Superfreakonomics and global warming

I’m a little slow getting to this, but it seems that the new book by Levitt and Dubner has a chapter on global warming (you can see an excerpt here). As usual, I leave most of the arguments to the experts (see here, here, and here for example). Instead, I’ll look at one of the responses [...]

Global Warming

Hmm, it seems there is more out about global warming and the data still says the Earth is getting warmer. First, via here, a study finds the same basic ‘hockey stick’ graph using different methods. Being a math guy, I love this:
The sheer amount of computation, however, is daunting, involving heavy matrix algebra. Initial values [...]

Lead, abortion, and murder

I have seen the Freakonomics idea that legalizing abortion caused a decrease in violence and I have been wary about it. They say that they control for lots of variables, but it still amounted to an observational study with their inherent problems. In particular confounding factors–just because you think you have thought of all the [...]

Another study shows why we need national healthcare

A new study in the American Journal of Public Health  (the NY Times has an older version here) has found (this study uses data, it seems, through 2000–the bold is in the Boston Globe post):
After accounting for age, education, income, and other factors, the researchers found that people without private insurance had a 40 percent [...]

Placebo Effect

I’m a little slow getting to this, perhaps because I find it fascinating. It seems that the placebo effect is getting bigger. The article has some of the historyof the placebo effect:
In a 1955 paper titled “The Powerful Placebo,” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had [...]

Charter Schools

The Boston Globe had an article a few days ago talking about charter schools. It found that charter schools in Massachusetts:
But a Globe analysis shows that charter schools in cities targeted by the proposal tend to enroll few special education students or English language learners.
The article then asks if charter schools do better than regular [...]

Second Anniversary

I’m a day late (I blame my dissertation defense on Thursday), but I have now been blogging for two years:
I’m still in the pathetic zone in terms of hits: 50,745 in two years for an average of 69.4 per day (although I averaged 108.8 this last year);
this is my 1250th post (1.71 per day, .99 [...]

Comparing things is un-American

I’m really confused about the backlash against comparative effectiveness research (CER). Hilzoy looks at this (and links to this paperby Jerry Avorn) and is as confused as me:
You’d think that doing research to figure out which treatments are most effective would be an obviously good thing. But no: it is, apparently, the first step on [...]

People are getting older

Via Hilzoy, it seems the demographics of the world are not what was thought not too long ago:
The various demographic changes I have described arrived with remarkable speed. At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the [...]

Comparative effectiveness of drugs

Hmm, a few people are writing about the push by drug and medical device companies to take money out of the stimulus package for comparative effectiveness studies for treatments. The reason there’s need for this is that the FDA approves a new drug or treatment if it’s safe and effective, they do not test to see if [...]

Cost of textbooks

Via Kevin Drum (there are some interesting comments there), I went to see Andrew Gelman’s post about $150 statistics textbooks. Since I’m teaching introductory statistics, this is a timely post (in fact I’m supposed to give the text for a summer course by the end of the day–and I’m not even going to teach it). One of [...]

Another Music Confidence Interval

First, here’s my random 10:
Ghosts Japan
Mirror In The Bathroom The English Beat
Song For Kim (She Said) Concrete Blonde
Your Phone’s off the Hook, But You’re Not X
Pacific Ocean Blues Gigolo Aunts
Have You Ever The Offspring
Slippin’ and Slidin’ (Peepin’ and Hidin’) Little Richard
Love Is A Long Road Tom Petty
Mary’s In India Dido
Suddenly I See KT Tunstall
Don’t Come Close The Ramones
The Delivery Man Elvis Costello & The Imposters 
Last week I [...]

Olympic Medals per Capita

As I said I might (the number of medals are from the Wikipedia link there and the populations come from the US Census Bureau), I have compiled the number of Olympic medals per capita for all the countries for all the Olympics. I was a bit lazy–some countries are gone, others are split, and so on, [...]

Numbers Stuff

The Numbers Guy has two posts that I find interesting:

the first wonders who was the most successful nation in the Olympics. He links to a WSJ article that ranks the countries that won a medal by a few categories. We find that The Bahamas won the most medals per capita and Zimbabwe won the most per [...]

Are You Male or Female in Your Browsing?

Mike On Ads has a javascript function to estimate the probability that you are male or female given your browsing history. Here’s mine:
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 33%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 67%

Site
Male-Female Ratio

yahoo.com
0.9

youtube.com
1

wikipedia.org
1.08

nytimes.com
1.13

washingtonpost.com
1.15

boston.com
1.08

sciencedaily.com
0.96

census.gov
0.9

mtbr.com
1.74

coursecompass.com
0.65

motherjones.com
1.47

I actually find the Male-Female ratios more interesting than the conclusion. Most of the places listed have a M-F [...]

Anniversary

Concrete Blonde – Happy Birthday

 
Well, I have now been blogging for exactly one year, so here are my statistics for the year:
this is the 888th post–a bit over 2.4 posts per day–with the most in politics (396, stretching the definition at times);
10,910 hits for about 12.3 hits per post or 29.8 [...]

Updated (March 4) Vote Totals

I have now put up the vote totals through yesterday’s votes (click on the Primary Vote Totals tab and scroll down).
Here are the totals right now (using the Washington and Texas primary numbers, not the caucus numbers, and not including the Florida and Michigan primaries for the Democrat numbers):
Obama: 12,692,854 (46.22%), Clinton: 12,090,313 (45.02%)
McCain: 7,169,558 [...]

Antidepressants and Placebos

I’m a little slow about this, but I was looking at this post by Kevin Drum where he looks at the study that finds antidepressants such as Prozac are about the same as placebos for most patients (you can see info here and here, or for the report here). The study confirms that one of [...]

Sharing Data

It seems like researchers don’t like sharing their data (I’m not surprised in the publish or perish world of academia or the profit world of business):
A few years back, a study was published showing that a certain drug could prevent one type of cancer. The problem was that the drug didn’t work very well and [...]

Are Women Effective in Government?

My sister sent me a link to this article about women in government (which is largely based on a paper by Duflo and Topalova). Since Senator Clinton is the favorite to win the next Presidential election, there has been a lot of discussion about women in government–specifically whether they will govern differently and whether people will [...]