You couldn’t make up this extract from a student’s essay a friend just sent me: If the state allows one to free to earn more money he will do so regardless of others positions in society as human nature has a constant demand for more. This will inevitably lead to the notion of luxury goods,…
The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does…
This is a true gem of interdisciplinary research: A recent article in the British Medical Journal demonstrates that the crisis may have toppled major banks and halved the value of your assets, but did not stop these silly little buggers from happily swallowing coins at a constant rate.
Without doubt, late December is exactly the right time for reflection and (re-)assessment. Looking back on the last months, I had too many conference dinners, not nearly enough conference beers/chats, and definitively too many conference papers to read. Amongst these, the prize for the most original political science graph (along with the price for the…
I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact…
As a light-hearted follow-up to my post on the growth of the database state in the UK, here is a link to boing-boings [caption id="" align="alignright" width="426" caption="Well done, junior!"][/caption] “remix the British Transport Police’s paranoid turn-in your neighbour posters” campaign. Most of the pictures sent in are really good, and many of them look…
Some answers given by students in written exams are so brilliant that you couldn’t make it up: Germany and Austria were not content with this and were still at war with each other
He can explain to a lay public why a spade in knife-crime is not totally unlikely and does not necessarily indicate an increase in the murder rate
Slightly anxious researchers that suffer from correlated disturbances shuffle into that shop and ask for the massive 18 centimetre sandwich estimator.
Today, the BBC has a rather amusing piece by Larry Sabato (Virginia) on the “The US election nightmare scenario”: an equal split of the “toss-up” state leads to deadlock in the Electoral College. Enter the unit rule, a constitutional provision which stipulates that the House will select the President in a vote where each state…