Recently at the Mother Blog

By agelman on November 5, 2009.

Slipperiness of the term "risk aversion"

How to think about how to think about causality

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"It would be as if any discussion of intercontinental navigation required a preliminary discussion of why the evidence shows that the earth is not flat"

I've been ranting lately about how I don't like the term "risk aversion," and I was thinking it might help to bring up this post from last year: This discussion from Keynes (from Robert Skidelsky, linked from Steve Hsu) reminds me of a frustrating conversation I've sometimes had with economists…

Risk, Fear, Certainty

Apologies, once again, for the blogging silence. I was busy in London, on tour for the UK version of the book, which is called "The Decisive Moment". (We got some great press, including being featured as "Book of the Week" by BBC Radio 4.) Although book tours can, on occasion, be frustrating and…

The Nation's Science Report Card is out. Everything is going fine.

The Science component of "The Nation's Report Card" was released today and clearly indicates that we have moved one step closer as a nation in two of our most important goals: Building a large and complacent poorly educated low-pay labor class, and increasing the size of our science-illiterate…

EuroTrip '08 - Belgrade, Open Access

OK, I posted a lot of pictures of Belgrade and my Mom's food so far, but the real business was on Tuesday, when I gave two talks about Open Access, PLoS, Science 2.0, the future of the scientific paper, Open Notebook Science and science blogging. In the morning, I gave a talk in the gallery of the…

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Bye

July 11, 2010

I realize that I haven't been posting much here. We had some plans to use the Applied Statistics blog for other purposes but it didn't really work out, so from now on you can go to my main blog for your statistical entertainment.

"How many zombies do you know?" Using indirect survey methods to measure alien attacks and outbreaks of the undead

July 1, 2010

I've been told that it's zombie day, so I thought I'd link to this research article by Gelman and Romero: The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow…

Scientists can read your mind . . . as long as the're allowed to look at more than one place in your brain and then make a prediction after seeing what you actually did

June 23, 2010

Maggie Fox writes: Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret "real time" brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week. The scans were…

Ethical and data-integrity problems in a study of mortality in Iraq

April 27, 2010

See discussion here. I've linked to it from here because ScienceBlogger and investigative journalist Tim Lambert has written some on the topic.

Random matrices in the news

April 12, 2010

Mark Buchanan wrote a cover article for the New Scientist on random matrices, a heretofore obscure area of probability theory that his headline writer characterizes as "the deep law that shapes our reality." It's interesting stuff, and he gets into some statistical applications at the end, so I'll…