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

Most cited paper of all time …

Would be Fisher’s if people cited him every time they used a p value: The p-value is the most widely-known statistic. P-values are reported in a large majority of scientific publications that measure and report data. R.A. Fisher is widely credited with inventing the p-value. If he was cited every time a p-value was reported his paper would have, at the very least, 3 million citations*...

Feminist, women’s rights attorney and former judge on Harvard’s sex assault policy

OCR has clearly mandated that universities and colleges evaluate accusations of rape under a preponderance of the evidence standard. A preponderance of the evidence is in fact the lowest standard of proof that the legal system has to offer. In effect, if the evidence leans in favor of the victim to any degree, say 50.01 percent, that is sufficient. OCR’s rationale was that this was the standard...

Students, know your rights!

FIRE has a must-read guide for any student caught up within the Kafka-esque nightmare known as the college judicial process: Too often, students on our nation’s campuses face misconduct charges without meaningful due process protections and fundamentally fair procedures. Because one must know one’s rights in order to exercise them, FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Campus Justice introduces readers...

Are we better off today? McArdle looks at changes in living standards

From her intro: By the standards of today, my grandparents were living in wrenching poverty. Some of this, of course, involves technologies that didn’t exist—as a young couple in the 1930s my grandparents had less access to health care than the most  neglected homeless person in modern America, simply because most of the treatments we now have had not yet been invented. That is not the whole...

Guy crashes Ivy League schools for four years

For four years, the 28-year-old from Quebec lived the life of a wandering scholar, moving from one university town to the next, attending lectures and seminars, getting into heated debates with professors. Sometimes he was open about his unregistered status, but most of the time, fearing reprisal, he kept it quiet. To pay for his everyday expenses, he worked at cafes and occasionally earned money...

Can U Oklahoma racist frat boys be suspended or expelled for that video?

Nope, guess again: 1. First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions — see here for some citations. The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech...

Do you do financial aid research …

… and would like to reach an audience beyond academics?
Contact Charlotte Pollack (pollackc@nasfaa.org) about your research. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators sends precis of interesting financial aid research papers to its members on a regular basis.

About me

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

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