Stephen Porter

Stephen Porter is a Professor in the College of Education at North Carolina State University, where he teaches graduate courses in statistics, causal inference, and workflow of data analysis. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester, with a concentration in econometrics.

Latest posts

Is science broken?

One creative attempt to estimate how widespread such dishonesty really is involves comparisons between fields of varying “hardness.” The author, Daniele Fanelli, theorized that the farther from physics one gets, the more freedom creeps into one’s experimental methodology, and the fewer constraints there are on a scientist’s conscious and unconscious biases. If all scientists were constantly...

Dominican monk devastates Indiana U campus

Last night around 9:15 PM, social media became a furious storm of confusion regarding a man in white robes roaming along 10th St. and purportedly armed with a whip. Students thought the white robes indicated Klu Klux Klan affiliation. […] While the KKK has been active in the area in the past, it later became apparent this klansman armed with a whip was actually just a monk of the Dominican...

How public universities avoid scrutiny via FOI requests

In total, presidential expenses were the most costly records; it would take $10,750.93 to fulfill them all. Arielle Hines, president of CMU-SPJ and a senior journalism major, questioned the hours it would take to fulfill the requests. “What archaic system are you using?” she said. “You have to think they’d have some kind of auditing process for the president, and if not, that’s a bigger story.”...

And I thought five coauthors was too many!

One such paper, in physics, is snappily titled “Charged-particle multiplicities in pp interactions at sqrt(s) = 900 Gev measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC”. It has clearly made a significant contribution to scholarship, based on ground breaking research at the Large Hadron Collider, and that is reflected in its high number of citations. But the problem arises from the fact it has 3,222...

How not to be a professor

Mr. Dillon describes himself as a “prickly guy,” but it may be more accurate to say he is the antitenure crowd’s straw man made flesh. In his 34 years at Charleston, he has received three official letters of reprimand, along with many negative evaluations from his supervisors and his students. (A sample review from RateMyProfessors.com: “Dr. Dillon likes to make you look like an...

He must not have filed an External Professional Activities for Pay Notice of Intent

University professor whose double life as a porn star was exposed has quit his teaching post A ‘smutty professor’ whose double life as a porn star was exposed after a student recognised him in an X-rated film has quit his post. Nicholas Goddard, educated at Oxford University, has taught chemical engineering at the University of Manchester for almost 25 years, publishing many...

Giant soap penis devastates Toronto high school

A photo-op with Premier Kathleen Wynne at a Toronto high school Tuesday morning is creating quite a social media stir — and it only takes a quick glance to figure out why. Wynne was at Jarvis Collegiate Institute with Reza Moridi, minister of training, colleges and universities, to talk about the province’s plan to offer a new grant for low-income college and university students. But a...

Difference-in-difference analysis of Melissa Click

And then the other shoe dropped: Last week, UM announced that new pledges and donations in December — a key month for university fundraising — fell $6 million, a decrease of roughly 31 percent. Only the Columbia branch, where the protests took place, suffered these losses. No other UM branch experienced declines.

About me

Professor and quant guy. Libertarian turned populist Republican. Trying to learn Japanese and play Spanish Baroque music on the ukulele.

Subscribe via email

Enter your email address to subscribe to my blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Tags