From Kevin Drum’s Chart o’ the Day: Lots of interesting stuff going on there. Notice, in particular, how the trust in science falls off a cliff for moderates in the 70s. It’s also fascinating that conservative trust in science used to be as high (if not higher) than that of liberals 40 years ago. This is still… Continue reading

From EnergyStar.gov: Lifecycle impact is an invaluable tool in making fair comparisons.  It’s easy, for example, to get hung up on the small amount of mercury in a CFL bulb, a percentage of which can escape into the environment if the bulb is crushed in a landfill. But the biggest contributor to mercury pollution is coal-fired plants, which… Continue reading

My new favorite term from epidemiology: J-Curve. There’s a lot of things that increase your mortality in a more-or-less linear way. The more you smoke, the greater your all-cause mortality risk, for example. This isn’t to say you increase your chance of death by 100% moving from one pack a day to two. But on… Continue reading

The Silicon Valley conception of privacy isn’t working for anyone except Silicon Valley. We know that. Charlie Stross, who is one smart dude, points out that if you follow the corporate-driven push to overshare to its logical conclusion your phone becomes a handy-dandy genocide machine, or, in the near term, the perfect device for this year’s Rufie-carrying… Continue reading

A decent point about comparison that’s often missed: comparing like-to-like means that interventions must be executed at the same level of proficiency as controls: For the past few years, proponents of barefoot running have argued that modern athletic shoes compromise natural running form. But now a first-of-its-kind study suggests that, in the right circumstances, running shoes make… Continue reading

I haven’t seen this graph referenced in the recent discussion around Blackboard’s latest purchase, which is strange, because it explains almost everything: A while back, Blackboard decided that the saturation and commodification of the LMS market meant that the path to greater profitability was not more contracts, but a higher average contract price. Under such… Continue reading

When things have a seasonal cycle, it’s often difficult to make direct comparisons. Ideally you compare to last year this time, or the ten year average of this time last year, but what people really want is a sense of how high it will go. This article does a decent job with that — look,… Continue reading

By now you’ve seen or heard about the APA study on millennials and civic-mindedness. Turns out that millenials are not as civic-minded as Howe and others have claimed. Fair enough. But another thing caught my eye — all the stories tended to compare Millennial numbers to a baseline Boomer figure — leading to everyone to… Continue reading

The golden rule of comparison, we tell our students, is simple: Compare like-to-like where this is possible; account for differences where it is not. Honestly, if you just apply this one rule religiously to anything billed as a comparison, you’ll outperform most people in evaluating comparisons. Case in point, the Congressional Budget just published an… Continue reading

I call this a plenary workshop, but as I learned after I agreed to do it, it was not only a plenary session, but it was the only session. Apparently NELIG, at least in its quarterly meetings, is structured as one giant workshop. No pressure there, then… 😉 In any case, I think it worked… Continue reading