There is a limit, of course, to how sorry we should feel for people who borrowed lots of money for a graduate degree, and found that it wasn’t a surefire ticket to easy prosperity. I am sympathetic to those people; indeed, I am one of those people. But people with graduate degrees, even not-very-useful-ones, are more affluent, more educated and more skilled than the general population. We should...
The quants are ruining baseball
The owners of America’s baseball teams, gathered at a Houston hotel last year, were discussing once again how their games had become so plodding. This time, however, the explanation was different. Two Major League Baseball officials and a statistician told the group that the sport was being brought to a standstill by the very phenomenon that has revolutionized it in recent years—the embrace of...
The quants run Wall Street now
Kahneman: “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
Kahneman responded: The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. Furthermore, the existence of a substantial file-drawer effect undermines the two main tools that...
Family monitored 24-7 by people and cameras to help kids
At first I thought the article was a joke. I like this kid: The kids had mixed reactions. Shep told his Mom the family architects made him nervous but his 12-year-old brother was probably the least accepting of the project. One afternoon, not long after the family architects arrived, he grabbed a footstool and put his face right up to one of the Nest Cams. “Hey, buttholes!” he said. “Why don’t...
Japan 2017: Hamamatsu and Tokyo
Hamamatsu
It’s difficult to understand just how fast the shinkansen are unless you’ve been on one.
Tokyo
Beer robot in the Sakura lounge at Narita. Behold its awesomeness!
Japan 2017: Furano, Sapporo and Yokohama
Farm Tomita
Sapporo
Yet another advancement for the human race: kaiten sushi at the New Chitose airport.
Yokohama
View of the bay area from our hotel room.
As we walked around the red brick warehouse area, we came across a massive J-pop outdoor festival, with performances and autograph signing. We left quickly.
Japan 2017: Daisetsuzan Nat’l Park
Sounkyo Onsen
Kogen Onsen
A hot spring and steam vent along the trail.
Mt. Kurodake
Mt. Akedake
Half of grade inflation due to changing student characteristics and taking easier courses
Rising average grades at American universities have prompted fears of “grade inflation.” This paper applies the methods used to estimate price inflation to examine the causes of rising grades. We use rich data from a large public university to decompose the increase in average grades into those components explained by changes in student characteristics and course choices, and the unexplained...
Is it easy to get data from another scholar?
I liked this very much. The sad thing is that it was obviously created by a medical researcher, not an educational researcher.