Hi Beth I love to mention the story of Gregor Mendel and HIS fake data. The fake data idea was advocated by R.A. Fisher himself and covered in detail in Oliver and Boyd's "Experiments in Plant Hybridization" (1965) which reprints some of Mendel's papers and contains Fisher's commentary. If you remember, Mendel postulated the existence of (what we now call) genes, as well as alleles (pairs of genes on corresponding chromosomes), and described a few key features of genetic transmission that are the foundation of modern genetics.
Basically, when Mendel hypothesized those 25% 25% 25% 25% ratios after crossing two allele patterns (say, recessive/recessive paired with Dominant/recessive) and predicting 50% plants expressing the Dominant in the Phenotype, his data not only matched, but it matched too well. I have not read the originals, just the summaries of this in the only great introductory statistics text (so I am told) by Freedman, Pisani, Purves, Adhikari, second edition (not sure the same story is repeated in later editions). It seems Mendel or his assistant did not appreciate the concept of standard error. Freedman et al (after Fisher) estimated the chance of getting empirical data as close as he claimed to his model to be 4/100,000. It's an interesting story because he was correct in his model. Perhaps his assistant knew how the data was to come out after many years of research? ========================== John W. Kulig, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology Coordinator, University Honors Plymouth State University Plymouth NH 03264 ========================== ----- Original Message ----- From: "Beth Benoit" <[email protected]> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9:32:09 PM Subject: [tips] Stapel's faking of social psychology data This story has been going on for a couple of days. Embarrassing: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21118-psychologist-admits-faking-data-in-dozens-of-studies.html Beth Benoit Granite State College Plymouth State University New Hampshire --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] . To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13338.f659d005276678c0696b7f6beda66454&n=T&l=tips&o=13855 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-13855-13338.f659d005276678c0696b7f6beda66...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=13865 or send a blank email to leave-13865-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
