Mon, 18 Dec 2006
The very first thing people tell me when they hear that I don't have results
from my experiments is that I should publish my lack of results. Negative
results are interesting!
The trouble is that that's not actually true. I suspect I keep getting told
it because people would like to believe that it's true (I hear it most from
other PhD students). And sometimes, if you're lucky with your idea and your
experimental design, the null hypothesis is somewhat interesting. I've even
known people who had a null hypothesis that was more interesting than the
hypothesis they were testing (hypothetical example: huh, it turns out that
massive doses of radiation actually don't hurt lizards at all, I for one
welcome our new lizard overlords
).
But a lot of the time, the null hypothesis is actually very dull: you had a vague hunch based on a conversation with your supervisor at the pub that X and Y were correlated. They aren't. Damn.
I have taken to referring to this as the 'muffin effect', as in huh, what
do you know, putting a blueberry muffin near the control panel has
absolutely no effect whatsoever on the behaviour of the particles in
the accelerator, hand over that LaTeX, I have to publish right now!
That
is, quite a few null hypotheses are really quite dull, and let's face it, not
publishable. Enterprising PhD students should seek out these golden geese
experiments that are publishable either way.
posted at: 22:40 | path: /travails | permanent link to this entry
