I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way [...]The post To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime appeared first on Statistical…
The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), [...]The post What happened that the journal Psychological Science published a paper with no identifiable…
I received two emails yesterday on related topics. First, Stephen Olivier pointed me to this post by Daniel Lakens, who wrote the following open call to statisticians: You would think that if you are passionate about statistics, then you want to help people to calculate them correctly in any way you can. . . . [...]The post How can statisticians help psychologists do their research better? appeared first on Statistical…
Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]The post The recursion of pop-econ appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors. (I’m posting this one at night, and a new post on an unrelated topic is coming in the morning, so I’m [...]The post Like Casper the ghost, Niall Ferguson is not only white. He is also…
Erin Jonaitis points us to this article by Christopher Ferguson and Moritz Heene, who write: Publication bias remains a controversial issue in psychological science. . . . that the field often constructs arguments to block the publication and interpretation of null results and that null results may be further extinguished through questionable researcher practices. Given [...]The post “A Vast Graveyard of Undead Theories: Publication Bias and Psychological Science’s Aversion to…
Jeff Ratto points me to this news article by Dean Baker reporting the work of three economists, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, who found errors in a much-cited article by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff analyzing historical statistics of economic growth and public debt. Mike Konczal provides a clear summary; that’s where I [...]The post Memo to Reinhart and Rogoff: I think it’s best to admit your errors…
Someone sent me an email with the subject line “A terrible infographic,” and it went on from there: “Given some of your recent writing on infovis, I thought you might get a kick out of this . . . I’m certainly sympathetic to their motivations, but some of these plots do not aid understanding… To [...]The post Too tired to mock appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
Doug Hartmann writes (link from Jay Livingston): Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that “there’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Hartman argues that Scalia is [...]
The popular New York Times columnist writes: The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for? . . . My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael [...]
