Posted inFun Philosophy
Weekly Mail
I receive regularly a lot of red hot tips from regular readers, but as the week goes on they are often buried by newer mail. Thus I will try out…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Why Memes Are Stupid: The Short Version
In 1976, in his The Selfish Gene, a book which revealed that most of us are slaves to our genes, biologist Richard Dawkins "discovered" the meme which, in one definition,…
Posted inCulture Statistics
Will The Religious Out-Breed Us All?
Thanks to long-time reader and contributer Ari Schwartz for bringing this to our attention. "It is widely agreed that religion has biological foundations---that belief in the supernatural, obedience to authority…
Posted inStatistics
The Statistics Of Racial And Gender Gaps
Suppose we have collected data on some measure deemed important to society. Examples are fireman entrance exams, standardized test scores in mathematics, income, IQ, and so forth. Higher measures are…
Posted inCulture Statistics
Peer Review Fails? Sympathetic Priest? What’s Going On Here?
Duke Scores Another Own Goal According to Science, Duke University oncologist Anil Potti quit after being caught cheating: Anil Potti had published papers in prominent journals identifying gene signatures in…
Posted inCulture
Top 10 Women’s Fashion Rules
As requested by Victoria, and several other non-male readers, here is the companion article to Top 10 Men's Fashion Rules. If you are, like most readers here, male, forward this…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Are We In The Midst Of A Global Extinction Event?
"All Life Ends! Amphibians, Cartilaginous Fishes Hardest Hit." That was the headline yesterday in newspapers all over the country as editors reacted to a press release from Science magazine which…
Posted inStatistics
The Gold Standard Of Experimentation Exposed As Pyrite
Everybody says the "gold standard" of experimentation, and especially clinical trials, is the randomized controlled trial. A typical view is that "A Randomized Controlled Trial is an experiment or study…