A recent article titled “The Sleeper Future of Data Visualization? Photography” extends the definition of data visualization to a new extreme. Proposing photography as the future of data visualization is an example of the slippery slope down which we descend when we allow the meanings of important terms to morph without constraint. Not long ago […]

Science is the best method that we’ve found for seeking truth. I trust science, but I don’t trust scientists. Science itself demands that we doubt and therefore scrutinize the work of scientists. This is fundamental to the scientific method. Science is too important to allow scientists to turn it into an enterprise that primarily serves […]

Modern science relies heavily on an approach to the assessment of uncertainty that is too narrow. Scientists rely on statistical measures of significance to establish the merits of their findings, often without fully understanding the limitations of those statistics and the original intentions for their use. P-values and even confidence intervals are cited as stamps […]