1. Academics use crazy tricks for clickbait.
Turn to @TheWinnower for an insightful analysis of academic article titles, and how their authors sometimes mimic techniques used for clickbait. Positively framed titles (those stating a specific finding) fare better than vague ones: For example, ‘smoking causes lung cancer’ vs. ‘the relationship between smoking and lung cancer’. Nice use of altmetrics to perform the analysis.
2. FCC doesn’t use cost-benefit analysis.
Critics claim Federal Communications Commission policymaking has swerved away from econometric evidence and economic theory. Federal agencies including the EPA must submit cost-benefit analyses to support new regulations, but the FCC is exempted, “free to embrace populism as its guiding principle”. @CALinnovates has published a new paper, The Curious Absence of Economic Analysis at the Federal Communications Commission: An Agency In Search of a Mission. Former FCC Chief Economist Gerald Faulhaber, PhD and Hal Singer, PhD review the agency’s “proud history at the cutting edge of industrial economics and its recent divergence from policymaking grounded in facts and analysis”.
3. No bias in US police shootings?
There’s plenty of evidence showing bias in US police use of force, but not in shootings, says one researcher. But Data Colada, among others, describes “an interesting empirical challenge for interpreting the shares of Whites vs Blacks shot by police while being arrested is that biased officers, those overestimating the threat posted by a Black civilian, will arrest less dangerous Blacks on average. They will arrest those posing a real threat, but also some not posing a real threat, resulting in lower average threat among those arrested by biased officers.”
4. Tobacco surcharges don’t work.
The Affordable Care Act imposes tobacco surcharges for smokers. But findings suggest the ACA has not led more people to stop smoking.
5. CEOs lose faith in forecasts.
Some CEOs say big-data predictions are failing. “The so-called experts and global economists are proven as often to be wrong as right these days,” claims a WSJ piece In Uncertain Times, CEOs Lose Faith in Forecasts. One consultant advises people to “rely less on forecasts and instead road-test ideas with customers and make fast adjustments when needed. He urges them to supplement big-data predictions with close observation of their customers.”
6. Is fMRI evidence flawed?
Motherboard’s Why Two Decades of Brain Research Could Be Seriously Flawed recaps research by Anders Eklund. Cost is one reason, he argues: fMRI scans are notoriously expensive. “That makes it hard for researchers to perform large-scale studies with lots of patients”. Eklund has written elsewhere about this (Can parametric statistical methods be trusted for fMRI based group studies?), and the issue is being noticed by Neuroskeptic and Science-Based Medicine (“It’s tempting to think that the new idea or technology is going to revolutionize science or medicine, but history has taught us to be cautious. For instance, antioxidants, it turns out, are not going to cure a long list of diseases”).
Posted by Tracy Allison Altman on 13-Jul-2016.
