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 4/10 Good --- scienceblogs.com http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScienceblogsCombinedFeed
| A feed of all posts across all blogs in the ScienceBlogs network. ... |
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 --- 74 days ago http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScienceblogsCombinedFeed/~3/289544738/repost_mdma
| A recent post of Zuska's discusses the pejorative use of "anecdote" to dismiss personal accounts of gender bias. The generic argument will be well familiar to many scientists who are used to sneering at sources of insight that are limited to individual data points. I concur in many cases however I also value anecdotal observations much in the way that commenter Sanguinity identified a number of useful applications of the anecdote in science including the following:
- suggest a new direction for query/research.
...
In that last case, the anecdote is a potential source for a vast new amount of information, but only if you don't dismiss it out of hand as "just an anecdote."
This reminded me of a post I wrote previously on the value of anecdotal case reports describing MDMA-related fatality and medical emergency.
The singular of data is "anecdote" .
We all know this hoary old scientific snark. Pure Pedantry ponders the utility of Case Reports following a discussion of same at The Scientist .
The Pure Pedantry Ponder identifies "rare neurological cases" as a primary validation for the Case Study, but the contribution goes way beyond this. Let's take YHN's favorite example, drug abuse science and MDMA in particular. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... ... |
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