Sandbox
Virginia election
The Virginia Attorney General contest this fall exceeding close; at one point in the count, the Democrat led the Republican by 164 votes out of some 2.2 million. Even more amazing than just the numbers, is that the discussion seemed to turn on the (mis)interpretation of a Venn diagram!
The Rachel Maddow show from Novermber 11 segment entitled "VA changes vote count rules while counting." Starting around 14:50 mark you will hear that for Fairfax County--which is heavily Democratic-- and only for Fairfax County, the State Board of Elections suddenly said that provisional ballots should be counted only if the voter and their representative are present whereas in all previous elections, the interpretation by Fairfax County officials was that provisional ballots would be counted if either the voter or their representative is present.
Submitted by Paul Alper
Nuts and death
Association of nut consumption with total and cause-specific mortality
by Ying Bao, M.D., et al, New England Journal of Medicine, 369:2001-2011, 21 November, 2013
Submitted by Paul Alper
Trouble at the lab
Economist, 19 Oct 2013
The subtitle of this article announces, "Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not."
Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility
by Erika Check Hayden, Nature News, 11 November 2013