Once a month during the academic year, the statistics faculty select a paper for our students to read and discuss. Papers are selected based on their impact or historical value, or because they contain useful techniques or results.

Notes preparer: Haim Bar

The last paper of the month for the academic year appeared in the Journal of Irreproducible Results (JIR). The title of the paper by Bennett et al. is “Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction”. The authors of the paper received the Ig Nobel prize in 2012, for neuroscience. According to the Ig Nobel website “The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” Indeed, although the chosen paper of the month is light-hearted and has appeared in a science humor magazine, it makes a very good argument for the importance of accounting for multiple testing, especially in modern applications, where the number of simultaneous tests can be very large.

Read more about the Ig Nobel prizeand the journal.