In a word: no. In more words, http://bactra.org/weblog/857.html

No, no, no. I like harshing on lawyers as much as the next scientist, but actually reading the news story suggests something much more reasonable. The judge on the appeals court was not, it seems, throwing out Bayes's theorem, but rather refusing to be cowed by Bayes's theorem when the base rates and the likelihoods appearing in it are wild-ass guesses. To quote the news story Mason links to: "And so he decided that Bayes' theorem shouldn't again be used unless the underlying statistics are "firm"." This is, of course, the completely correct attitude; otherwise, the Bayesian posterior is simply without any evidential value whatsoever, and the difference between an expert stating "I'm, like, really sure" and "My posterior probability is 0.99" lies entirely in the latter's spurious precision.

Sadly, in this case fitting crappy power laws to the works of Gene Stanley and Laszlo Barabasi is not an_intentional_ joke.

"Bayesian models of human learning are becoming increasingly popular in cognitive science. We argue that their purported confirmation largely relies on a methodology that depends on premises that are inconsistent with the claim that people are Bayesian about learning and inference. Bayesian models in cognitive science derive their appeal from their normative claim that the modeled inference is in some sense rational. Standard accounts of the rationality of Bayesian inference imply predictions that an agent selects the option that maximizes the posterior expected utility. Experimental confirmation of the models, however, has been claimed because of groups of agents that “probability match” the posterior. Probability matching only constitutes support for the Bayesian claim if additional unobvious and untested (but testable) assumptions are invoked. The alternative strategy of weakening the underlying notion of rationality no longer distinguishes the Bayesian model uniquely."

Would it be wrong to put this up in the office, across from the student chair?  (Yes, probably, but oh so tempting.)

"Let the flowers be forgotten/ Sprinkle coal dust on my grave/ In remembrance of the UMWA"

Someone's digitizing the photos from my grandfather's book!

"Obviously, this data I’ve cited is perhaps open to some criticisms or alternate interpretations. But Flanagan doesn’t dispute it, doesn’t cite alternate data, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of discussing social trends in terms of evidence rather than assertion."

In which the combined police forces of Europe spend years chasing a female serial killer known only from DNA evidence, only to find that it's all down to contaminated cotton swabs from a single supplier!

Teaching note for data mining: This should make a great example of the importance of getting the data right, before worrying about the statistical processing...

"we analyze a comprehensive data set of protein-protein and transcriptional regulatory interaction networks in yeast, an E. coli metabolic network, and gene activity profiles for different metabolic states in both organisms. We show that in all cases the networks have a heavy-tailed distribution, but most of them present significant differences from a power-law model according to a stringent statistical test. Those few data sets that have a statistically significant fit with a power-law model follow other distributions equally well. Thus, while our analysis supports that both global connectivity interaction networks and activity distributions are heavy-tailed, they are not generally described by any specific distribution model, leaving space for further inferences on generative models."

Watching MYL debunking tendentious appropriations of neuroscience _again_, the phrase "One must imagine Liberman happy" comes to mind...

!!! Should I start making CSSR question its purpose in life?

Warning: it turns out that his case study for his approach is the development of the incest taboo, and he's pretty free in quoting the clinical literature about how exactly the taboo gets broken. This actually has considerable redeeming intellectual value, but is still not for the squeamish and/or victimized.

Begun fall 2004, submitted to this journal at the end of 2007, finally appearing 2009.

Described by Uncle Judea as "A new survey paper, gently summarizing everything I know about causation (in only 43 pages)".

"One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor - splat!"

Having read the papers and re-implemented the method, I now concur with Mark: this is an methodological EPIC FAIL.

File under: people who do not grasp the meaning of the term "controlled experiment". See also: "ecological fallacy", "massive confounding".

Update: I gave in: http://bactra.org/weblog/592.html

A profoundly - and characteristically - stupid cover story from Wired. (And I say this as someone who _works_ on nonparametric model discovery.)

Frank Miller fails a test. (I liked _Ronin_, when I read it as a teenager, but otherwise, eh.)

Surprisingly, she does not mention Achilles.

Cell phones; "One needs to have a valid description of the system under consideration before any reasonable statistics can be calculated."

Jensen does everything except actually provide a single substantive reason for accepting his proposal.

Blogged: http://bactra.org/weblog/561.html

The secret of my success, such as it is.

"So the stereotype was of creepy horny drunk carnivorous beggars covered in human ash, accompanied by hott chick acolytes, carrying around someone's skull, asking you for money. I think they used to squat in Tompkins Square Park."

On Richard Mellon Scaife's divorce. (I live in Shadyside and go by those houses every day. I guessed the "welcome home" sign was for coming back from the vet's!)