Weakliem writes: I think I see where the [air rage] analysis went wrong. The dependent variable was whether or not an “air rage” incident happened on the flight. Two important influences on the chance of an incident are the number … Continue reading
So. Marcus Crede, Carol Nickerson, and I published a letter in PPNAS criticizing the notorious “air rage” article. (Due to space limitations, our letter contained only a small subset of the many possible criticisms of that paper.) Our letter was … Continue reading
[cat picture] Commenter David alerts us that Consumer Reports fell for the notorious air rage story. Background on air rage here and here. Or, if you want to read something by someone other than me, here. This last piece is … Continue reading
OK, here’s the story. A couple days ago, regarding the now-notorious PPNAS article, “Physical and situational inequality on airplanes predicts air rage,” I wrote: NPR will love this paper. It directly targets their demographic of people who are rich enough … Continue reading
Someone just pointed me to this news article entitled, “Air rage incidents are on the rise. First-class sections aren’t helping,” which falls hook, line, and sinker for a notorious discredited study that appeared in PPNAS last year. I can hardly … Continue reading
Jay Jones writes: I recently came across your paper on average predictive comparisons (Gelman and Pardoe, 2007) and can see many applications for this in my work (I’m an applied statistician working for Weyerhaeuser Company at our R&D center near … Continue reading
A few months ago I wrote about some disturbing stuff I’d been hearing about from Harvard Law School professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeuele. The two of them wrote an article back in 2005 writing, “a refusal to impose [the … Continue reading
This news article, “Anti-Affirmative Action Group Sues West Point Over Admissions Policy,” contained this amazing quote: “For most of its history, West Point has evaluated cadets based on merit and achievement,” the group said in its complaint, filed on Tuesday … Continue reading
I have appreciated Jessica’s recent coverage of differential privacy and related topics on this blog — especially as I’ve also started working in this general area. So I thought I’d share this new postdoc position that Manish Raghavan and I … Continue reading
Roxana Dior writes: From this news article, I found out about this paper, “Global warming, home runs, and the future of America’s pastime,” by Christopher Callahan, Nathaniel Dominy, Jeremy DeSilva, and Justin Mankin, which suggests home runs in baseball have … Continue reading
Last year I wrote a post, “Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible” . . . but I’m still guessing that the effects are being overestimated:. Since then, Vincent Bagilet and Léo Zabrocki-Hallak wrote an article, Why Some Acute Health … Continue reading
The post is by Leonardo Egidi. This Bayesian fairy tale starts in July 2016 and will reveal some mysteries of the magical world of mixtures. Opening: the airport idea Once upon a time a young Italian statistician was dragging his … Continue reading
I read Leaving a Doll’s House, the autobiography of actress Claire Bloom, and, as promised (see P.P.P.S. here), here are my reactions. Bloom’s book is famous because of its chapters on her relationship with author Philip Roth. Actually, though, it … Continue reading
A reader writes: I usually enjoy your blog, but when I saw the first sentence of this recent post it left a bad taste that just didn’t go away. The post in question was titled, “New England Journal of Medicine … Continue reading
Blake McShane writes: The idea of retrospectively estimating the average power of a set of studies via meta-analysis has recently been gaining a ton of traction in psychology and medicine. This seems really bad for two reasons: 1. Proponents claim … Continue reading
In the replication crisis in science, replications have often been performed of controversial studies on silly topics such as embodied cognition, extra-sensory perception, and power pose. We’ve been talking recently about replication being something we do for high-quality studies on … Continue reading
In a news article on Vox, entitled “Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits,” Matthew Yglesias writes: An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles … Continue reading
So, back on 4/20 we linked to the post by Sam Harper and Adam Palayew shooting down a silly article, published in JAMA and publicized around the world, that claimed excess road deaths on 4/20 (“cannabis day”). I googled the … Continue reading
Don MacLeod writes: Perhaps you know this study which is being taken at face value in all the secondary reports: “Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals.” It’s surely alarming, but the reported effect of air pollution seems … Continue reading
Andrea Panizza writes: I stumbled across this article on the End of Average. I didn’t know about Todd Rose, thus I had a look at his Wikipedia entry: Rose is a leading figure in the science of individual, an interdisciplinary … Continue reading