The FilmTech experience

Project Leaders: Roger Cook, Jeffrey UhlmannFormal proposal for the 2008/2009 project, "The FilmTech Experience." From original description: "This project brings together students and faculty from several departments and programs in three different colleges, as well as staff from the Missouri Film Office and Student Life to work collaboratively on a feature film project. The filmmaking venture will enable students to use cutting-edge information technology on a competitive industry project and to gain professional experience and credits in the entertainment field. It will also open up new interdisciplinary areas of curriculum, both in the various major fields and with the new Film Production course that will be offered in Spring 2009 in conjunction with the project."MU Interdisciplinary Innovations Fun

Consensus-based guidance for conducting and reporting multi-analyst studies

International audienceAny large dataset can be analyzed in a number of ways, and it is possible that the use of different analysis strategies will lead to different results and conclusions. One way to assess whether the results obtained depend on the analysis strategy chosen is to employ multiple analysts and leave each of them free to follow their own approach. Here, we present consensus-based guidance for conducting and reporting such multi-analyst studies, and we discuss how broader adoption of the multi-analyst approach has the potential to strengthen the robustness of results and conclusions obtained from analyses of datasets in basic and applied research

Creative destruction in science

Drawing on the concept of a gale of creative destruction in a capitalistic economy, we argue that initiatives to assess the robustness of findings in the organizational literature should aim to simultaneously test competing ideas operating in the same theoretical space. In other words, replication efforts should seek not just to support or question the original findings, but also to replace them with revised, stronger theories with greater explanatory power. Achieving this will typically require adding new measures, conditions, and subject populations to research designs, in order to carry out conceptual tests of multiple theories in addition to directly replicating the original findings. To illustrate the value of the creative destruction approach for theory pruning in organizational scholarship, we describe recent replication initiatives re-examining culture and work morality, working parents\u2019 reasoning about day care options, and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. Significance statement It is becoming increasingly clear that many, if not most, published research findings across scientific fields are not readily replicable when the same method is repeated. Although extremely valuable, failed replications risk leaving a theoretical void\u2014 reducing confidence the original theoretical prediction is true, but not replacing it with positive evidence in favor of an alternative theory. We introduce the creative destruction approach to replication, which combines theory pruning methods from the field of management with emerging best practices from the open science movement, with the aim of making replications as generative as possible. In effect, we advocate for a Replication 2.0 movement in which the goal shifts from checking on the reliability of past findings to actively engaging in competitive theory testing and theory building. Scientific transparency statement The materials, code, and data for this article are posted publicly on the Open Science Framework, with links provided in the article

Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples

The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

A General Method for Approximating Nonlinear Transformations of Probability Distributions

In this paper we describe a new approach for generalised nonlinear filtering. We show that the technique is more accurate, more stable, and far easier to implement than an extended Kalman filter. Several examples are provided, including the application of the new filter to problems involving discontinuous functions. 1 Introduction Possibly the most important problem arising in tracking and control applications is the representation and maintenance of uncertainty. The state of a system, whether measured or estimated, is rarely known perfectly because (a) measuring instruments and processes have limited precision, and/or (b) estimates of evolving systems are based on process models that fail to include all governing parameters. The uncertainty associated with a state estimate can be represented most generally by a probability distribution incorporating all knowledge about the state. Because the amount of knowledge about the state is inherently finite, a complete parameterisation of the ..

A Counter Example to the Theory of Simultaneous Localization and Map Building

This paper analyses the properties of the full covariance simultaneous map building problem (SLAM). We prove that, for the special case of a stationary vehicle (with no process noise) which uses a range-bearing sensor and has non-zero angular uncertainty, the fullcovariance SLAM algorithm always yields an inconsistent map. We also show, through simulations, that these conclusions appear to extend to a moving vehicle with process noise. However, these inconsistencies only become apparent after several hundred beacon updates