Russ Lyons points us to this disturbing article by Brett Murphy, “They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars.” Here’s how the story goes: Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief … Continue reading
Children’s book authors have been doing well in the tournament, and here are two more. Don’t let the runaway bunny in the night kitchen, or the wild things might eat it up! I have no idea how either of these … Continue reading
Asher Meir writes: Economists (like me) love models with “rational expectations”. In these models, all agents have mutually consistent expectations of some future economic equilibrium. If everyone expects that the outcome (which can be stochastic) is X, then it will … Continue reading
Ethan writes: In this MS vs MS matchup I can’t imagine enjoying Stewart. I doubt she’d talk about her time in jail, just use the seminar to push her latest venture. Actually, Martha talking about her jail time is something … Continue reading
Commenters on yesterday’s contest reaffirm that Miles Davis was, indeed, cool. From Alan: I’ve probably listened to almost everything the Miles recorded and he is super-cool. My favorite single track has always been ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ with Wynton … Continue reading
There must be some econ literature on this one . . . Joseph Delaney writes that telehealth has been proposed as a solution to ER wait times, but it hasn’t worked so well in practice. Among other things, there are … Continue reading
OK, remember Wile E. Coyote when he makes the all-too-common mistake of stepping off a cliff, or standing on a cliff edge that breaks? He stands there in the air, unsupported by anything, until he realizes what’s happening—and only then … Continue reading
Alon Honig points to a post from psychology researcher Joe Hilgard: This is the story of how I [Hilgard] found what I believe to be scientific misconduct and what happened when I reported it. Science is supposed to be self-correcting. … Continue reading
Gary Smith writes: In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award (“the Nobel Prize of Computing”), predicted that within “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” Fifty-two years … Continue reading
Last year my co-bloggers and I posted 565 entries on this blog. Here’s a list of all them, in decreasing order of number of comments. You can draw your own conclusions from all this. A tale of two epidemiologists: It … Continue reading
Aleks points to this news report by Melissa Davey, who writes:
Ethan Steinberg writes: I thought you might find this funny given your past blog posts about related subjects (Iran & Benford’s law, preregistration, etc). Announcing that an election is fraudulent due to Benford’s law on data that doesn’t even exist … Continue reading
1. Meta-story Someone pointed me to a news report of a statistics-based research claim and asked me what I thought of it. I read through the press summary and the underlying research paper. At this point, it’s natural to anticipate … Continue reading
Apparently this is well known, it’s just new to me. [Actually, not so new, as this blog post has been sent to the end of the queue twice now, so it’s appearing about a year after I wrote it. — … Continue reading
Last year we posted 635 entries on this blog. Above is a histogram of the number of comments on each of the posts. The bars are each of width 5, except that I made a special bar just for the … Continue reading
Paul Alper points us to this news article by Catherine Rampell, which tells this story: Georgiou is not a mobster. He’s not a hit man or a spy. He’s a statistician. And the sin at the heart of his supposed … Continue reading
A colleague pointed me to Nate Silver’s election forecast; see here and here: The headline number The Fivethirtyeight forecast gives Biden a 72% chance of winning the electoral vote, a bit less than the 89% coming from our model at … Continue reading
This should keep you busy through the end of the year . . . Many of these posts were originally scheduled earlier but then got bumped because of coronavirus and other topical material. The typical set and its relevance to … Continue reading
Emma Pierson writes: My two sisters and I, with my friend Jacob Steinhardt, spent the last several days looking at the statistical methodology in a paper which has achieved a lot of press – Incarceration and Its Disseminations: COVID-19 Pandemic … Continue reading
This post by Alex Tabarrok hits all the right notes: At current rates, the US economy is losing about $40 billion a week. Thus, if $20 billion could advance a vaccine by just one week that would be a good … Continue reading