Kieran Healy

Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin from the outside. It ain’t pretty.

Freaky

I was browsing in the campus bookshop over lunch and saw the UK/Australia edition of Freakonomics for sale—this is the recently released revised and expanded version. Looking to see what had changed, I was surprised and gratified to see that the new version incorporates much of Steven Levitt’s response to our seminar on the first […]

More Cartwright

Following on from Omar’s post about Nancy Cartwright’s The Dappled World, I will abuse my right to post here to point to this review of the book by Laurie Paul. Paul is a very intelligent philosopher (her unwise decision to marry me was an uncharacteristic lapse), and her review gives a good sense of the […]

Nameless Horror

Via the common-as-dirt PZ Myers comes this site, which alleges it will tell you how many people in the U.S. share a name with you. The results are not encouraging.

HowManyOfMe.comThere are:
0

people with my name
in the U.S.A.
How many have your name?

Now, I am in Australia at the moment, so technically this result might be true and […]

Floating the Fraud Balloon

Daniel wrote a piece for the Guardian’s blog saying that critics who wanted to reject the findings of Burnham et al.’s Lancet paper and believe the Iraq Body Count estimate (or similar-sized numbers) were going to have to come out and claim that the paper was fraudulent, “and presumably to accept the legal consequences of […]

More Burnham et al.

Here are some comments from Andrew Gelman on the Burnham et al. paper. People who’d like (or ought) to learn more about statistics could do worse than read Gelman and Nolan’s terrific Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am awaiting the publication of Gelman and Hill’s Data […]