Lars P. Syll

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Ett företag inom svensk skola har bland annat använt skolpeng för att köpa en våffelstuga i Åre, visar SVT Nyheters granskning. I skolkoncernen Watma har 20 miljoner kronor i koncernbidrag gått från utbildningsverksamhet till moderbolaget under de senaste tre åren. Av summan har 2,8 miljoner därefter gått vidare till dotterbolaget Nordic Leisure, pengar som sedermera delfinansierade ett köp av våffelstugan … Anders Hultin som driver skolkoncernen Watma skriver i ett mejl att...

The labor shortage myth .[embedded content]

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You see it all the time in studies. “We controlled for…” And then the list starts … The more things you can control for, the stronger your study is — or, at least, the stronger your study seems. Controls give the feeling of specificity, of precision. But sometimes, you can control for too much. Sometimes you end up controlling for the thing you’re trying to measure … An example is research around the gender wage gap, which tries to control for so many things that it ends up...

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Ukraine — fighting for all of us .[embedded content] To all my brothers and sisters in Ukraine, fighting the Russian invasion for one year now. May God be with you. Never give in. Never give up.

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Getting causality into statistics Because statistical analyses need a causal skeleton to connect to the world, causality is not extra-statistical but instead is a logical antecedent of real-world inferences. Claims of random or “ignorable” or “unbiased” sampling or allocation are justified by causal actions to block (“control”) unwanted causal effects on the sample patterns. Without such actions of causal blocking, independence can only be treated as a...

If you can’t devise an experiment that answers your question in a world where anything goes, then the odds of generating useful results with a modest budget and nonexperimental survey data seem pretty slim. The description of an ideal experiment also helps you formulate causal questions precisely. The mechanics of an ideal experiment highlight the forces you’d like to manipulate and the factors you’d like to hold constant. Research questions that cannot be answered by any...