Hapgood

This is brilliant. You should watch it. Added note: I was just thinking of my endorsement up there, and realizing everyone probably clicks the link expecting a TED style video that will wrap everything up for you in a nice metaphor wrapped in a story of humanity and triumph. Nope, it’s just an old dude… Continue reading

This is new today:   This seems pretty straightforward at first. Seniors, in a survey-based study, report better sleep than young adults. But we hit the same problem here as we do in happiness research. How people define things varies both with age and with the cultural norms of your generation. It’s hard to get… Continue reading

  This is from the University of Edinburgh. It’s being heavily circulated right now in edtech. I agree with most of it. I find point two particularly a) true, and b) problematic. And if the truth of the manifesto is to be useful truth, that’s the piece that has to be solved institutionally first.   Continue reading

So we have this COMPARABLE framework I’ve been working on, where COMPARABLE is an acronym for the sorts of things you want to look at when presented with a comparison. The “M” in the acronym stands for “Mental Experiment”, and it’s a reminder that a lot of sanity checking claims is about taking some guesstimate… Continue reading

For the stats text, I’ve been trying to think of/find rules that apply across a wide array of disciplines. Here’s one: control for cyclical effects. It applies here (summer gas spikes): And here, with voting in elections — presidential elections (a cyclical event) boosts turnout every second congressional election):  2008:  a bit over 340,000 come… Continue reading

Gas prices are up again. What’s going on? Who’s to blame? Of course big long term driver is China. China needs more gas, and its exploding demand has put pressure on the market. But what about the recent spike? Apparently the big villian is… Chemistry: Gas prices fluctuate seasonally — up in spring, down in… Continue reading

Decent graph from NYT showing quintiles over time, in this case, the declining portion of government benefits the poorest 20% of the population receives. These sorts of graphs are very in right now, as the format is perfect for showing change of distribution over time, and so much of our political discourse is dealing with… Continue reading

Making some progress on the Making Fair Comparisons textbook. The preface is below. One thing I’ve learned from reading cheesy self-help books: If you believe a skill will change a person’s life, you should say it. At the end of the book, the reader will know if their life is changed or not. There’s time to be… Continue reading

I’m writing a intro stats book right now (a small one for students). This lecture really brings home the problem of the “garden path” solution, and how small changes in presentation could make a big difference. Continue reading

Everyone knows that campaign spending is out of control, right? Except it’s not. In raw numbers, of course, the amount just keeps getting bigger, but controlled for inflation, it’s exactly what you would expect, and no more expensive than it was at the turn of the century, as the graph above from Mother Jones shows.… Continue reading