Back to back on my to read list were two articles that made an odd juxtaposition. First up was Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue in the once great Scientific American. Here’s a representative blurb: More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a […]

This is just a short post to illustrate the magnitude of GDP revisions. I downloaded quarterly GDP data from BEA in June 2011. I went back to BEA this morning to update the file. Forgetting about GDP revisions, I thought I’d be adding 2 or three more quarters of data, but discovered that all the […]

Noted for the record: author Piaw Na reviews Mike Kimel‘s Presimetrics at Piaw’s Blog: This is a great book to read if you’ve got a statistical bent and are willing to follow the data rather than your pre-conceived notions….Many people like to say that they’re data-driven, but most people actually have prejudices that lead them […]

by Mike Kimel There’s a story going around in the news about a new prostate cancer drug. Here’s press release: A life-extending new drug to treat patients with advanced prostate cancer, developed by The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and The Royal Marsden Hospital, has received its UK license. Abiraterone acetate, marketed by Janssen under […]

I’m not going to do this with graphics (at least for now), but the finger exercise seems intuitive. Assume—against all evidence—that the “once we educated them, 30% said they would stop offering health insurance to their lowest-paid employees” study is accurate. How does that, as John Boehner declares, cost America jobs? From Boehner’s site: At […]

The quality of the posts at Disruptive Women in Health Care(r) varies widely, but their special issues bring out the best and leave most of the chaff behind. Their latest eBook is Innovation Nation: Recognizing the Benefits of Innovation in Health Care. The PDF (direct link here) collects a series of posts from December, and […]

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand released a paper by Nicolas Groshenny last month—I’m behind on planning for Chanukkah; that I got to a paper from New Zealand about U.S. monetary policy this soon is, er, probably one of the reasons why—in which he evaluates the counterfactual of following the “Taylor Rule” from 2002 to […]

I have (vainly, I suspect, in both senses of the phrase), tried to start a meme on Twitter, #ifTimGeithnerrantheEmergencyRoom. “The defibrillator would only charge to 30 to prevent scarring; anything more and you’re on your own” probably isn’t winning friends or influencing people, but it does make me feel better. It also makes me look […]

Chris Blattman highlights the latest version of Janet Currie and Reed Walker’s research on a positive externality of the shift to E-Z Pass (PDF link). From the Abstract: We find that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza […]

For those interested in more information on job creation in the Employment Dynamics database these three article provide very good information. Cordelia Okolie, “Why Size Class Methodology Matters in Analyses of Net and Gross Job Flows.” July 2004 Monthly Labor Review Jessica Helfand, Akbar Sadeghi and David Talan, “Employment Dynamics: Small and Large Firms Over […]