Social-Science
drorzel | September 8, 2009Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman's essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday's Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the "high end blogosphere," I'm not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But, since he asked...
Twitter's interface makes it almost impossible to go back and figure out what the hell was going on even a few days ago, but going through Eric's feed, the crux of the matter seems to be that he takes issue with Krugman's claim that "the economics profession went astray because…
drorzel | July 28, 2009There's an interesting report at Inside Higher Ed today on a study of religiosity and college. Some of the results will probably come as a surprise to many people around ScienceBlogs:
# The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a "nagging theory" in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college.
# Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity --…
drorzel | July 9, 2009Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there's a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there's something in here to bolster every opinion.
The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems…
drorzel | June 8, 2009Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level:
1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures.
2) There's a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning questions of how the principles of economics play out in superhero comics. This is both more and less silly than that description makes it sound. If you'd like a participatory entry to parallel Sheril's kissing survey, they're asking readers who's the richest character in comics.
drorzel | May 15, 2009Malcolm Gladwell has a number of public responses to the sort of thing I ranted about the other day-- not to me specifically, mind, but to the same general points-- on his own blog and on ESPN's Page 2. It's pretty much the same argument others made in the comments to my post. Taking a fairly representative bit from his blog post:
The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath…
drorzel | May 5, 2009I'm never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn't seem to be much there.
Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems to be his general practice, Gladwell frames the whole thing around an engaging anecdote, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley businessman who coached his daughter's team of twelve-year-old girls in a National Junior Basketball competition:
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph:
Explained by Wolfers thusly:
The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by…
drorzel | January 3, 2009A couple of smallish items that came up in recent days, that can be grouped together under the general heading of "data presentation oddities." First, over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy tries out a semi-hemi-demi-log plot for a graph of WPA expenditures.
The problem he's trying to address is the gigantic difference in magnitudes between the billions spent on road construction and the mere millions spent on public art. His solution is to split the chart into regions corresponding to different orders of magnitude. They're each graphed linearly, but there's one section for millions, another…
drorzel | December 4, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, another example of why I have a hard time taking economists seriously, talking about a measure of stock prices:
[T]he "Q" ratio [is] the value of the stock market relative to the replacement cost of net assets. The basic logic behind "Q" is that capitalism works. If the "Q" is above 1.0, then the market is valuing a company at more than it costs to reproduce it; stock prices should fall. If it is below 1.0, then stocks are undervalued because new businesses can't be created at as cheap a price as they can be bought in the open market. In the short run, this ratio is…