Artist needed!

We have some great ideas but none of us can draw. We need your help with designs and art for any or all of these projects:

1. “Gone Fishing” T-shirt

A person is standing in a boat, fishing. The lake is full, not of fish but of little numbers: “.14”, “.31”, “.08”, etc etc. And also a few shiny glittery numbers like “.04”, “.01”, “.03”. The fisherman is reeling in a glittering “.05”. Then, next to him on the boat is a bucket with a few shiny “.04″‘s and “.03″‘s.

Possible titles:

– Teach the Controversy (as in here).
This is Science?
Psychological Science
– Or we could play it straight and give it the title, We Can Do Better Than This.

In any case, all this would be on the back, and then the front would just have a tasteful Stan logo over the pocket. Or something like that.

2. “Garden of Forking Paths” T-shirt

Something similar with a “forking paths” design. I’m not quite sure how to do it.

3. “Tabloid Science” T-shirt

Some sort of collage of all the “power = .06” studies we talk about here: himmicanes and hurricanes, beauty and sex ratio, ovulation and just about anything, MRI’s, etc etc, we must have dozens of examples so we could just cram them in to a single overstuffed image.

Or maybe do it as a mock-up of a tabloid newspaper, with the title “Psychological Science” (in that newspaper-title font like they have for the New York Times) and then various tabloid-style headlines laid out, newspaper style).

Then on the front: “Stan. We can do better.”

Or something like that. Use your creativity!

4. Handy Statistical Lexicon

I think this could work in the form of an illustrated book. This is for someone who really likes to draw!

5. “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen” movie posters

I think these could be awesome. See here for the descriptions of the movies, to get a sense of what you’d be working with.

What I really want to see are the movies themselves, but that would take a lot of work. Maybe I can throw together a script or two sometime. Or at least a Gong Show act.

I’m serious!

I’m serious! Anyone who wants to draw any of the above, please let me know. There’s a free T-shirt in it for you. Also glory.

P.S. The submissions (from Ed Witt) are here.

20 thoughts on “Artist needed!

  1. Do you remember the poster that hung for years (maybe still does) in the window of Top Dog in Berkeley, in the food court on Hearst? It was titled “The Path to Success” or something like that, and it showed a road climbing from the base of a mountain to the peak. People are walking up the road, but almost all of them are being diverted into areas along the wayside: “Mutual Admiration Society”, “Bohemianism”, etc.

    I’m thinking you could do the same kind of thing with The Road to Statistical Significance….not the exact same thing, but the same idea. “Thought of the Question Before Looking at the Data”, “Didn’t Cherry-Pick Enough”, “Didn’t Try Enough Likelihood Functions”, etc., each could divert people from reaching the shining city on the hill labeled “Statistical Significance”. Actually this wouldn’t work as a tee shirt, it would have to be a big poster like the one at Top Dog.

    Or, hmm, how about a cherry orchard (sign that says “Fisher’s Cherries” or something) , with guys wearing lab coats out collecting cherries in baskets, and a caption: “Scientists selecting data for their new study.”

    • Phil:

      These are some good ideas. But I want to avoid the term (and concept) of “cherry-picking” because it’s so negative, and I want to convey the “garden of forking paths” idea that these problems with null hypothesis significance testing arise even when the researcher is not trying to cheat.

      That said, with the “fishing” idea, I’m clearly implying that researchers are looking around for statistical significance. Somehow, to me, “fishing” does not sound as bad as “cherry picking.”

  2. I think I’ve pre-emptively stolen idea #1 for my book cover. We were tossing around ideas and “fishing for significance” came up, resulting in this:

    http://www.nostarch.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/product_full/statsdone-wrong.png

    Not quite the same — we decided that putting 0.05 on the end of the hook wouldn’t be understood by some of the audience, so we just used a plot. But it’s close. I guess the fishing metaphor is universal.

  3. Have you considered some form of ‘crowd sourcing’, if that’s the right term…or a competition for graphic design students, with the prize being a free copy of STAN (that’ll get them going!)

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