Construct validity

An interesting op-ed in today's NYT suggests that helping others is not always effective (e.g. supporting a child in college or a spouse to complete a fitness goal). Finkel and Fitzsimons (the authors) set out a couple of criteria for when help is best: for example, when it's clearly needed and when it's complementary to the recipient's efforts. Overall I enjoyed the article, and it's a nice addition to some ongoing discussion of the consequences of helicopter parenting. One small section bothered me though:

The good news is that people seem to be adept at understanding when others need help, as shown in a fascinating observational study of barroom brawls. This study, led by the sociologist Michael J. Parks of Penn State and published online in March in the journal Aggressive Behavior, showed that bystanders are especially likely to intervene to end the brawl to the extent that the brawlers are intoxicated. That is, observers stepped in to help precisely when that help was most needed.

I was quite surprised that the authors cited evidence on helping in brawls as evidence for our sensitivity to need in overall helping behavior. To me this seemed like a clear example of problematic construct validity: why is jumping into a fight in a bar the same as monitoring your spouse's ongoing exercise needs? 

Why use TeX for academic papers?

In a post from several years ago, Russ Poldrack said pretty much everything I have to say about why you would write academic papers in LaTeX. Like Russ, I also sometimes have trouble convincing collaborators to work with me in TeX. But I've found a surprising number of journals will accept TeX source. Elsevier, for all its faults, has an in-house TeX style that looks pretty nice. The only journal that has consistently asked for manuscripts to be reformatted in Word has been Perspectives in Psychological Science.

Here are just a few notes on my TeX workflow:

I still haven't found much in the way of track changes-style functionality aside from texdiff, which is better than nothing but occasionally barfs on more complex changes.

One of the best parts of writing APA formatted papers in TeX is using apa.cls (though now there's apa6 as well). The only issue from my perspective is that apa.cls typesets figures correctly according to APA style: at the end of the manuscript. But APA style is completely silly (as some journals have noted) : putting figures at the end makes reading and reviewing papers with many figures into a nightmare of flipping or scrolling. So apa2.cls is my minor modification that leaves figures in situ.

For bibtex, apacite is great, but it includes issue numbers for journals; apacite2.cls doesn't do this.

Very minor modifications, but hopefully useful for someone else besides me.