Research on Student Evaluations

Lillian MacNell and two co-authors from North Carolina University have discovered evidence of gender bias in student evaluations of professors. 

The study tested the effect of perceived gender on student evaluations by having the same professor self-identify as different genders for different sections of the same course taught online.

In a separate study, Michele Pellizzari, of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, found that professors who are better teachers actually receive lower student evaluations (presumably because they challenge their students in ways that students find difficult or unpleasant). The exception is that highly skilled students evaluate better teachers more highly (presumably because they appreciate being challenged in a way that promotes their learning).

Are Economists' Research Findings Biased by Political Ideology?

A new paper examines whether the political ideology of economists influences their findings. 

The authors of the paper have summarized their findings in a popular article on the website Five Thirty Eight entitled "Economists Aren't as Nonpartisan as We Think".

However, I concur with economist Noah Smith, who disagrees that the data show that economists are partisan. Smith argues that the effect size of ideological bias on research findings that was discovered by the researchers is surprisingly small, even though the result is statistically significant.

Now, it is common to confuse the issue of effect size with that of statistical significance, but presumably the authors of the study understand very well the difference between these two concepts. The most likely explanation for the way they are framing their findings is that this is what the journals and Five Thirty Eight want to hear. But who knows?

How Can Scandinavian Countries Tax So Much?

How can Scandinavian countries tax so much, and yet still have such high income per capita and other favorable economic and social outcomes?

Henrik Jacobsen Kleven explains, in a recent article from the peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Perspectives. Here are his three main conclusions:

First, the Scandinavian tax systems have very wide coverage of third-party information reporting and more generally, well developed information trails that ensure a low level of tax evasion. Second, broad tax bases in these countries further encourage low levels of tax avoidance and contribute to modest elasticities of taxable income with respect to the marginal tax rate. Third, the subsidization or public provision of goods that are complementary to working—including child care, elderly care, transportation, and education—encourages a high level of labor supply.

Why Was Agriculture Invented?

Economist Andrea Matinga argues that agriculture was invented (seven different times) because of a large increase in climatic seasonality.

Matinga also attempts to explain some current cultural and political differences in terms of the history of agriculture and climate.

Is this what E. O. Wilson meant by sociobiology? Or something to that effect (social sciences / natural sciences crossover / interface).

The benefits of pre-testing

Science writer Benedict Carey makes the case for testing students before they are taught new material in a class as well as after.

Catnip for human ears?

Vice Motherboard reports on audiophiles obsessed with tuning instruments to 432 Hz, instead of the standard 440 Hz. They claim that tuning to 432 brings with it immeasurable aesthetic and spiritual benefits; some within the movement have even blamed tuning to 440 on the Nazis.

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin isn't buying it:

“We can fix pitches anywhere we want,” Levitin writes, “because what defines music is a set of pitch relations. The specific frequencies for notes may be arbitrary, but the distance from one frequency to the next—and hence from one note to the next in our musical system [the intervals we discussed earlier]—isn’t at all arbitrary.”

UC San Diego cognitive psychologist Diana Deutsch suggests simply resolving the dispute with a controlled experiment--but laments that there is no funding for such at this time.

Either way, it's a fascinating story, well told by Chris Hampton for Motherboard.

The psychology of pronouns

Psychologist James Pennebaker studies the psychology of word choice. Among other things, he has discovered that lower status people use the word 'I' more when talking to higher status people. Pennebaker illustrates this with an email that he wrote to a high-status professor before making this discovery:

Dear Famous Professor: 

The reason I'm writing is that I'm helping to put together a conference on [a particular topic]. I have been contacting a large group of people and many have specifically asked if you were attending. I would absolutely love it if you could come... I really hope you can make it. 

Jamie Pennebaker

 And here is the professor's reply:

Dear Jamie - 

Good to hear from you. Congratulations on the conference. The idea of a reunion is a nice one ... and the conference idea will provide us with a semiformal way of catching up with one another's current research.... Isn't there any way to get the university to dig up a few thousand dollars to defray travel expenses for the conference? 

With all best regards,

Famous Professor 

Rising income inequality

Income inequality has increased in the United States since the recession:

"The most striking finding is that the median American family earned 5 per cent less in 2013 than in 2010 after inflation even though the average American family took home 4 per cent more."

That was from Matthew C. Klein, who blogs at the Financial Times, in response to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2013.

Klein further comments: "The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that only people in the top tenth of the income distribution experienced any real income gains since 2010."

The labor market seems to be increasingly divided between those with the most valued skills and everyone else (including, ahem, academics with 9 or more years of higher education under their belt...). (Note that this data is about income inequality, not wealth inequality, which is a separate issue.)

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Social Mobility Is Slower than Previously Thought

Gregory Clark, an economist at UC Davis, discusses the evidence that, while members of both the upper and the lower class tend to revert to the mean over time, social mobility is slower than previously thought: regression to the mean can take 10 to 15 generations (or 300 to 450 years).

Russia and Ukraine

According to Akos Lada, a PhD candidate in political economy and government at Harvard, nations are more likely to go to war when they are culturally similar.

Claims about meditation

According to this story in SF Gate, meditation (or "quiet time" as they are calling it) in Bay Area schools has been improving student performance and discipline. 

Your cat is a jerk, because science

According to the Huffington Post, anyway.

College athletes who can't read

Investigative journalism on NCAA athletes and the universities who fail them by admitting students not ready for college and systematically cheating or covering up for their academic problems. Not a shock, but surely a disgrace.

New evidence about materialism (the non-metaphysical variety)

Materialism is correlated with and may cause anxiety and depression.

A Vintage of Canaan

Archaeologists announced a discovery of an ancient wine cellar which stored vast quantities of Canaanite wine:

A chemical analysis of residues left in the three-foot-tall jars detected organic traces of acids that are common components of all wine, as well as ingredients popular in ancient winemaking. These included honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins used as a preservative. The recipe was similar to medicinal wines used for 2,000 years in ancient Egypt and probably tasted something like retsina or other resinous Greek wines today.

"Grit" Predicts Success More Than I.Q.

A summary of the research on motivation in student success by psychologist Angela Duckworth.

Among other findings, Duckworth's 12-point "Grit" self-test predicts the success of cadets at West Point better than the battery of measures developed by West Point for just that purpose.

Critique of Barbara Frederickson's Happiness Research

Debunking Barbara Fredrickson's happiness research: it's a maths problem. Fredrickson collected the wrong kind of data to use with her co-author Losada's differential equations, and Losada's math is gibberish, according to a new paper by Brown, Sokal, and Friedman. (Hat tip to Marginal Revolution; Will Wilkinson blogs the story.)

Links

1. Interview with Clive James on his ill health, estranged marriage, and recent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (conceived in part as an amatory missive to his estranged wife, a Dante scholar).

2. Copyright makes books and music disappear.

3. Understanding evil: interviewing Japanese war criminals.

Links

1. Sports pundits perform worse than a coin flip, and the more successful one's are more confident without being more correct in their predictions. 

2. The Soviet-era commercials of Harry Egipt. 

3. The Norwegian slow-tv movement, as exemplified by a world-record breaking 30 hour continuous interview with crime novelist Hans Olav Lahlum.

4. Join Wall Street to save the world?

5. "Yukio Ohyama has devoted his entire life to photographing Mt. Fuji."

6. The art of book-stacking in Japanese book stores.

7. Ask the Past: advice from old books.

8. New York Times review of Joss Whedon's adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"; filmed on a shoestring, it is allegedly a superior effort to Whedon's blockbuster "The Avengers". 

9. Excel spreadsheet artist.

10. The NSA and CIA have been running tests using Watson to sift through the massive reams of communications data which they have been secretly collecting.

11. Erotic goat sculpture from Pompeii.

12. The new field of behavioral epigenetics; it may be possible to inherit traits acquired by one's parents during their life.

Links

1. The effect of soil on sub-Saharan African agriculture and development.

2. What happens when you resubmit previously published journal articles to peer-reviewed psychology journals?

3. Are we breeding the nutrition out of food?

4. Teens' use of social media. 

5. Pictures of Finland from World War II.

6. In praise of New Zealand's health care system.