis. Since changing people’s behaviours is a big part of controlling a pandemic, they saw many opportunities to use their research to help out. As we know, though, the behavioural sciences have been going through their own crisis over the past years – a crisis of confidence in the quality, replicability, and generalisability of their findings. How appropriate was it to try to apply these findings to a completely unprecedented scenario – and one where lives were at stake? What are the pitfalls in doing so? In this talk, I’ll discuss what’s happened with psychology and the pandemic, and propose a new scheme—partly stolen from NASA—to assess how ready any given piece of research is for translation to a crisis.

Working with R Markdown by Dr Jon McPhetres
2021-03-05 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | Zoom, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Speaker’s bio and any relevant social links can be found here.
About the talk
This seminar will demonstrate how to use R to produce statistical output directly to a document without manually inputting values.

The AccessLab by Dr Lotty Brand
2021-03-11 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Brand is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield with Prof. Tom Stafford investigating the use of argument maps and automated dialogue for fostering open-mindedness and de-polarisation. Lotty was previously Postdoctoral Research Associate with Prof. Alex Mesoudi at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus as part of the Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group (HuBCEG). Her research spans a variety of topics related to the evolution of human behaviour and cognition. All her publications and preprints are openly available here.
About the talk
AccessLab is a novel science communication initiative in which researchers and those without research training get together to discuss how scientific literature can be accessed and used by people outside of the academic bubble. The aim is to open-up access to scientific research for anyone to find, understand, and use in their daily lives. The workshops include open discussion about how scientific research is funded and published, how to find it, how to get to the bottom of confusing media headlines, and a chance for those without formal research training to confidentially research a question of their own with a trained researcher. It’s a really eye-opening workshop that I really recommend to any researcher who cares about how scientific research is accessed, understood, and put to good use. In this talk, I’ll discuss my experience of helping to run and develop these workshops, as well as the general principles about science communication and open science that I’ve learnt through the process. More about AccessLab can be found in this open publication.
To join, follow this link.

Opportunities and challenges of open science for qualitative methods by Dr Peter Branney
2021-03-16 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
To learn more about Dr Branney, visit his website.
About the talk
Despite (perhaps in-part because of) the mocking of expertise in recent elections and the replication crisis in social psychology, the 17th century Scientific Revolution is re-emerging; albeit reconfigured as the Open Science movement in calls for open collaboration and digitally mediated open access to study designs, methods, notebooks, data and results. To date, psychologists have largely focused on experiments and the replications of findings, but it is important for us to consider the possibilities for qualitative research as open science. I will do this by weaving three threads of thought; 1) the systemic changes open science is bringing about to the research landscape and how far these reach back in history, 2) the legitimate sensitivities of qualitative data and 3) opportunities available for supporting open qualitative research.

Data visualisation in R by Dr Niklas Johannes
2021-03-19 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | Zoom, United Kingdom
About the speaker
I’m a Postdoc in the Adolescent Well-Being in the Digital Age program at the Oxford Internet Institute. Under the supervision of Andrew Przybylski, I study the effects of technology use on well-being and performance. My PhD had a similar topic: Here, I investigated the effects of constant connectedness on performance and well-being. In my research, I follow open science practices. That means I preregister all studies and make materials, data, and analyses publicly available.
To learn more about Dr Johannes, visit his website.
About the talk
This session will focus on data visualisation in R.

Working with large, open-source neuroimaging datasets by Corey Horien
2021-03-22 13:00 - 14:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Corey Horien is an MD-PhD student in Todd Constable’s lab at Yale School of Medicine. His research focuses on individual differences in fMRI data in the developing brain in health and disease. He recently wrote “A hitchhiker’s guide to working with large, open-source neuroimaging datasets”.
Twitter: @coreyhorien
About the talk
Large datasets are growing increasingly common in neuroimaging. Due to the simultaneous increasing popularity of open science, these state-of-the-art samples are more accessible than ever. Nevertheless, their sheer size presents a new set of challenges that might cause difficulties. In this talk, Corey will discuss tips for working with large datasets from the end-user’s perspective. He will cover all aspects of the data lifecycle: from what to consider when downloading and storing the data to tips on how to become acquainted with a dataset one did not collect and what to share when communicating results. Emphasis is placed on practical solutions, as well as lessons his lab has learned working with large samples.

The racial origins of the p-value by Theresa Wege
2021-03-30 12:30 - 13:30 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Theresa Elise Wege is a PhD student and PGTA for statistics at the Centre for Mathematical Cognition, Loughborough University. While her research is focused on preschool maths, she thinks about statistics pedagogy and introducing students to the philosophy of science as part of her teaching role.
About the talk
Where do the statistical methods we commonly use come from? In this presentation, Theresa will explore the origins of the p-value and other statistical methods and discuss their connections to eugenics and white supremacist thinking in the early 20th century. With a feminist epistemology in mind, Theresa will present the discovery of statistical methods embedded in the biographies of Sir Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and Sir Ronald Fisher. She will conclude with how thinking about the origins of statistical methods can be integrated in the statistics curriculum and how it can facilitate discussions in the open science context.

Hans Eysenck: personality and fatal diseases; exposing a scientific scandal by Dr Anthony Pelosi
2021-04-08 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker
Dr Anthony Pelosi is a consultant psychiatrist at Priory Hospital Glasgow. Since the early ‘90s, Pelosi has published extensive critiques of the work of Hans Eysenck, In February 2019, Pelosi published a paper in the Journal of Health Psychology, in which he stated that the Eysenck case is “one of the worst scientific scandals of all time,” which was also accompanied by an editorial from David Marks, in which he called for an inquiry by King’s College London and the British Psychological Society.
About the talk
During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the late Hans Eysenck conducted a programme of research into the causes, prevention and treatment of cancer and other fatal diseases in collaboration with one of his protégés, Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. This led to what must be the most astonishing series of findings ever published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. I am going to present just a selection of these findings. I will also summarise a study in which these scientists describe in detail – and without a trace of insight – a criminally negligent clinical experiment on 41 people who were at grave and imminent risk due to malignant hypertension.
I will be asking the RIOT Science Club what I have been asking myself for three decades. How on earth could this work have been published and why was nothing done about it until last year? I will be making a few suggestions. i) Professor Eysenck considered himself to be some sort of genius. Over the years, he managed to beguile numerous young researchers who egged him on in this belief. Some of them still try to defend his work on fatal diseases. ii) He was encouraged to continue this research by tobacco company scientists even when they knew that it was so flawed. iii) Eysenck thought of himself as the world’s greatest psychometrician. However, he had only a loose and fluctuating grasp of the difference between statistical significance and effect size. iv) His university and his regulatory body were not up to the task of dealing with such a person.
I will be asking for suggestions about how to undo some of the damage to science that has been caused by this scandal.
