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 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 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…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part II
The models in Part I might not have "felt right" to you. But if that is so it is because your diet of probability examples has been too narrowly constricted.…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part I
The rules of logic are simple. Use whatever evidence you have, and no other, to figure the probability of a conclusion. These rules are all we need to understand what…