Use this page to scan recent stories from Columbia, see the themes that keep appearing, and jump into complete story briefs.
Sometimes left-wing writers use the term “reactionary centrist,” and it always irritates me. Someone’s a centrist, but you’re calling him a “reactionary” just because he doesn’t agree with you on every issue? I get it that people on the left … Continue reading →
Mal Graham writes: I read your blog and thought my small side project might be of interest. I’m aiming to transparently quantify academic bureaucracy, so universities can be better compared. It’s ironic that the solution to academic bureaucracy is to … Continue reading →
We were just here–pretty unusual to see a museum exposition devoted to a census, can’t get much more up my alley than that! It was good. The above photo gives a sense of the charm of the exhibits, and they … Continue reading →
Think about it like this: a survey organization uses a method M to get data D to give population estimates E which are used by clients to make actions A. The method M is crucial in determining data D, which … Continue reading →
OK, here’s a causal inference problem for ya: Blake Lively Says She Suffered $64 Million Financial Fallout From Justin Baldoni Conflict . . . In Lively’s memorandum in opposition to Wayfarer Studios’ motion in limine filed April 17, her expert … Continue reading →
Happy Fat Bear Week to all who celebrate. In 2024 I made a cartoon called Basu’s Bears, adapted from Basu’s (1971) elephants example, a lesson on the use of auxiliary information in survey statistics. For Fat Bear Week 2025, I … Continue reading →
It’s time for another one of Bob’s favorite sort of post, which is when I use simulation to demonstrate a statistical principle. 1. Flogging a dead horse The issue in question came up the other day in comments to my … Continue reading →
Tyler Watts and Drew Bailey write: Educational policy is often viewed as a field of fads, where one follows another for seemingly arbitrary reasons. We might like to believe that fad-based policy could be superseded by evidence-based policy, with rational … Continue reading →
This post is from Bob In case anyone else was wondering what happened to today’s blog post, there isn’t one scheduled (yet, anyway). There are hundreds of posts queued up, with the next one scheduled to appear tomorrow morning in … Continue reading →
Paul Alper points us to this from New York Times columnist David Brooks: As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to … Continue reading →
Every year, in the Center for Computational Mathematics at Flatiron Institute, we hire 7 to 10 postdocs to keep up our steady state of roughly 20 postdocs (more and more of them are leaving after 1–2 years to go to … Continue reading →
I was reading the London Review of Books and came across this article by Jameel Jaffer stating that, in 1952, Congress overrode the presidential veto and passed the McCarran-Walter Act with a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate. The … Continue reading →
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