Miguel Paz writes: Poderomedia Foundation and PinLatam are launching OpenDataLatinoamerica.org, a regional data repository to free data and use it on Hackathons and other activities by HacksHackers chapters and other organizations. We are doing this because the road to the future of news has been littered with lost datasets. A day or so after every [...]
Archive of entries posted by
Crime novels for economists
Following up on this post by Noah Smith on economics in science fiction, Mark Palko writes on economics in crime fiction. Just as almost all science fiction is ultimately about politics, one could say that just about all crime fiction is about economics. But if I had to pick one crime novelist with an economics [...]
Actually, I have no problem with this graph
Tom Salvesen asks, is this the worst info-graphic of the year? I say, no. Nobody really cares about these numbers. It’s an amusing feature. The alternative would not be a better display of these data, the alternative would be some photo or cartoon. They’re just having fun. I wouldn’t give it any design awards but [...]
The recursion of pop-econ
Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]
Same old same old
In an email I sent to a colleague who’s writing about lasso and Bayesian regression for R users: The one thing you might want to add, to fit with your pragmatic perspective, is to point out that these different methods are optimal under different assumptions about the data. However, these assumptions are never true (even [...]
A tale of two discussion papers
Over the years I’ve written a dozen or so journal articles that have appeared with discussions, and I’ve participated in many published discussions of others’ articles as well. I get a lot out of these article-discussion-rejoinder packages, in all three of my roles as reader, writer, and discussant. Part 1: The story of an unsuccessful [...]
Of parsing and chess
Gary Marcus writes, An algorithm that is good at chess won’t help parsing sentences, and one that parses sentences likely won’t be much help playing chess. That is soooo true. I’m excellent at parsing sentences but I’m not so great at chess. And, worse than that, my chess ability seems to be declining from year [...]
Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV?
Mark Palko writes: Salmon is dismissive of the claim that there are fifty million over-the-air television viewers: The 50 million number, by the way, should not be considered particularly reliable: it’s Aereo’s guess as to the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. (Maybe they have [...]
Against optimism about social science
Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. [...]
Cleaning up science
David Hogg pointed me to this post by Gary Marcus, reviewing this skeptics’ all-star issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that features replication culture heroes Jelte Wicherts, Hal Pashler, Arina Bones, E. J. Wagenmakers, Gregory Francis, Hal Pashler, John Ioannidis, and Uri Simonsohn. I agree with pretty much everything Marcus has to say. In addition [...]
The New York Times Book of Mathematics
This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the [...]
One more thought on Hoover historian Niall Ferguson’s thing about Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry
We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and [...]
The Folk Theorem of Statistical Computing
From an email I received the other day: Things are going much better now — it’s interesting, it feels like with both of my models, parameters are slow to converge or get “stuck” and have trouble mixing when the model is somehow misspecified. See here for a statement of the folk theorem.
Jesus historian Niall Ferguson and the improving standards of public discourse
History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports:
NYC Data Skeptics Meetup
Rachel Schutt writes: The hype surrounding Big Data and Data Science is at a fever pitch with promises to solve the world’s business and social problems, large and small. How accurate or misleading is this message? How is it helping or damaging people, and which people? What opportunities exist for data nerds and entrepreneurs that [...]
Setting aside the politics, the debate over the new health-care study reveals that we’re moving to a new high standard of statistical journalism
Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your [...]
Culture clash
I had no idea this sort of thing even existed: I’m reminded of our discussion of Charles Murray’s recent book on social divisions among Americans. Murray talked about differences between upper and lower class, but I thought he was really talking more about differences between liberals and conservatives among the elite. (More discussion here.) In [...]
7 ways to separate errors from statistics
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been inspired by the recent Reinhardt and Rogoff debacle to list “six ways to separate lies from statistics” in economics research: 1. “Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion.” 2. Don’t confuse statistical with practical [...]
A graph at war with its caption. Also, how to visualize the same numbers without giving the display a misleading causal feel?
Kaiser Fung discusses the following graph that is captioned, “A study of 54 nations–ranked below–found that those with more progressive tax rates had happier citizens, on average.” As Kaiser writes, “from a purely graphical perspective, the chart is well executed . . . they have 54 points, and the chart still doesn’t look too crammed [...]
“Tragedy of the science-communication commons”
I’ve earlier written that science is science communication—that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists [...]
Giving credit where due
Gregg Easterbrook may not always be on the ball, but I 100% endorse the last section of his recent column (scroll down to “Absurd Specificity Watch”). Earlier in the column, Easterbrook has a plug for Tim Tebow. I’d forgotten about Tim Tebow.
The blogroll
I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored [...]
Plain old everyday Bayesianism!
Sam Behseta writes: There is a report by Martin Tingley and Peter Huybers in Nature on the unprecedented high temperatures at northern latitudes (Russia, Greenland, etc). What is more interesting is the authors are have used a straightforward hierarchical Bayes model, and for the first time (as far as I can remember) the results are [...]
Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences
James Druckman and Jeremy Freese write: