Hapgood

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

Via Krugman, the scary graph of the day: Sources of Health insurance 2001-2010.   Continue reading

One of the things I like about the COMPARABLE framework is how nicely it can be used not only to evaluate existing comparisons, but to think through what a fair comparsion would look like where none is provided. For instance, today I saw this: “Well you have to look at the proof that’s in the… Continue reading

Number Needed to Treat is an aggregate measure of clinical benefit that medical study geeks love because it has a comprehensibility lacking in odds ratios and relative benefit percentages. It represents the number of patients that would need to receive a treatment for one of the patients to avoid an adverse outcome (death, stroke, development… Continue reading

Student debt is a problem, I think. I’m pretty sure about that. But reporting like this isn’t helpful: But this is a bigger problem than many realize. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that outstanding student loans have surpassed the nation’s $693-billion credit card balance. Even more eye-opening, nearly 80% of… Continue reading

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Occasionally when I argue against the claim that higher education is on the verge of catastrophic collapse, and warn that MOOCs are being advanced by many as a replacement for higher education instead of a supplement to it I’m told I’m arguing against straw men. Where are these people? Show me the articles! The truth… Continue reading