Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.
And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.
What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here?
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Elegance and Economics -- a choice comment from Paul Krugman
From "How did Economists Get It So Wrong?" (September 2nd, 2009):
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Distributed computing
In medical research, data privacy is paramount. So it is unlikely that we'll be taking advantage of things like cloud computing anytime soon.
However, even if I could, I doubt that I would in the absence of brutally complete back-ups (which would rather eliminate any space savings). Because the world is broken up into two groups of people: those who have lost data due to crashes and those who are yet to do so. When you are in the former group, it seems the height of insanity not to be as a careful as possible about keeping data safe.
Heck, I dislike how the SAS program editor does not have an autosave feature. I've lost code because I walked away from the computer for a meeting and windows decided that was an ideal time for an auto-update. In that sense, the static environment of using the computer as a tool is at war with the dynamic vision of computer developers.
I wonder if, at some point, we'll branch off into two streams? Computers are cheap enough that you no longer need one platform for everything and I mostly use the internet at work for downloading articles (a function that slowly updated libraries could pretty much handle).
It is an interesting thought.
However, even if I could, I doubt that I would in the absence of brutally complete back-ups (which would rather eliminate any space savings). Because the world is broken up into two groups of people: those who have lost data due to crashes and those who are yet to do so. When you are in the former group, it seems the height of insanity not to be as a careful as possible about keeping data safe.
Heck, I dislike how the SAS program editor does not have an autosave feature. I've lost code because I walked away from the computer for a meeting and windows decided that was an ideal time for an auto-update. In that sense, the static environment of using the computer as a tool is at war with the dynamic vision of computer developers.
I wonder if, at some point, we'll branch off into two streams? Computers are cheap enough that you no longer need one platform for everything and I mostly use the internet at work for downloading articles (a function that slowly updated libraries could pretty much handle).
It is an interesting thought.
Friday, May 28, 2010
"How is model-based macroeconomic forecasting possible?"
There's an interesting discussion of economic forecasting over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. The post and the responses raise some points I've been wondering about myself. It's good to see people inside the field addressing them.
What Auteur Theory and Freshwater Economics have in common
(the first draft is the dominant genre of the internet. Between the roughness of this essay and my extensive ignorance of criticism and economics, I'm sure there is plenty of room for improvement here. If any readers have suggestions for taking this to the next level please let me know.)
(you might want to read this New York Times piece by Paul Krugman before going on -- it's the best primer I know of for this debate.)
We'll define freshwater economics as the theory that economic behavior (and perhaps most non-economic behavior) can be explained using the concepts of rational actors and efficient markets and auteur theory as the idea that most films (particularly great films) represent the artistic vision of a single author (almost always the director) and the best way to approach one of those films is through the body of work of its author. Both of these definitions are oversimplified and a bit unfair but they will get the discussion started.
At first first glance, these theories don't seem to have much in common, but as we step back and look at them in general terms, fundamental similarities start to emerge in their styles, their ecological niches and in the way they've been received.
Compared to their nearest neighbors, film criticism and economics (particularly macroeconomics) are both difficult, messy fields. Films are collaborative efforts where individual contributions defy attribution and creative decisions often can't be distinguished from accidents of filming. Worse yet, most films are the product of large corporations which means that dozens of VPs and executives might have played a role (sometimes an appallingly large one) in determining what got to the screen.
Economists face a comparably daunting task. Unlike researchers in the hard sciences, they have to deal with messiness of human behavior. Unlike psychologists, microeconomists have few opportunities to perform randomized trials and macroeconomists have none whatsoever. Finally, unlike any other researchers in any other field, economists face a massive problem with deliberate feedback. It is true that subjects in psychological and sociological studies might be aware of and influenced by the results of previous studies but in economics, most of the major players are consciously modifying their behavior based on economic research. It is as if the white mice got together before every experiment and did a literature search. ("Well, there's our problem. We should have been pulling the black lever.")
Faced with all this confusion, film scholars and economists (at least, macroeconomists) both reached the same inevitable conclusion: they would have to rely on broader, stronger assumptions than those colleagues in adjacent fields were using. This does not apply simply to auteurists and freshwater economists. Anyone who does any work in these fields will have to start with some sweeping and unprovable statements about how the world works. Auteurists and freshwater economists just took this idea to its logical conclusion and built their work on the simplest and most elegant assumptions possible, like Euclid demonstrating every aspect of shape and measure using only five little postulates.
(Except, of course, Euclid didn't. His set of postulates didn't actually support his conclusions. The world would have to wait for Hilbert to come up with a set that did. The question of whether economists need a Hilbert will have to wait for another day.)
Given that we have two similar responses to two similar situations, it is not all that surprising to see that both schools of thought have followed similar paths and have come to dominate their respective fields. I don't think that anyone would argue that any institution has had more impact on economics than the Chicago school over the past fifty years and I doubt you could find a theory of film that comes close to the impact of auteurism over the same period.
This dominance was achieved despite serious criticisms and counter-examples. When the writer William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Princess Bride, many, many, many others) heard about auteur theory, his reaction was "What's the punchline?" The sentiment was echoed by many writers who pointed out that many of the elements that the critics discussed were determined, explicitly or implicitly in the script. On related grounds, others pointed out how many of the creative decisions were made in preproduction often before the director was hired (John Huston said that a film was mostly finished once you had the cast and the script). Others talked about films that were "saved in the editing room," a common Hollywood expression for films that are radically changed for the better in post-production, usually after having been taken away from the director. Many (including Goldman) argued that films were the sum of many individual contributions and that changing any of them would result in a different movie.
Critics of classical economics question the realism of the school's postulates. They suggest that the proposed 'homo economicus' would have to be a cross between a lightning calculator and a high-functioning psychic. They point to findings from behavioral economics that show individuals failing to act according to neoclassical principles and historical cases where neoclassical models failed to predict economic events.
Both schools of thought partially address these complaints by arguing that their critics are trying to apply their ideas in cases where the necessary conditions don't hold. For auteurists, conditions included technical competence, recognizable style and a sufficient body of work. For freshwater economists, conditions included symmetry of information, a sufficient pool of buyers and sellers, a lack of externalities and freedom from government influence. These conditions did not refute the criticisms but they did provide defensible positions.
There is nothing unusual, let alone improper about proponents of a theory laying out conditions that have to be met before their concepts can be applied. (I could have written essential the same paragraph about Keynesians or deconstructionists.) What makes this notable is the disconnect between this approach and the way lay people use these ideas.
The dominance of auteurism and the Chicago School is, if anything, greater when you venture outside of academia. Most financial journalists, pundits and politicians take the power of market forces as a given and the vast majority of movie reviewers routinely assume that the director is the author of the film they just saw, but in both these cases with very few exceptions, the lay people using these theories have no idea that the conditions of the previous paragraphs even exist.
The problem with auteurism is compounded by the fact that most reviewers have no idea what a director actually does. This was certainly not true of the original French critics who popularized the theory (who were, themselves, directors) or of its primary American proponent, Andrew Sarris, (who went to great pains to discuss exactly and also set out the definitive list of the conditions I referred to).
Today most reviews will use the possessive form of the director's name then proceed to discuss everything about the film but the direction. The strange result of all this is that directors are both the most overrated and under-appreciated of movie makers. They are given credit for the work of everyone else while their own contribution is generally ignored.*
Obviously, the stakes are higher for economics but the disconnect is just as big. Open up any op-ed page or tune in any news conference and you are likely to find someone using freshwater arguments in situations where any serious freshwater economist would tell you they don't apply. For example, it is easy to pundits and politicians who believe we should let the market forces handle global warming instead of having a carbon tax, despite the pro-tax position of economists like Laffer, Cowen and Mankiw. It isn't that these laymen are consciously disagreeing with these experts; they simply don't know that using taxes to address externalities is a fundamental part of the philosophy they think they are espousing.
Finally, both schools had clear winners and have been aggressively promoted by those winners. Directors were the big winners in auteur theory; they gained power and prestige which in an industry that knows how to reward those attributes. It may not have been entirely a coincidence that the original auteurist critics had their careers as directors enhanced by the rise of the theory.
In economics, there is no question that the rise of freshwater ideas and approaches have been advanced considerably by institutions like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, nor is there any question that much of the funding for these institutions came from companies that directly benefited from the dominance of freshwater economics.
Do these schools deserve their positions of dominance? That's a question for people above my pay grade. I'm just pointing out that widely separated disciplines can be surprisingly similar when you take things to a high enough level.
* For a view of how little influence some directors have on actors' performances check out these comments by Robert Mitchum (cutter in this context means film editor).
note: The Paul Krugman link at the top was added 5/31/10.
(you might want to read this New York Times piece by Paul Krugman before going on -- it's the best primer I know of for this debate.)
We'll define freshwater economics as the theory that economic behavior (and perhaps most non-economic behavior) can be explained using the concepts of rational actors and efficient markets and auteur theory as the idea that most films (particularly great films) represent the artistic vision of a single author (almost always the director) and the best way to approach one of those films is through the body of work of its author. Both of these definitions are oversimplified and a bit unfair but they will get the discussion started.
At first first glance, these theories don't seem to have much in common, but as we step back and look at them in general terms, fundamental similarities start to emerge in their styles, their ecological niches and in the way they've been received.
Compared to their nearest neighbors, film criticism and economics (particularly macroeconomics) are both difficult, messy fields. Films are collaborative efforts where individual contributions defy attribution and creative decisions often can't be distinguished from accidents of filming. Worse yet, most films are the product of large corporations which means that dozens of VPs and executives might have played a role (sometimes an appallingly large one) in determining what got to the screen.
Economists face a comparably daunting task. Unlike researchers in the hard sciences, they have to deal with messiness of human behavior. Unlike psychologists, microeconomists have few opportunities to perform randomized trials and macroeconomists have none whatsoever. Finally, unlike any other researchers in any other field, economists face a massive problem with deliberate feedback. It is true that subjects in psychological and sociological studies might be aware of and influenced by the results of previous studies but in economics, most of the major players are consciously modifying their behavior based on economic research. It is as if the white mice got together before every experiment and did a literature search. ("Well, there's our problem. We should have been pulling the black lever.")
Faced with all this confusion, film scholars and economists (at least, macroeconomists) both reached the same inevitable conclusion: they would have to rely on broader, stronger assumptions than those colleagues in adjacent fields were using. This does not apply simply to auteurists and freshwater economists. Anyone who does any work in these fields will have to start with some sweeping and unprovable statements about how the world works. Auteurists and freshwater economists just took this idea to its logical conclusion and built their work on the simplest and most elegant assumptions possible, like Euclid demonstrating every aspect of shape and measure using only five little postulates.
(Except, of course, Euclid didn't. His set of postulates didn't actually support his conclusions. The world would have to wait for Hilbert to come up with a set that did. The question of whether economists need a Hilbert will have to wait for another day.)
Given that we have two similar responses to two similar situations, it is not all that surprising to see that both schools of thought have followed similar paths and have come to dominate their respective fields. I don't think that anyone would argue that any institution has had more impact on economics than the Chicago school over the past fifty years and I doubt you could find a theory of film that comes close to the impact of auteurism over the same period.
This dominance was achieved despite serious criticisms and counter-examples. When the writer William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Princess Bride, many, many, many others) heard about auteur theory, his reaction was "What's the punchline?" The sentiment was echoed by many writers who pointed out that many of the elements that the critics discussed were determined, explicitly or implicitly in the script. On related grounds, others pointed out how many of the creative decisions were made in preproduction often before the director was hired (John Huston said that a film was mostly finished once you had the cast and the script). Others talked about films that were "saved in the editing room," a common Hollywood expression for films that are radically changed for the better in post-production, usually after having been taken away from the director. Many (including Goldman) argued that films were the sum of many individual contributions and that changing any of them would result in a different movie.
Critics of classical economics question the realism of the school's postulates. They suggest that the proposed 'homo economicus' would have to be a cross between a lightning calculator and a high-functioning psychic. They point to findings from behavioral economics that show individuals failing to act according to neoclassical principles and historical cases where neoclassical models failed to predict economic events.
Both schools of thought partially address these complaints by arguing that their critics are trying to apply their ideas in cases where the necessary conditions don't hold. For auteurists, conditions included technical competence, recognizable style and a sufficient body of work. For freshwater economists, conditions included symmetry of information, a sufficient pool of buyers and sellers, a lack of externalities and freedom from government influence. These conditions did not refute the criticisms but they did provide defensible positions.
There is nothing unusual, let alone improper about proponents of a theory laying out conditions that have to be met before their concepts can be applied. (I could have written essential the same paragraph about Keynesians or deconstructionists.) What makes this notable is the disconnect between this approach and the way lay people use these ideas.
The dominance of auteurism and the Chicago School is, if anything, greater when you venture outside of academia. Most financial journalists, pundits and politicians take the power of market forces as a given and the vast majority of movie reviewers routinely assume that the director is the author of the film they just saw, but in both these cases with very few exceptions, the lay people using these theories have no idea that the conditions of the previous paragraphs even exist.
The problem with auteurism is compounded by the fact that most reviewers have no idea what a director actually does. This was certainly not true of the original French critics who popularized the theory (who were, themselves, directors) or of its primary American proponent, Andrew Sarris, (who went to great pains to discuss exactly and also set out the definitive list of the conditions I referred to).
Today most reviews will use the possessive form of the director's name then proceed to discuss everything about the film but the direction. The strange result of all this is that directors are both the most overrated and under-appreciated of movie makers. They are given credit for the work of everyone else while their own contribution is generally ignored.*
Obviously, the stakes are higher for economics but the disconnect is just as big. Open up any op-ed page or tune in any news conference and you are likely to find someone using freshwater arguments in situations where any serious freshwater economist would tell you they don't apply. For example, it is easy to pundits and politicians who believe we should let the market forces handle global warming instead of having a carbon tax, despite the pro-tax position of economists like Laffer, Cowen and Mankiw. It isn't that these laymen are consciously disagreeing with these experts; they simply don't know that using taxes to address externalities is a fundamental part of the philosophy they think they are espousing.
Finally, both schools had clear winners and have been aggressively promoted by those winners. Directors were the big winners in auteur theory; they gained power and prestige which in an industry that knows how to reward those attributes. It may not have been entirely a coincidence that the original auteurist critics had their careers as directors enhanced by the rise of the theory.
In economics, there is no question that the rise of freshwater ideas and approaches have been advanced considerably by institutions like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, nor is there any question that much of the funding for these institutions came from companies that directly benefited from the dominance of freshwater economics.
Do these schools deserve their positions of dominance? That's a question for people above my pay grade. I'm just pointing out that widely separated disciplines can be surprisingly similar when you take things to a high enough level.
* For a view of how little influence some directors have on actors' performances check out these comments by Robert Mitchum (cutter in this context means film editor).
note: The Paul Krugman link at the top was added 5/31/10.
Journal Reviewing
How often do you review?
In the latest early releases from the American Journaol of Epidemiology, the editors discuss the concern of authors who submit heavily but do not accept requests to review articles. This situation is a classic case of the "Tragedy of the Commons"; the credit for reviewing is small (and typically anoymous). If nobody reviewed then the peer-review system would break down. However, the cost of any one person removing themselves from the reviewer pool is small compared to the benefit (for that person) in being able to focus on their own research projects.
Even worse, it is hard to know if the person who refuses at journal X might be a common reviewer at journal Y. Is the person who refuses refusing because they already do a lot of reviewing for another journal? Heck, I have reviewed for the American Journal of Epidemiology and I've never had a paper accepted there!
Female Science Professor once assembled a list of why people might see reviewing as a rewarding experience. It is an interesting list but maybe not completely convincing that the benefits outweigh the costs.
On the other hand, it is somewhat insirational that this system works despite everything that is working against it. Maybe science still has a critical mass of idealists left?
It's rather a nice thought.
In the latest early releases from the American Journaol of Epidemiology, the editors discuss the concern of authors who submit heavily but do not accept requests to review articles. This situation is a classic case of the "Tragedy of the Commons"; the credit for reviewing is small (and typically anoymous). If nobody reviewed then the peer-review system would break down. However, the cost of any one person removing themselves from the reviewer pool is small compared to the benefit (for that person) in being able to focus on their own research projects.
Even worse, it is hard to know if the person who refuses at journal X might be a common reviewer at journal Y. Is the person who refuses refusing because they already do a lot of reviewing for another journal? Heck, I have reviewed for the American Journal of Epidemiology and I've never had a paper accepted there!
Female Science Professor once assembled a list of why people might see reviewing as a rewarding experience. It is an interesting list but maybe not completely convincing that the benefits outweigh the costs.
On the other hand, it is somewhat insirational that this system works despite everything that is working against it. Maybe science still has a critical mass of idealists left?
It's rather a nice thought.
From Mark Thoma, two links and a damned good observation
First Thoma links to this:
And I'm depressed as hell.
How to prevent huge teacher layoffs, by Christina D. Romer, Commentary, Washington Post: The emergency spending bill before the House would address the education crisis facing communities across America -- and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers are at stake. Because ... state and local budgets are stressed to the breaking point..., hundreds of thousands of public school teachers are likely to be laid off over the next few months. As many as one out of every 15 teachers could receive a pink slip this summer...Then this:
Bill on jobless benefits, state financial help scaled back, by Lori Montgomery, Washington Post: Under fire from rank-and-file Democrats worried about the soaring national debt, congressional leaders reached a tentative agreement Wednesday to scale back a package that would have devoted nearly $200 billion to jobless benefits and other economic provisions...Which he follows with the following observation:
The deficit hawks generally talk about the fate of our children when making the case to reduce the deficit, but at a time like now when the recession is pressuring school budgets, how are kids helped by reducing their educational opportunities?It used to be fun reading Molly Ivins skilfully mocking hypocritical politicians trotting out the "What about the children?" line. Now she's gone. They're still here.
And I'm depressed as hell.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
DIY-U
In a recent post, Dead Dad wrote about DIY-U. And he's right -- most academic training (especially in areas like Epidemiology) benefits greatly from an institutional framework. But there is another angle that I think is worth thinking about -- school should not be the only place from which you derive learning. There are huge advantages to being well read and interested in a wide range of subjects. It's not an optimal strategy to take a degree in every area you have any kind of interest in.
So let us try and take the good part of this bad idea -- lifelong learning is something that it is important to begin early and never really stop doing!
So let us try and take the good part of this bad idea -- lifelong learning is something that it is important to begin early and never really stop doing!
Pudding wrestling, the Antichrist and the breakdown of a winnowing system
Brian (who blogs on television and society at Ultrasonic Remote) sent the following example of winnowing processes gone awry by the always sharp Gail Collins. Collins seems to doubt that the GOP primaries are selecting their strongest candidates:
Pretend you’re the Republican leadership in a smallish state with an open United States Senate seat. The opposition is running a popular, longtime officeholder whose sense of inevitability was shaken by recent revelations that he had referred to himself as a Vietnam War veteran when he isn’t one.Your own options are:
A) A well regarded former congressman who is a decorated Vietnam War veteran.
B) A political novice who made her fortune building up an entertainment business that specialized in blood, seminaked women and scripted subplots featuring rape, adultery and familial violence. In which the candidate, her husband and children played themselves. Also, the family yacht is named Sexy Bitch.
Well, obviously, you go for the yacht owner.
Yes, this week the Connecticut Republican Party chose Linda McMahon, the former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, to be their Senate candidate. Her main opponent, the former Representative Rob Simmons, packed up his war medals and went home.
“You can’t argue with arithmetic,” he told The New London Day.
The math in question is $50 million, the amount McMahon claimed she was prepared to spend on her campaign. Connecticut has just under two million registered voters, so maybe she’ll just invite everybody in the state to a nice dinner at Red Lobster.
So far this season, the Republicans have offered two new models of their future. One is the Tea Party vision, in which outsiders full of spirit and excitement overthrow the old order. In North Carolina, there was so much spirit and excitement that voters gave the top spot in a Congressional primary to a former drug addict who, according to court documents, once referred to the United States government as the Antichrist and claimed to have personally located the Ark of the Covenant.
...
“One good thing has come from her run: Vince McMahon putting out an edict that there will no longer be any cutting of your foreheads with razor blades,” said Superstar Billy Graham, a retired wrestler who contracted hepatitis from a bloody competitor. “He has actually stopped wrestlers from cutting their heads with razor blades. This is a big deal!”
Still going better than California.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Steve Poizner needs to get out more
As reported on This American Life (get a download here. It's well worth the money), back in 2002, recently retired multi-millioniare Steve Poizner volunteered to teach a class in east San Jose. A few years later he wrote about that year in the book Mount Pleasant: My Journey from Creating a Billion-Dollar Company to Teaching at a Struggling Public High School. It's an interesting account (though not in any of the ways Poizner intended).
One detail struck me as particularly funny as I listened to the story while driving through LA. Here's the excerpt as Poizner read it on the show:
One detail struck me as particularly funny as I listened to the story while driving through LA. Here's the excerpt as Poizner read it on the show:
Several miles and a couple of highways later I took the Capital Expressway exit and drove into what felt like another planet. Signs advertising janitorial supply stores and taquerÃas. Exhaust hung over 10 lanes of inner city traffic; yellowing, weedy gardens fronted many of the homes, as did driveways marred by large oil spots or broken down cars.Taquerias are generally small restaurants that serve mainly tacos and burritos. After hamburger joints, they are probably the most common restaurants in California. The thought that a California resident who wasn't looking for a place to eat would even notice them is odd. Listing them as an exotic sign of urban decay is downright bizarre.
the plural of anecdote is not data
Andrew Gelman has a great post on how statisticans do not always apply the lessons of statistics to their everyday lives. And it is true -- a lot of what we do in our lives is from custom and tradition that has never undergone rigorous evalaution. I'd be curious to see how teaching would change if we tested pre- and post-class knowledge (and had a control group who did not take the class). One suspects that the results might be humbling . . .
This reminds me of Miquel Hernan arguing in the journal Epidemiology (sadly, gated) that epidemiologists should be skeptical of journal impact factors because of our training. Unfortunately, despite this skepticism, it is rare for an active researcher not to have a good idea of the ranking of various journals (often based off of the impact factor). I think that staticisticans are better at disregarding impact factors but that's not a universal rule.
But I wonder if we could improve a lot of everyday tasks with a slightly tigher focus on statistical and/or epidemiological reasoning?
This reminds me of Miquel Hernan arguing in the journal Epidemiology (sadly, gated) that epidemiologists should be skeptical of journal impact factors because of our training. Unfortunately, despite this skepticism, it is rare for an active researcher not to have a good idea of the ranking of various journals (often based off of the impact factor). I think that staticisticans are better at disregarding impact factors but that's not a universal rule.
But I wonder if we could improve a lot of everyday tasks with a slightly tigher focus on statistical and/or epidemiological reasoning?
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
More great reporting from This American Life
This is either the best piece of California political reporting I've come across recently or the best piece of education reporting. Either way it's worth the ninety-nine cents.
Monday, May 24, 2010
"Study: Excluding Cellphones Introduces Statistically Significant Bias in Polls"
Nate Silver has a timely and insightful post on the state of political polling.
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