[cat picture] Alison McCook from Retraction Watch interviewed Eric Loken and me regarding our recent article, “Measurement error and the replication crisis.” We talked about why traditional statistics are often counterproductive to research in the human sciences. Here’s the interview: … Continue reading
Kevin Lewis and Paul Alper send me so much material, I think they need their own blogs. In the meantime, I keep posting the stuff they send me, as part of my desperate effort to empty my inbox. 1. From … Continue reading
Mikhail Balyasin writes: I have come across this paper by Jacob Westfall and Tal Yarkoni, “Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think.” I think it talks about very similar issues you raise on your blog, but in … Continue reading
At Bank Underground: When studying the effects of interventions on individual behavior, the experimental research template is typically: Gather a bunch of people who are willing to participate in an experiment, randomly divide them into two groups, assign one treatment … Continue reading
Avi Adler points to this post by Felix Schönbrodt on “What’s the probability that a significant p-value indicates a true effect?” I’m sympathetic to the goal of better understanding what’s in a p-value (see for example my paper with John … Continue reading
I followed a link at Steve Hsu’s blog and came to this discussion of Feyman’s cognitive style. Hsu writes that “it was often easier for [Feynman] to invent his own solution than to read through someone else’s lengthy paper” and … Continue reading
The other day, in the context of a discussion of an article from 1972, I remarked that the great statistician William Cochran, when writing on observational studies, wrote almost nothing about causality, nor did he mention selection or meta-analysis. It … Continue reading
Paul Pudaite writes: In the latest Journal of the American Statistical Association (September 2014, Vol. 109 No. 507), Andrew Harvey and Alessandra Luati published a paper [preprint here] — “Filtering With Heavy Tails” — featuring the phenomenon you had asked … Continue reading
Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my … Continue reading
Following up on our blog discussions a year ago, I published a review of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart,” for the journal Statistics, Politics, and Policy. I invited Murray to publish a response, and he did so. Here’s the … Continue reading
Alex Tabarrok with a good catch: In Why Don’t Women Patent?, a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. [Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, and David Munroe] present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women. … Continue reading
Greg Campbell writes: I am a Canadian archaeologist (BSc in Chemistry) researching the past human use of European Atlantic shellfish. After two decades of practice I am finally getting a MA in archaeology at Reading. I am seeing if the … Continue reading
A few days ago I discussed the evaluation of somewhat-plausible claims that are somewhat supported by theory and somewhat supported by statistical evidence. One point I raised was that an implausibly large estimate of effect size can be cause for … Continue reading
This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: Continue reading
Interesting discussion (by Dave Armstrong, Will Wilkinson, and somebody called Sebastian) here.
Following up on our link to an article about educational measurement, Eric Loken pointed me to this: On the Criteria Corporation blog we [Loken] just posted a look at golf tournament scores. If you take the four rounds as if … Continue reading
Marco Morales sent me this paper of his with Rene Bautista:
Exit polls are seldom used for voting behavior research despite the advantages they have compared to pre and post-election surveys. Exit polls reduce potential biases and measurement errors on reported vote choice and other political attitudes related to the time in which measurements are taken. This is the result of collecting information from actual voters only minutes after the vote has been cast. Among the main reasons why exit polls are not frequently used by scholars it is the time constraints that must be placed on the interviews, i.e., short questionnaires, severely limiting the amount of information obtained from each respondent. This paper advances a combination of an appropriate data collection design along with adequate statistical techniques to allow exit polls to overcome such a restriction without jeopardizing data quality. This mechanism implies the use of Planned Missingness designs and Multiple Imputation techniques. The potential advantages of this design applied to voting behavior research are illustrated empirically with data from the 2006 Mexican election.
This sounds cool. I’d only add that all surveys are “planned missingness.” That’s what makes it a survey rather than a census. Also I want to take a look at their data and see if their results are consistent with what we found in our analysis of the 2006 Mexican presidential election. Continue reading
When preparing our GSS survey questions on social and political polarization, one of our questions was, “How many people do you know who have a second home?” This was supposed to help us measure social stratification by wealth–we figured people … Continue reading
Here’s the abstract for a talk by Dr. Albert Tarantola, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris: While the conventional way for making inferences from observations goes through the use of conditional probabilities (via de Bayes identity), there is an … Continue reading
David Budescu writes, We ran an experiment where subject made predictions about future value of many stocks based on their past performance. More precisely, they were asked to estimate 7 quantiles of the distribution of each stock: Q05, Q15, Q25, … Continue reading