Say that at small scale, you have really high-quality early childhood education — but at large scale, the education may not be that great, because of all the aforementioned difficulties in growing the program. It’s possible that the small project is better for kids than the various child-care arrangements that parents make now, and the large project is worse. And indeed, that’s what a new...
“The end of polling as we know it.”
It’s a national — and international — trend. The polls underestimated the scope of the 2014 midterm elections. Elections and referenda in Greece, Poland, Britain, Israel, and Scotland embarrassed the pollsters who thought they knew what was going on. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Karlyn Bowman, has been studying polling for decades. She says this may be “the end of polling as...
Remove data labels and change data values to reduce bias in research!
Decades ago, physicists including Richard Feynman noticed something worrying. New estimates of basic physical constants were often closer to published values than would be expected given standard errors of measurement1. They realized that researchers were more likely to ‘confirm’ past results than refute them — results that did not conform to their expectation were more often...
Can we start taking political correctness seriously now?
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive...
Is there a shortage of STEM workers?
Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times recently reported on the much-talked-about shortage of STEM workers, or workers in fields that predominantly deal with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). He notes that many studies indicate that the shortage of STEM workers is imagined. He also discovered that many of the companies that complain about their inability to find STEM...
Who knew Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) was such a stud?
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Academic tweet of the year (re Yale)
If you hate seeing your kid grow up, for $50,000 a year we can transform your teenager back into a fucking baby. #college
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) November 9, 2015
Who discovered regression analysis?
The legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss considered his alleged discovery of statistical regression “trivial.” The method seemed so obvious to Gauss that he figured he must not have been the first to use it. He was sure enough it must have been discovered that he did not publicly state his finding until many years later, after his contemporary Adrien-Marie Legendre had published on the...
Data on stolen student newspapers
Where did Jews stand the best chance of surviving the Holocaust?
DB: You claim that the breakdown of states and institutions is what, on a practical level, enabled the mass extermination of Jews. Does that mean part of the answer is to shore up the nation-state system? Because in many parts of the world today, the nation-state is under attack. TS: If we look at it statistically, we see that in places where the state was destroyed, Jews had a 1 in 20 chance of...