# Predicting Elections

Jacob Eisenstein at MIT has developed an smart election predictor for the US Senate Elections using a Kalman Filter. The filter helps to decide how much extra weight to attach to more recent polls. Check it out here; he also has some details on the method here.

# More thoughts on publication bias and p-values

Amy Perfors

In a previous post about the Gerber & Malhotra paper about publication bias in political science, I rather optimistically opined that the findings -- that there were more significant results than would be predicted by chance, and that many of those were suspiciously close to 0.05 -- were probably not deeply worrisome, at least for those fields in which experimenters could vary the number of subjects run based on the significance level achieved thus far.

# Applied Statistics - Nan Laird & Christoph Lang

This week the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by Nan Laird, Professor of Biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health, and Christoph Lang, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health.

# America by the Numbers

Take a closer look here. Cute, isn't it?

Posted by Jens Hainmueller at October 29, 2006 3:14 PM

Newcomb’s paradox is a classic problem in philosophy and also an entertaining puzzle to consider. Here is one version of the paradox. Suppose you are presented with two boxes, A and B. You are allowed to take just box A, just box B, or both A and B. There will always be $1000 in box A, and there will either be$0 or \$1,000,000 in box B.

# Unconscious Bias & Expert Witnesses

Jim Greiner

Quantitative expert witnesses are essential to modern litigation. But why do they disagree so often?

An excerpt from an article by Professor Franklin Fisher appears below. It’s a tad long, but it’s really worth reading. Does it ring a familiar bell with anyone out there?

# Procrastination

Here’s an interesting piece that should help you keep your New Semester resolutions by understanding procrastination better. Sendhil Mullainathan recently used research by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch as motivation for his undergraduate psychology and economics class. Though it’s not exactly statistics, it seems the insights could be useful for grad students and their advisors.