7 May 2009, Evening

Science:
Climate Change Crock: here Climate Change Crock of the week discusses ocean temperatures and the tricks that some climate change denialists use.

Science and Experiments: Sandwalk talks about some bad statistical methods used when discussing the outcome of experiments. One of the common errors is that the null hypothesis is not properly framed.

For those who don’t know statistics: basically, when one wants to determine if something is a factor, one has to declare the “null hypothesis” which means “X isn’t a factor” verses the alternative hypothesis “X is a factor”. The “default assumption” is the null hypothesis (akin to the apriori assumption of innocence at a court trial).

Example, if one was, say, trying to determine if eating Doritos leads to a higher incidence of cancer, the null hypothesis is: “Doritos has no effect on the cancer rate” and the alternative hypothesis would be “Doritos raises one’s cancer rate”. One then compares two groups of people: one doesn’t eat Doritos and one group does (these groups should be more or less equal in other areas to avoid confounding effects; e. g., perhaps smokers are more likely to eat Doritos).

One doesn’t declare that Doritos causes cancer unless the Doritos eating group has a higher cancer rate than the non-Doritos group and this probability of observing this difference just due to randomness is, say, 1 to 5 percent.

But the default assumption is that Doritos has no effect on the cancer rate; that is the null hypothesis.

Cosmology: did the space telescope reveal information about dark matter?

Social/Religious Humor:

Ed Current talks about the “stork theory” of birth and how yucky human sex is.

Via the Legal Satyricon: a potential lawyer (she is waiting for her bar exam results) tells police that she was assaulted while working as a call girl!

Politics
Governors: Nate Silver points out (with data) that it is tough to maintain high approval ratings as governor of a state.

Politics: Republicans

Here is a sarcastic “poe” post on some of the superficial things that the media concentrates on: President Obama’s prayer day celebration and…….yes, the type of mustard that he likes.

Supreme Court Nomination Falsehoods and Misconceptions: be ready to hear these “arguments” from your conservative friends.

James Dobson: Attempts to make hay about of hate crimes legislation. Sure, I admit that I am skeptical of legislation that attempts in any way attach a criminal penalty to attitudes. But Dobson is just bat-*hit crazy here.

Right wing “educational” material: So the right wing accuses us on the left of teaching revisionist history? Check this out.

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