Johannes Schult

Scientific work requires transparency. There is no mad genius in his/her lonely tower working for years on end on some great invention. While it may be true that professors have little time for anything but their research, they communicate their findings (along with their methods). Science is a social enterprise. Primed by Gary King‘s essay “Replication, Replication” (1995) and lectures by Rainer Schnell, I arrived at the conclusion that a scientific workflow must be a reproducible workflow. I do think that making replication material broadly available is a good thing for everyone involved.

Replication materials for my recent publications can now be found online. Maintaining a reproducible workflow is hard work but rewarding. Looking back, I could have improved a lot of things (without changing the results, mind you). It felt a bit awkward at first. Soon enough it felt even more awkward to have waited so long to put up the material. I wish I could share more of my older publications (and also raw data) but privacy laws, work contracts, and fellow psychologists who are highly skeptical of these ideas keep me from doing so.

Hopefully, the present material is just the beginning. Sadly, most psychologists do not share their materials publicly so I had to figure out most stuff on my own. I decided against third-party repositories because some focus solely on data sets whereas others are somewhat difficult to handle. So I wrote the HTML by hand hoping that a plain format allows for longevity. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements.

This is another example of why I like the 52-second format: If this lonely hearts ad was any longer, people would actually start taking it seriously. I was somewhat uncertain about the exact wording, the organ in the background and the main chord sequence (D G E A was in there at one point). But I think, the song works in its present form (p < 0.05). The concept of the song was inspired by an old statistics lecture that featured remarks about Love@Lycos, matching algorithms and bootstrapping.

#7 Lonely Hearts Ad (Bootstrapping)

I’m looking for a woman who is capable of bootstrapping, yeah
I don’t care if she’s tall or thin or if her hair is red

It’s good for a romantic relationship to be based on common interests, yeah
Even though I’m the first to admit that bootstrapping’s uncommon

This statistical procedure
Is an important feature
Of our future late-night conversations

I’m looking for a woman who is capable of bootstrapping, yeah
If we can figure out bootstrapping we can figure out everything else

(words and music by Johannes Schult)

I just recorded a video of me playing the song at home: