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The Other Side of the Night

Don Green points us to this quantitative/qualitative meta-analysis he did with Betsy Levy Paluck and Seth Green. The paper begins: This paper evaluates the state of contact hypothesis research from a policy perspective. Building on Pettigrew...Show More Summary

Take two on Laura Arnold’s TEDx talk.

In this post I try to be more concise and direct about what I found of value in Laura Arnold’s TEDx talk that I recently blogged about here. Primarily it was the disclosure from someone who could afford to buy good evidence (and experts...Show More Summary

PCI Statistics: A preprint review peer community in statistics

X informs me of a new effort, “Peer community in...”, which describes itself as “a free recommendation process of published and unpublished scientific papers.” So far this exists in only one field, Evolutionary Biology. But this looks...Show More Summary

A Type Theory for Synthetic ?-Categories

Summarizes a new paper "A type theory for synthetic $\infty$-categories" by Emily Riehl and Mike Shulman.

This company wants to hire people who can program in R or Python and do statistical modeling in Stan

Doug Puett writes: I am a 2012 QMSS [Columbia University Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences] grad who is currently trying to build a Data Science/Quantitative UX team, and was hoping for some advice. I am finding myself having a...Show More Summary

How is a politician different from a 4-year-old?

A few days ago I shared my reactions to an op-ed by developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. Gopnik replied: As a regular reader of your blog, I thought you and your readers might be interested in a response to your very fair comments. Show More Summary

Julie Rehmeyer’s new memoir is a moving portrait of a person living expansively in the face of setbacks and limitations -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Quantitative continuity estimates

Suppose is a continuous (but nonlinear) map from one normed vector space to another. The continuity means, roughly speaking, that if are such that is small, then is also small (though the precise notion of “smallness” may depend on or, particularly if is not known to be uniformly continuous). If is known to […]

Design top down, Code bottom up

Top-down design means designing from the client application programmer interface (API) down to the code. The API lays out a precise functional specification, which says what the code will do, not how it will do it. Coding bottom up means coding the lowest-level foundations first, testing them, then continuing to build. Show More Summary

How to think scientifically about scientists’ proposals for fixing science

I wrote this article for a sociology journal: Science is in crisis. Any doubt about this status has surely been been dispelled by the loud assurances to the contrary by various authority figures who are deeply invested in the current...Show More Summary

First ever data on number of gender confirmation surgeries

(MediaSource) For the first time, the world's largest plastic surgery organization is tracking national statistics on gender confirmation surgeries. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons found a nearly 20 percent increase in these surgeries in just the first year of reporting. Show More Summary

An obvious fact about constrained systems.

This post is not by Andrew. This post is by Phil. This post is prompted by Andrew’s recent post about the book “Everything is obvious once you know the answer,” together with a recent discussion I’ve been involved in. I’m going to say something obvious. Show More Summary

Some natural solutions to the p-value communication problem—and why they won’t work.

John Carlin and I write: It is well known that even experienced scientists routinely misinterpret p-values in all sorts of ways, including confusion of statistical and practical significance, treating non-rejection as acceptance of the...Show More Summary

#NotAll4YearOlds

I think there’s something wrong this op-ed by developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, “4-year-olds don’t act like Trump,” and which begins, The analogy is pervasive among his critics: Donald Trump is like a child.... But the analogy is profoundly wrong, and it’s unfair to children. Show More Summary

Hotel room aliases of the statisticians

Barry Petchesky writes: Below you’ll find a room list found before Game 1 at the Four Seasons in Houston (right across from the arena), where the Thunder were staying for their first-round series against the Rockets. We didn’t run it...Show More Summary

UTA educator awarded NSF CAREER grant to focus on community college transfer students

(University of Texas at Arlington) Yi 'Leaf' Zhang, an assistant professor in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Arlington, has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to help community college transfer students more easily and quickly attain degrees in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEM fields.

Researchers look to add statistical safeguards to data analysis and visualization software

(Brown University) Brown University computer scientists have shown a new way to help prevent users of data exploration software from making false discoveries.

A continuous hinge function for statistical modeling

This comes up sometimes in my applied work: I want a continuous “hinge function,” something like the red curve above, connecting two straight lines in a smooth way. Why not include the sharp corner (in this case, the function y=-0.5x if x0)? Two reasons. Show More Summary

New tools safeguard census data about where you live and work

(Duke University) New methods enable people to learn as much as possible from census data for policy-making and funding decisions, while guaranteeing that no one can trace the data back to your household or business. Census-related statistics are used to allocate billions of dollars annually for things like disaster relief, roads and schools. Show More Summary

New algorithm tracks neurons in bendy brain of freely crawling worm

(PLOS) Scientists at Princeton University have developed a new algorithm to track neurons in the brain of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans while it crawls. The algorithm, presented in PLOS Computational Biology by Jeffrey Nguyen and colleagues, could save hundreds of hours of manual labor in studies of animal behavior.