Incentivizing Peer Reviewers
It really annoys me! I review papers for scholarly journals and, if I agree to undertake the task, have never taken more than six weeks to get the job done. But sometimes my own papers are held by scholarly journals for a year, as the journal waits on reviews by one or more delinquent reviewers. Read More »
Score a Point for Seth Roberts and the Shangri-La Diet
Earlier this week, we linked to a news article about a medical study finding that rats gained about the same amount of weight (80 grams, versus 72 grams on average) when they ate saccharine sweetened yogurt as when they ate yogurt sweetened with glucose. In both cases, the rats ate the yogurt in addition to Read More »
Is the U.S. High School Graduation Rate Worse Than We Thought?
That’s the assertion made by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine in a new working paper called “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” Here is their abstract: This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important Read More »
Mozilla Gets Freaky
For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in Read More »
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