A team of researchers examined 2,101 commercial experiments facilitated by A/B splitting tools like Google Optimize, Mixpanel, Monetate and Optimizely and used regression analysis to detect whether p-hacking (previously), a statistical cheating technique that makes it look like you've found a valid cause-and-effect relationship when you haven't, had taken place.

Vladimir Putin just changed his tune. The Russian president has previously denied having anything to do with hacking America's 2016 elections, but today says perhaps "patriotically minded" private Russian hackers were involved in cyberattacks last year that swung the presidential race for Donald J. — Read the rest

Brian Wansink is one of the most-cited nutrition researchers in the world; 30,000 US schools use his advice to design their lunch programs, drawing on studies he's done that show that kids eat more carrots when they're called "X-ray vision carrots" and that putting out fruit bowls improves eating habits, and that smaller plates reduce portion sizes.

Cennydd Bowles's essay on "Datafication and ideological blindness" attacks the business/product-design vogue to base every decision on "data" on the grounds that data reflects objective truth, free from bias.

The gold standard for researching the effects of diet on health is the self-reported food-diary, which is prone to lots of error, underreporting of "bad" food, and changes in diet that result from simply keeping track of what you're eating. The standard tool for correcting these errors comparisons with more self-reported tests.

John Bohannon teamed up with a German documentary crew to undertake a crappy junk-science study on the effects of bitter chocolate on weight loss, and managed to push their hoax to major media outlets all over the world — here's how.