Megan McArdle provides a nice overview of what we know about minimum wage hikes. What really struck me was her comments on “one-study wonders”: Alas, if only economic analysis were so easy. In fact, it’s very hard to study what happens when we raise the minimum wage. The people confidently proclaiming their ability to see the future are often what I like to call “one-study...
Who is exaggerating research findings in the media?
Interesting question: is it academic researchers overselling their findings, or journalists hyping their story? The researchers found that 33 to 40 percent of the academic press releases exaggerated causation, advice, or inference in some way, and that the news articles took those claims and published them as is, or, in some cases, exaggerated them even more. Now, to be fair, 10 to 18 percent of...
How to fight the campus speech police: Get a good lawyer
Great piece from the Wall Street Journal. It’s behind a firewall, so link takes you to a Google link that will get you in:
Action photo: Pink martini bar on the Disney Dream
Law students should not know rape law
Higher ed continues to self-destruct: Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood. What should his instructors do? Criminal-law teachers face a similar question with law students who are afraid to study rape law. Thirty years ago, their reluctance would not have posed a problem. Until the mid-nineteen-eighties...
Study suggests peer review can’t handle “unconventional” studies
Peer review is an institution of enormous importance for the careers of scientists and the content of published science. The decisions of gatekeepers—editors and peer reviewers—legitimize scientific findings, distribute professional rewards, and influence future research. However, appropriate data to gauge the quality of gatekeeper decision-making in science has rarely been made publicly...
Statisticians in World War II
One of them was George Box, a young sergeant from Gravesend who had left school aged 16 in 1936 to work as an assistant to a chemist in a sewage plant. This background brought him to Porton Down, where the army was studying the effects of poisons such as mustard gas. Sergeant Box knew enough to tell his superiors that they needed a statistician—and that he had once tried to read a book by someone...
LSU offers faculty buyouts
What is interesting is that the amounts have been published; I usually don’t see this in articles about buyouts. A year’s salary is also the largest buyout I have come across: LSU’s Law Center is offering an incentive to seven professors if they retire next summer as it looks to cut costs amid a dwindling interest in law schools nationally. The professors, all older than 65 and...
The world is in great shape, despite what you think
It’s a good time to be a pessimist. ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who can avoid the feeling that things fall apart, the center cannot hold? Last year Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.” This past...
Atticus Finch: rape apologist
With the increasing focus on sexual assault, if “To Kill A Mockingbird” were taught in women’s studies classes today, Finch would have to be labeled the villain of the book for not accepting at face value an accuser’s tale of rape and for posing difficult, painful questions to her on the witness stand.