Scientific studies tend to follow the same logical structure. Introduction, theory, method, results, discussion, conclusion. Easy-peasy. Sometimes the sections have other names or are merged together, e.g., “Discussion and concluding remarks”, and for the less serious journals (such as PNAS), they save the methodology for the footnote-size section at the end of the paper. I […]
Category: blog
The many causes of Brexit
In 2018, I wrote a critical blog post about a study that examined whether welfare reforms caused Brexit. The study, now published in American Economic Review, concludes “that the EU referendum could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for austerity”. (It is by the same researcher who tried to make people […]
Assorted links #16
451. SQL style guide / SQL Style Guide 452. Statistical Analysis of the Elo Rating System in Chess 453. The Behavioral Economics Guide 2022 454. WINDOWS93 455. Digital vs. Practical Shots in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD 456. Write plain text files 457. The Aggregate Confusion Project 458. Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a […]
Podcast recommendations
I don’t really care about what podcasts people find interesting. That is somewhat interesting as I ask people about their favourite movies, books, restaurants, travel destinations, 90s sit-com, academic papers, paintings, Twitter users, etc. all the time. There is just something about podcasts that I do not care about. If anything, I enjoy talking more […]
How to improve your figures #10: Do not use word clouds
In a previous post, I argued that people should not use pie charts. In this post I am going to make a similar case for word clouds. In short, I will argue that word clouds provide ‘foggy’ insights (pun intended). Specifically, I will discuss a word cloud that got a lot of attention in the […]