Labor

If you have a laboratory that has one postdoc, one grad student and on average has two undergrad volunteers most of the time, you don’t run a two person lab. You run a four person lab.

Reflexively appealing to how they have to be trained in a ploy to pretend you aren’t using their labor is nonsense.

Shorthand

Storyboard

Pretty data

N-up

Prove the hypothesis

Representative image

Trend for significance

Different subcultures of science may use certain phrases that send people in other traditions into paroxysms of critique.

Mostly it is because such phrasing can sound like bad science. As if the person using it doesn’t understand how dangerous and horrible their thinking is. 

We’ve gone a few rounds over storyboarding and representative images in the past. 

Today’s topic is “n-up”, which is deployed, I surmise, after examining a few results, replicates or subjects that look promising for what the lab would prefer to be so. It raises my hackles. It smells to me like a recipe for confirmation bias and false alarming. To me.

Apparently this is normal phrasing for other people and merely indicates the pilot study is complete? 

How do you use the phrase?