Foolippic

The Observer makes another hash of “clarifying” and persists in trying to cover up its mistakes – Bad Science

But there was no mention of these studies in Panorama. Instead they showed us just one subject in an unfinished, unpublished study: Why? Apparently she has guessed if the signal is on or not, correctly, 2/3 of the time. Is that statistically significant? What about the other subjects in the study? It’s meaningless: it’s an anecdote dressed up as science with some pictures of some measuring equipment.

Emphasis added. It’s not every day that even Ben Goldacre’s reporting about Bad Science makes me laugh out loud.

Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst? - Chronicle.com

Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college. There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering.

In such a climate, it is not surprising that applications to some community colleges and other public institutions have risen by as much as 40 percent. Those institutions, particularly community colleges, will become a more-attractive option for a larger swath of the collegebound. Taking the first two years of college while living at home has been an attractive option since the 1920s, but it is now poised to grow significantly.

Questioning the Hawthorne effect: Light work | The Economist

The data from the illumination experiments had never been rigorously analysed and were believed lost. But Steven Levitt and John List, two economists at the University of Chicago, discovered that the data had survived the decades in two archives in Milwaukee and Boston, and decided to subject them to econometric analysis. The Hawthorne experiments had another surprise in store for them. Contrary to the descriptions in the literature, they found no systematic evidence that levels of productivity in the factory rose whenever changes in lighting were implemented.

It turns out that idiosyncrasies in the way the experiments were conducted may have led to misleading interpretations of what happened. For example, lighting was always changed on a Sunday, when the plant was closed. When it reopened on Monday, output duly rose compared with Saturday, the last working day before the change, and continued to rise for the next couple of days. But a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Mondays. Workers tended to beaver away for the first few days of the working week in any case, before hitting a plateau and then slackening off.

And less of the other kind:

Home taping didn’t kill music - Bad Science

On the billions lost it says: “Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.”

What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full CIBER documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed “background”, among five other points, it says: “Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10 billion and 4,000 jobs.” An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius

Dynamist Blog: Medicare First!

“Nearly 30 percent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without adverse health consequences.”

The report also suggests that we know what the problems are, listing the usual suspects:

We spend a substantial amount on high cost, low-value treatments.

Patients obtain too little of certain types of care that are effective and of high value.

Patients frequently do not receive care in the most cost-effective setting.

There is extensive variation in the quality of care provided to patients.

There are many preventable medical errors that lead to worse outcomes and higher costs.

Our system is complex and we have high administrative costs.

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let’s see what “better management” looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

Burris on tape offering a check for Blagojevich - Chicago Breaking News

A transcript of a secretly recorded phone call between the brother of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and U.S. Sen. Roland Burris was released in federal court today, a call in which Burris, then seeking the Senate seat, was recorded offering the Blagojevich campaign a campaign check.

“I know I could give him a check,” Burris said. “Myself.”

But in the same call, Burris tells Robert Blagojevich he is concerned he and Rod Blagojevich will “catch hell.”

“And if I do get appointed that means I bought it,” Burris said.

“And, and God knows number one, I, I wanna help Rod,” Burris says later in the call. “Number two, I also wanna, you know, hope I get a consideration to get that appointment.”

Reader survey results: probabilities, halos, and leaders (Aid Watch)

On one level, A is the right answer, because B is a subset of A. A contains all successes, both (1) those achieved with wise leadership, and (2) those achieved with any other means. B only contains (1), and so is less likely than A. Well known psychology experiments find the same thing — that many people have what is called the “conjunction fallacy” (again from my continuing Mlodinow and Kahneman obsession) that would cause them to choose (B). A set of outcomes that fits a plausible story is thought to be larger than one unrestricted by ANY story, even though ANY restriction on the set of possible outcomes always makes that set less likely than an unrestricted set. An explanation usually trumps no explanation, even if it gets the probabilities wrong!

Interestingly, though, Easterly goes on to say that he thinks is phrasing was sloppy, so that a number of people chose B because they read it as “when is development success more likely?” So although the split was 60-40 in favor of A (the answer I thought was obvious), it’s not clear how many of the 40% were falling for the conjunction fallacy, and how many read the question as meaning something else.

What Does the Human Development Index Measure? - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

Given this debate, I wondered whether Gelman’s critique might also apply to the U.N.’s original cross-national Human Development Index, so I downloaded the latest data. The graph below compares a country’s ranking on the human development index with its ranking on average income. The correlation between the two is even stronger — a massive 95 percent! For all but a handful of countries, your ranking on average income is the same as your ranking on this multi-dimensional index.

so, granting Catherine Rampell’s point that  “U.N.’s index was not designed to capture the levels of variation that would occur within a single country. It was designed to make international comparisons.”  What is the non-evil (or at least massively tendentious) explanation for how it was designed if all the factors basically collapse into average income?

William Easterly asks the following question of his readers:
Reader survey (Aid Watch)

Please tell me which you think is more probable:

(A) a country succeeds at economic development, or
(B) a country succeeds at economic development with a wise and capable leadership.

But it seems like it’s completely obvious unless I’m misunderstanding how “with” is meant.  P(A) > P(A & B) as long as P(A & ~B) > 0.  That is, as long as there’s even one country that succeeds at economic development without wise and capable leadership, the probability that a country succeeds is greater than the probability that it succeeds and has wise and capable leadership. No?  Maybe the question really means which is greater P(A) or P(A|B), but I really find that quite a stretch for that phrasing.

Or, blowing your nose on the Constitution, because you’re a bureaucrat and you can:

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts | Threat Level | Wired.com

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

Every day, the list of people who need a good horse-whippin’ grows. No, seriously, they have no explanation for how this doesn’t fall under the relevant Supreme Court caselaw:

“The Supreme Court has said that the government can’t make
warrantless entries into homes for administrative inspections,” Kerr
said via e-mail, refering to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling
that housing inspectors needed warrants to force their way into private
residences. The FCC’s online FAQ doesn’t explain how the agency gets
around that ruling, Kerr adds.

But they go ahead and do it anyway, including fining people $7000 for “refusing to admit an officer.”  At the very least, heads should roll over this.  It’s not that the minions of the FCC are acting as jackbooted thugs–as far as I can tell from the article, they’re basically just doing their job of making sure that nobody is using radio equipment that interferes with other radio equipment–it’s that the government shouldn’t be employing anybody with such a cavalier disregard for people’s Constituional rights.  The minute anybody at the agency even suggested that they had the authority to enter people’s homes without a warrant, that should have raised alarm bells.  The fact that not only didn’t it, and they’ve been acting on it, and even written it up in the FAQ on their website, I think indicates something is terribly wrong.