Viewing profile — pacbard

Usually, a crushed soda can is good enough to prevent the kickstand to sync in the pavement. You can usually find a can in a random parking lot. That, or find a strip of concrete. …

My first reaction is that it depends on who you read. The linked article talks about Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of education. While I haven't read much into 19th-century Ger…

This fits a need I had when working with DuckDB: running statistical analyses directly within the database without having to spin up external tools (like R/Stata/Python). I really …

The figure-8 central design makes this roundabout not a real roundabout. The challenge is that the entry and exit points are at the tightest part of the curve, making ingress and e…

It seems to be a textbook example of the Simpson's paradox.

This seems to be a problem with the Stata code. Disappointing but not really surprising. Stata isn't an easy language to debug and problems like this happen a lot. I wonder how muc…

Regarding public comments, I don't believe a good politician will make a snap decision at the dais following public comments. Most of them will have received the meeting agenda in …

The ironic part about these hallucinations is that a research paper includes a literature review because the goal of the research is to be in dialogue with prior work, to show a ga…

When you think about a data science pipeline, you really have three separate steps: [Data Preparation] --> [Data Analysis] --> [Result Preparation] Neither Python or R does a good …

I set up something similar at work. But it was before the DuckLake format was available, so it just uses manually generated Parquet files saved to a bucket and a light DuckDB catal…

Because applying for a visa takes money, time, and a visit to the embassy. ESTA/ETIAS gets automatically approved within a few minutes of paying for the fee (I guess this is true f…

The hunter-gatherers in the study lived in the "Late Holocene (~4000 to 250 BP)", meaning between 2000 BCE to 1825 CE. These people are separated from us by less than 150 generatio…

Without knowing what happened, it's difficult to make the comparison between the Italian Years of Lead and what happened earlier today at Utah Valley University. My understanding o…

This was my take as well. At least microeconomics has moved away from large-scale observational studies and has moved into experimental and quasi-experimental studies. While the me…

Not all null results are created equal. There are interesting null results that get published and are well known. For example, Card & Kruger (1994) was a null result paper showing …

Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is mo…

The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that there isn't a change in the population average for variable X, but that the decrease in college students' average X is due t…

Apache Iceberg builds an additional layer on top of Parquet files that let's you do ACID transactions, rollbacks, and schema evolution. A Parquet file is a static file that has the…

What's interesting to me is that these budget cuts are coming at a time when the VA is also trying to implement a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) system (Oracle CERNER) which is…

I'll take the bait. It seems to me that going from "F1 and F2 generations of mice respond differently to the smell of acetophenone if their parents were exposed to it" to "well, hu…

You could assign ELO at the group level. It will increase the number of possible groups by C(N, g) where N is the number of players and g is the group size. It could work if the gr…

My guess is that they had prior experience with asking students not to use cellphones and they observed students start using wearables to skirt the ban, which led them to just ban …

Local mapping is surprisingly difficult. I believe that the commercial products (i.e., Google Maps) are viable only because there are strong incentives for people (e.g., business o…

If you want to take this a step further, quantitative methods are about efficient data reduction. As part of this data reduction, the model’s assumptions and mathematical form take…

No, it's a coding error that lead to a wacky subsample being used for their treatment variable. The blog post list this as the original Stata code: > replace event`i’ = 1 if delta_…