The Tall T*

Saw The Tall T on video last night. It was ok, but when it comes to movies whose titles begin with that particular character string, I think The Tall Target was much better. I’d say The Tall Target is the best train movie ever, but maybe that title should go to Intolerable Cruelty, which was much better than Out of Sight, another movie featuring George...

7h

One reason why that estimated effect of Fox News could’ve been so implausibly high.

Ethan Kaplan writes: I just happened upon a post of yours on the potential impact of Fox News on the 2016 election [“No, I don’t buy that claim that Fox news is shifting the vote by 6 percentage points“]. I am one of the authors of the first Fox News study from 2007 (DellaVigna and Kaplan). My guess is that the reason the Martin and Yurukoglu estimates...

14h

Questions about our old analysis of police stops

I received this anonymous email: I read your seminal work on racial bias in stops with Professors Fagan and Kiss and just had a few questions. 1. Your paper analyzed stops at the precinct level. A critique I have heard regarding aggregating data at that level is that: “To say that the threshold test can feasibly discern whether racial bias is present...

1d

A recommender system for scientific papers

Jeff Leek writes: We created a web app that lets people very quickly sort papers on two axes: how interesting it is and how plausible they think it is. We started with covid papers but have plans to expand it to other fields as well. Seems like an interesting idea, a yelp-style recommender system but with two dimensions.

2d

A fill-in-the-blanks contest: Attributing the persistence of the $7.25 minimum wage to “the median voter theorem” is as silly as _______________________

My best shots are “attributing Napoleon’s loss at Waterloo to the second law of thermodynamics” or “attributing Michael Jordan’s 6 rings to the infield fly rule.” But these aren’t right at all. I know youall can do better. Background here. For some relevant data, see here, here, here, and here. P.S. I get it that Cowen doesn’t like the minimum...

2d

In making minimal corrections and not acknowledging that he made these errors, Rajan is dealing with the symptoms but not the underlying problem, which is that he’s processing recent history via conventional wisdom.

Raghuram Rajan is an academic and policy star, University of Chicago professor, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, and former chief economic advisor to the government of India, and featured many times in NPR and other prestige media. He also appears to be in the habit of telling purportedly data-backed stories that aren’t really...

2d

“Do you come from Liverpool?”

Paul Alper writes: Because I used to live in Trondheim, I have a special interest in this NYT article about exercise results in Trondheim, Norway. Obviously, even without reading the article in any detail, the headline claim that The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help can be misleading and is subject to many caveats....

3d

Conference on digital twins

Ron Kenett writes: This conference and the special issue that follows might be of interest to (some) of your blog readers. Here’s what it says there: The concept of digital twins is based on a combination of physical models that describe the machine’s behavior and its deterioration processes over time with analytics capabilities that enable lessons...

4d

Which sorts of posts get more blog comments?

Paul Alper writes: Some of your blog postings elicit many responses and some, rather few. Have you ever thought of displaying some sort of statistical graph illustrating the years of data? For example, sports vs. politics, or responses for one year vs. another (time series), winter vs. summer, highly technical vs. breezy. I’ve not done any graph...

4d

Webinar: An introduction to Bayesian multilevel modeling with brms

This post is by Eric. This Wednesday, at 12 pm ET, Paul Bürkner is stopping by to talk to us about brms. You can register here. Abstract The talk will be about Bayesian multilevel models and their implementation in R using the package brms. We will start with a short introduction to multilevel modeling and to Bayesian statistics in general followed...

5d