Misc

I've worn a Garmin wearable fitness tracker religiously for the last 9 months. The device has now become unreliable, but with so much data collected, I was curious to quantify patterns based on physical activity and sleep (this model measures both). However, while I can view a daily step count using the online service Garmin Connect , I also wanted to download my total step count for each day and run my own separate analysis. But this isn't possible (see below). I own the device, but not the data. Garmin can provide access to an API , but this remains expensive according to this reddit feed. It would actually be cheaper to build my own device and use that instead. Personally, I don't see how preventing customers from accessing their own raw data can continue. I understand why a manufacture would restrict access to the exact algorithm that takes accelerometer data and converts this data into steps, but my request outlined above is entirely reasonable. Man...

The Rosenberg self-esteem scale is a psychological inventory based on a 4-point likert scale and consists of 10 questions. It is used extensively to measure self-esteem across the social sciences. Below is a short script for SPSS which will help speed up the coding process.  All items should be labelled as separate numeric variables as R1, R2...etc The script computes and prints the results for all reverse-scored items and then calculates the total score.  *Part 1 - reverse scoring of specific items COMPUTE R3 = 5 - Q3. EXECUTE. COMPUTE R5 = 5 - Q5. EXECUTE. COMPUTE R8 = 5 - Q8. EXECUTE. COMPUTE R9 = 5 - Q9. EXECUTE. COMPUTE R10 = 5 - Q10. EXECUTE. *Part 2 - total score COMPUTE Rosenberg = Q1+Q2+R3+Q4+R5+Q6+Q7+R8+R9+R10. EXECUTE. *Reliability  RELIABILITY   /VARIABLES=Q1 Q2 R3 Q4 R5 Q6 Q7 R8 R9 R10   /SCALE('ALL VARIABLES') ALL   /MODEL=ALPHA.

Science has its problems , but many early career researchers (myself included) can often struggle when it comes to knowing how we can improve systems that we still very much have to operate within on a daily basis. That said, I am a firm believer that making research readily available to others is something that we should all work towards where possible. This applies to publications, data, computer code/software and the peer review process. The references below are taken from my own reading, but this list certainly isn't exhaustive. All of these papers pull in the same direction. Specifically, they provide convincing evidence that open access research practices help science as well as the individual researcher.  Early career researchers, who are typically gifted very little time to get ideas off the ground and demonstrate that they have societal importance, will help their own cause by ensuring that work is readily available across multiple disciplines and beyond. Moving ...

POSITION FILLED This is now advertised on jobs.ac.uk , but if you wish to discuss the studentship informally or if you have any questions about the position, please contact me (d.a.ellis@lancaster.ac.uk).

Frequently in psychology, many will proclaim that they could have provided an answer before you ran the experiment. This reminds me of people who walk into an art gallery or listen to a piece of music before announcing that they could have created exactly the same thing or something superiour. Of course, after taking a  few more seconds to think about any piece of art, most of us would admit that even if it was possible to recreate something very similar, we probably wouldn't know why we were engaged with the activity without thinking very deeply about the subject and the underlying message. That said, if the goal of art is to elicit a response, I suppose ' I could do that ' does in itself satisfy that condition! But even in science, psychology appears to elicit this response more than say, theoretical physics. There are many reasons, not least that a psychology paper is far more likely to reach the mainstream media than one published in theoretical physics. Even wi...

Generating decent tables in R is something I have struggled with for some time, particularly when these need to follow  APA   guidelines . SPSS has proved to be a complete nightmare so in the past I've simply built templates in Word and copied the numbers across manually from the R console. This is both time-consuming and increases the chances of human error. Fortunately, David Stanley has written a  great library that can quickly generate results and place them in APA tables. One note of caution - your data frame must be complete (i.e. no missing values) and only include variables you want to appear in the table.  Subsetting your main data frame beforehand may be required in the first instance. Otherwise, it is plain sailing: For example, a data-set with six personality factors calculated from the HEXACO  personality inventory across several hundred participants might look like this... To generate an APA correlation table run the following: ##...