Posted inCulture
Make Colleges Co-Signers Of Student Loans?
As often has been said, if everybody is a genius, then nobody is. The wisdom in this apothegm is little changed by the modification: if everybody has a certification of…
Posted inCulture Philosophy
Science Explains Belief In God Through Genetics
Let's look at "Life's Extremes: Atheists vs. Believers", a piece on Live Science (the home of unexpurgated university press releases; hat tip to HotAir). The article is itself slight---it begins…
Posted inStatistics
Geo-engineering The Climate: Durban Global Warming Conference
A group of scientists, funded generously by Big Green, which includes the Environmental Defense Fund, have released a report to coincide with the efforts of the Durban Global Warming Conference,…
Posted inFun Statistics
Are Experts Better At Predicting Sports Than Ordinary Fans?
Today's post is over at the new and, yes, improved Edgehogs.com. Our launch was a couple of months ago. Since that time we've got a good chunk of games and…
Posted inStatistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part VI Climate Model Focus
This is a technical addendum to the main series. I would have skipped this, but Climategate 2.0 revealed many misapprehensions of verification statistics that I want to clear up, particularly…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part V
We have in our hands (via the predictive posterior) the probabilities that Susy's GPA is less than any number between 0 and 4, given that we accept the normal model…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part IV
In Part I we had the simplest kind of model. We complicated it in Part II, built more structure in Part III, and today finally come to the most used…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part III
We have had two cases so far: arbitrary models for counterfactual Martians (Part I) and a deduced model for an urn holding dichotomous objects (Part II). The logic was identical…