Behavior that I have trouble explaining ...

... or, when bad things happen to good people, at Madison and at Princeton.

Assorted links

1. Nick Gillespie at reason on Alec Baldwin's latest scandal.

2. P.J. O'Rourke on space.

3. The story of one of Hitler's food tasters.

4. David Warsh on Charles Manski's new book (among other things).

5. Kaleidescope

Canada Day

In honor of Canada Day, which is today for those readers who do not attend to such important matters, a bit of fun from the Onion.

More than marginally entertaining ...

A list of euphemisms, drawn from the published literature, for results that do not obtain statistical significance at conventional levels.

Of course, it makes little sense to set up an arbitrary, binary cutoff level for the p-value, but that is, sadly, the world that we live in as we await the casual bayesian revolution.

Hat tip: Jianlin Wang

TAA evaluation released

The evaluation of the Trade Adjustment Act that I posted about before has finally been released. You can find it on DOL ETA's web page.

The evaluation was performed by Mathematica Policy Research on behalf of the US Department of Labor. I would say (and I might be biased as I provided some comments at various points) that the authors have done the best they could with the available data and variation. We could, of course, have better data and variation if we really wanted to.

Star Trek humor

Assorted links

1. Could it be worse? Well, yes.

2. Deconstructing Georgetown Mall in Ann Arbor.

3. I Dream of Jeannie (and so does Bill Clinton).

4. David Warsh spanks Paul Krugman

5. Steve Martin as the Great Flydini

Hat tip on #1 to Dan Black and on #5 to Jackie Smith