Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Physics Today
... an occasional look at foibles and funnies of the arxiv, mainly in cases where natural scientists do silly things while reinventing the wheel in social science statistics. Here we see three intrepid adventurers into "scientometrics", that being the statistical analysis of scientific journals.
In principle, this is a sensible thing to do. In execution ... perhaps not so much. Apparently, the frequency with which the words "simulation" and "Monte Carlo" appear in physics journals has a statistically significant correlation with average incomes in Argentina, the number of doctoral degrees granted in the USA and the number of collaborations at CERN. What they don't publish is that, via the spurious regression phenomenon, their dataset will also show a statistically significant correlation with anything else that has gone up over the period in a sufficiently smooth fashion.
(NB: physicists should only feel a little bit ashamed of this; most econometrics papers before the early 70s also suffered from the problem of regressing two nonstationary series on each other and then patting yourself on the back for getting a high r^2).
this item posted by the management 12/09/2010 12:45:00 AM
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