Misc

It's always nice to find someone else in a completely different field who has similar interests. When demonstrating the strength of the associations people have with each day of the week , we included data from lab-based experiments, Google search and Ngram enquires. As with our experimental data for example, Google searches found fewer occurrences of midweek days in webpages and books (see below). Fig 3. (a) Mean number of associations generated for each weekday in Study 3. General Associations are shown in dark grey, Specific Events in light grey. Error bars show SEM. (b) Number of hits returned by Google Search for each of the search terms “Monday” to “Sunday”. (c) Google Ngram search results. The y-axis shows the percentages of weekday words in the corpus. See main text for details. (d) Word frequencies from the British National Corpus However, we didn't include data from Twitter and last week a colleague spotted the recent work of Jeff Sisson . Have a look h...

I will be leaving The University of Lincoln in October having accepted a  50th Anniversary Lectureship  at  Lancaster University . While I am immensely excited for the challenges that lie ahead, Lincoln has provided me with a fantastic environment for research, teaching, and public engagement. The support and genuine concern shown by the school and many many people across the university has been deeply appreciated. Thank you. Recent projects completed at The University of Lincoln Stress detection using wearable physiological sensors  (appears in  Artificial Computation in Biology and Medicine ) Mental representations of weekdays  ( appears  in  PLoS ONE ) (list of media coverage here ) Watch-wearing as a marker of conscientiousness  (appears in  PeerJ )  Featured in The Daily Mail  (in  print ) and the Sunday Herald (Australia ) Real Men Real Style also covered the work here Beyond self-report: ...

Jittering is the act of adding random noise to data in order to prevent overplotting in statistical graphs. Overplotting can occur when a continuous measurement is rounded to a convenient unit. This has the effect of making a continuous variable appear like a discrete ordinal variable.  For example, age is measured in years and body weight is measured in pounds or kilograms.  A scatter plot of weight versus age, which includes a sufficiently large sample of people will involve considerable overlap. Many individuals may be recorded as, 29 years old and weighing 70 kg, and there will be many markers plotted at the point (29, 70). The same is often true when plotting other individual difference metrics throughout psychology (e.g. personality) (Figure 1). Figure 1: Before Jittering - a significant positive correlation between x & y [r = .37]. To alleviate overplotting, it is possible to add a small amount of random noise to the data...

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is a psychological inventory based on a 4-point Likert scale and consists of 40 questions on a self-report basis.  Below is a short script for SPSS which will help speed up the coding process. A version that runs in  R is also in the pipeline.  All items should be labeled as separate numeric variables as stai1 and taiy1 ...etc The script computes and prints the results for all reverse scored items and then calculates and prints state and trait scores. It will also produce  Cronbach's Alpha  coefficients. The original scoring key for the STAI can be found  here . *Part 1 - reverse scoring of specific items COMPUTE stai1r = 5 - stai1. EXECUTE. COMPUTE stai2r = 5 - stai2. EXECUTE. COMPUTE stai5r = 5 - stai5. EXECUTE. COMPUTE stai8r = 5 - stai8. EXECUTE. COMPUTE stai10r = 5 - stai10. EXECUTE. COMPUTE stai11r = 5 - stai11. EXECUTE. COMPUTE stai15r = 5 - stai15. EXE...

My former primary school has become a mini- chernobyl  (minus the radioactivity) after being abandoned in 2007. The site has been left to degrade as the local council is apparently unable to sell the land.  What fascinates me about this site is not the lack of human activity, but that it exists in the centre of a fully functioning town! Hidden away behind a handful of active council buildings, the barren and bleak landscape is all the more bewildering in the winter sun.  Larger versions of these photos can be downloaded on  Flickr .