With Obama now in office the rest of the country may be about ready to move on from the 2008 election, but political scientists are of course still finding plenty to write about. Neil Malhotra and Erik Snowberg recently circulated a working paper in which they use data from political prediction markets in 2008 to examine two key questions about presidential primaries: whether primaries constrain politicians from appealing to the middle of the electorate and whether states with early primaries play a disproportionately large role in...

Like many of us, I'm always on the lookout for good examples to use in undergraduate methods courses. My high school chemistry teacher (a former nun) said that the best teaching examples involved sex, food, or money, and that seems like reasonable advice for statistics as well. In that vein, I noted a recent article on the "Axe effect" in Metro:

'Axe effect' really works, a new study swears

Researchers in the U.K. asked women to rate the attractiveness of men wearing Axe's British counterpart, Lynx, against those who were wearing an odorless placebo.

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