Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Amateur political analysis ahead. What are the chances for bipartisanship under Biden. Roughly speaking, that means whose votes would he need to get to 60 in the Senate, requiring 10 Republicans Repubs who have voted with Trump less than 75 per cent of the timeCollinsPaulMurkowskiLeeRomneyOf these, Paul and Lee have dissented mostly from the right Next 5MoranYoungDainsScottSasseScott voted to overturn the election Next 5Toomey, Graham, Johnson, Hawley (!), LankfordNeed I say...

from C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh The United States prepares for moving out of the Trump era with the incoming President promising more rounds of stimulus spending to revive an economy ravaged by Covid-19. Other members of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, a predominantly rich nation’s club, have also been generous with their spending and signalled that they are willing to keep their wallets open to spend more if necessary. The evidence clearly is that the...

from Lars Syll A non-trivial part of teaching statistics to social science students is made up of learning them to perform significance testing. A problem yours truly has noticed repeatedly over the years, however, is that no matter how careful you try to be in explicating what the probabilities generated by these statistical tests — p-values — really are, still most students misinterpret them. A couple of years ago I gave a statistics course for the Swedish National Research School in...

from Peter Radford The aftermath of a coup attempt is one of those moments when a nation gets a really serious insight into its values.  Do, for instance, its politicians rally around some higher set of principles, or do they slide quickly back into the day-to-day argy-bargy of political positioning and infighting? Ours are perilously close to the latter.  And this after their own place of work was invaded and trashed while they hid and cowered in sundry hiding places.  Profiles in...

Tags: open thread

from Dean Baker With a Democrat in the White House, the season of the deficit hawk has returned. So, it’s worth going through the old arguments just to remind everyone that the best response to these people is ridicule. It looks like President Biden will propose a robust stimulus package of well over $1 trillion. According to press accounts, the package is likely to include another check for $2,000. (I believe it is supposed to $1,400 above the $600 in the last package.) It is likely to...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a dire warning about what is to come for the COVID-19 pandemic, according to its latest ensemble projections. The agency believes that as many as 92,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 in the next three weeks despite the rollout of the vaccine. This represents a 25% increase in total COVID-related deaths, which have now topped over 384,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The...

Having just had an operation at Mass General earlier this week, I was pleased to hear that the nurses I met had their first vaccination. But then I checked the Boston Globe and Med Page Today on our local progress in relation to my own turn. Worth a discussion and feedback on your own locality. https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/marty-makary/90649 Quote: This is a manufactured problem. The CDC, states, and hospitals should have...

from Lars Syll When no formal theory is available, as is often the case, then the analyst needs to justify statistical specifications by showing that they fit the data. That means more than just “running things.” It means careful graphical and crosstabular analysis … When I present this argument … one or more scholars say, “But shouldn’t I control for every-thing I can? If not, aren’t my regression coefficients biased due to excluded variables?” But this argument is not as persuasive...

from Asad Zaman An article by Alan Hajek in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists six major categories of definitions. Many more are possible if causality is also taken into account. These definitions conflict with each other, and face serious problems as interpretations of real-world probabilities. The basic definition of probability we will offer in this lecture falls outside all of these listed categories. Before going on to present it, we briefly explain why there is such massive...