Ever wondered how to correctly take into account the complex sampling design of a national survey? The good folks at RTI put together a nice appendix for common statistical packages:
Table K1
From the 2011–12 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:12) Data File Documentation, Appendix K.
When discrimination is baked into algorithms
A recent ProPublica analysis of The Princeton Review’s prices for online SAT tutoring shows that customers in areas with a high density of Asian residents are often charged more. When presented with this finding, The Princeton Review called it an “incidental” result of its geographic pricing scheme. The case illustrates how even a seemingly neutral price model could potentially lead to...
Pension crisis at public universities
While massive state- and city-pension debts across the country have gotten anxious scrutiny from lawmakers and the public, their effect on public universities and colleges has gone largely unnoticed. But an independent board that oversees state and local accounting standards nationwide has recently put into effect new rules, requiring more disclosure of how much the government owes to...
Contingent faculty are better teachers than tenure track faculty
This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and...
Ashley Madison data analysis: lots of fake women
After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally clear is new evidence that Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots...
Psychology is broken
Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed...
Medical journal statistical guide for authors
We should have more of these in education:
(14)00598-3/fulltext/guidelines-for-reporting-of-statistics-in-european-urology
An unsettling graph about student loan debt
Understanding weight calculations in Stata’s psmatch2
UPDATE: Edwin Leuven was kind enough to comment on my post and has a much better explanation of the weight situation: If you’ve ever used psmatch2 in Stata, you know that it has one of the least useful help files ever created. I’ve always been frustrated with not understanding how the weights in psmatch2 are calculated, so I decided to sit down and figure it out. After running...
Science isn’t broken
If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately. Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November uncovered a scam in which researchers were rubber-stamping their own work, circumventing peer review at five high-profile publishers. Scientific journals? Not exactly a badge of legitimacy, given that the International Journal of Advanced Computer...