The economist Justin Wolfers, writing for the New York Times Upshot, reports that economists increasingly outnumber other social scientists in mentions in the both the Times and — even more — in the Congressional Record. About 1% of Times stories use the word “economist,” more than three-times as often as they write “sociologist.” Here’s his figure tracking Times references:
Professor spoofs Google Scholar to boost citation rate
I was wondering when this would happen. The article ignores, however, the entire mechanism that allows GS to work: your citing articles are listed, so anyone can check out your citation sources, which is exactly what happened here! So rather than evidence that GS is flawed, the incident shows that it works as intended. Beall the “investigator” is just clueless.
Myth: majority of public schools students are in poverty
I thought this was bogus as soon as I read about it; Alex Tabarrok is on the case: Frankly I suspect that this study was intended to confuse the media by conflating “low-income” with “below the poverty line”. Indeed, why did this study grab headlines except for the greater than 50% statistic? It is very easy to find official numbers of the number of students in poverty according to the federal...
School district claims right to students’ social media passwords
1,800 college students die each year from alcohol is a myth
And pretty crappy science as well: But there is another problem with the data. The research appears to assume that alcohol-related motor-vehicle crashes were caused by the presence of alcohol. But since at least 2003, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has emphatically warned that the data do not mean that alcohol consumption caused the crashes … In other words, an accident...
Ich bin ein Stehpinkler
Stehpinklers of the world unite! Fight the Matriarchy! The dispute in Duesseldorf is actually part of a long-running debate in Germany over whether men should be encouraged to sit down when urinating. The controversy pits stehpinklers (men who stand up to pee) against sitzpinklers (men who sit down), and it has taken some bizarre twists over the years. In 2004, for example, The Telegraph reported...
Quick postsecondary analytics tool
Nate Johnson and colleagues have developed some nice web tools to look at postsecondary metrics over time:
Law school dean whines about competition for students
I would be worried if I were a faculty member under this associate dean – he is clearly clueless about higher education in general, and the competitive trends within legal education: I am glad that some in the media — even if just the legal blogosphere — are finally paying attention to what GW Law has been doing with transfers. The school shrank its 1L class some years ago...
Economic world history in one chart
RCT of police body cameras
Hard to argue with this graph: