http://www.rasmusen.org/x Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:39:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My cumulative ecclesiology page, a list of questions and, at some point, discussion and answers in the style of Aquinas's Summa, is here. I will add the post below to it. Should books be sold in a church? Should there be commercial advertising in a church bulletin? Should money ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2008/07/21/ecclesiology-questions/ I am unhappy with Wordpress for various reasons, so I'm trying out Google's Blogger. For a while I will be posting at http://www.rasmusen.org/t instead. http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/29/trying-out-googles-blogger/ In doing statistics, when should we weight different observations differently? Suppose I have 10 independent observations of $x$ and I want to estimate the population mean, $\mu$. Why should I use the unweighted sample mean rather than weighting the first observation .91 and each of the rest by .01? Either way, I ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/28/weighted-least-squares-and-why-more-data-is-better/ http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/27/converging-cables/ Jerusalem Post via National Review Two weeks after Israel's alleged bombing raid in Syria, which some foreign reports said targeted North Korean nuclear material, the UN's nuclear watchdog elected Syria as deputy chairman of its General Conference on Monday. http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/26/who-most-wants-to-be-elected-policeman/ The Frequentist view of probability is that a coin with a 50% probability of heads will turn up heads 50% of the time. http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/25/bayesian-vs-frequentist-statistical-theory/ Page 96 of David Cox's 2006 Principles of Statistical Inference has a very nice one-sentence summary of asymptotic theory: [A]pproximations are derived on the basis that the amount of information is large, errors of estimation are small, nonlinear relations are locally linear and a ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/24/asymptotics-2/ You scored as Evangelical Presbyterian, You're an Evangelical Presbyterian, probably a member of a PCA church. Sound theology and reverent worship are important to you, but so are outreach and ministry to the community. You are likely to be from the deep South, and perhaps at one time you were ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/22/an-online-quiz/ I received a rejection letter recently that puzzles me. My co- authors and I don't really see how the criticisms below apply to our paper, apart from the single spacing and not citing any articles from that journal. We would welcome any comments. Don't worry about ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/21/a-rejection-letter/ Peggy Noonan's "Now He Tells Us: If only they'd listened to Greenspan! And they might have, if only he'd spoken clearly" is good on how the former Fed chairman has saved his criticism of pork barrel spending for his book rather than making it when it might have actually stopped ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/21/greenspan-criticizes-bush-for-money-but-not-for-duty/ Has anyone pointed out that large landfills full of plastic bottles and disposable diapers are a solution to global warming? http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/20/throwing-away-plastic-bottles-as-a-solution-to-global-warming/ . The Northern Rock bank run is interesting (background below from a newspape account). I'll make three points: 1. Stupidly low deposit insurance limits caused a rational run, 2. The government should have made Northern Rock pay for the free full deposit guarantee it ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/19/the-northern-rock-bank-run/ Someone asked me about the past few years' papers on exclusive dealing, so I did some thinking. I'll lay it out in my own way. Suppose we have 100 buyers, each with 1% of the market, one upstream incumbent seller who charges the monopoly ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/18/exclusive-dealing-and-foreclosure/ "Intelligence in the Classroom: Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them" by Charles Murray in the WSJ, is a good article. The subtitle says it all. In designing a school system, we need to think about children's potential, not ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/17/every-child-reaching-his-potential-a-realistic-but-limited-goal/ p>Three Hierarchies makes the nice point that if you look closely, the Bible does not say that God directly created animals and plants, just that He created the earth, and that spontaneous generation-- as opposed to God having created all living things directly--- was long accepted by Christians ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/16/spontaneouse-generation-and-evolution/ http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/15/a-good-cartoon/ Baylor University is clearly infringing on academic freedom when it tries to shut down Professor Robert Marks's pro-intelligent-design website, located here with the disclaimers the professor put on in response to Baylor's complaints that people might think Baylor officially approved of his research. I wish there ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/14/the-robert-marks-academic-freedom-case-at-baylor/ I learned something this morning. When you're trying to estimate the impact of a two-valued X on some two-valued Y with Y=1 being a rare event, you can get an unbiased estimate of the relative risk, Pr(Y=1|X=1)/Pr(Y=1|X=0), even if your sample is biased because you oversampled mainly ... http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/13/the-odds-ratio-in-biased-sample-case-control-studies/ http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/11/a-cartoon/ The London School of Economics has a great idea: a computerized seminar sign-up list. You choose the seminars that interest you, and get email notifications. http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/09/10/lses-computerized-seminar-sign-up-list/