In Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best argues that consumers of statistics need to especially scrutinize international comparisons because there are so many opportunities to mix up apples and oranges (I have discussed this with regard to the conceptual definitions used to quantify police-related deaths in different countries). One of Best’s examples was international comparisons … Continue reading
A couple of days ago I wrote about a six-year old statistical controversy in political science (in my defense, it was new to me!), where Jesse Richman and his collaboraters used a massive online survey–the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES)–to argue that non-citizen voting in the 2008 and 2010 elections in the United States was … Continue reading
I saw this tweet by the president of the right-wing thinktank Judicial Watch and I was curious how he arrived at those numbers. In the video he cites a 2014 study by Jesse Richman and colleagues purporting to quantify the extent to which non-citizens voted in the United States, which is nearly illegal everywhere in … Continue reading
“As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, ‘Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population.‘” — Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, 9/28/14 The National Center for Women and Policing website is currently down, … Continue reading
Half a year ago, psychologist Stephanie Fryberg and her colleagues published an article (supplementary materials) in Social Psychological and Personality Science on how Native American identity influences attitudes towards sports’ teams use of native mascots, with a particular focus on the infamous Washington Redskins. Jane Recker wrote a news article about the research for The … Continue reading
One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by the police. Patrick Ball, Granta …the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019. Heather MacDonald, USA Today Someone turning to data to try to quantify the problem of police killings (or police brutality … Continue reading
Long-lasting symptoms of COVID
Fabio Rojas has argued for most institutions reopening in the face of COVID-19, on the grounds that COVID mortality rates are quite low for the non-elderly. A number of commenters on his posted legitimately raised the issue of people with serious, long-lasting complications from COVID. It’s just not a matter of a few people dying … Continue reading →