Knowing and Making

I read the following quote in an article about the near-crash of a 747 plane in San Francisco: "In the past months, we have had several operational incidents," airline jargon for close calls, W.J. Carter, chief of United's Honolulu-based pilots, wrote in a Feb. 23 internal memo to his flight crews. "Major accidents historically are preceded by a series of these seemingly unrelated incidents. This disturbing trend is cause for concern" I was immediately skeptical, because patterns like this are often not real. The " hot hand " effect - often seen in sports, especially basketball - is a kind of momentum effect, where a player who has scored lots of baskets in the last few minutes is thought to be more likely to score again. It intuitively makes sense that someone could be "on a streak" where they are playing at the peak of their ability - those times when every shot you attempt seems to go in. Equally there could be times when you just keep ...

Via the excellent Simoleon Sense weekly roundup , I find  this link which claims to discover "the single most important question in your life". The research behind it claims to have found that the answers on a single kindergarten test can predict future income, college attendance, quality of college, college graduation (and while they're at it, a close link between college ranking and future wages). I don't have the knowledge to challenge their results and I would not want to suggest that there's anything untoward about this research. But one thing makes me really, really puzzled: the results are too good . Specifically, the regressions show an incredibly close linear fit between rank  (or percentile) in the kindergarten test, and absolute  salary. And a similarly close fit between rank in the test, and percentage chance of going to college. The following image not only shows that unrealistically close linear fit, but they also imply an almost constant  d...

See that "Most believe retirement is over" link on the right? When you click on it, you get the article on the left . Which says that fully 8% of people expect never to retire. I know that the definitions of some words are variable, and subjective, and that reasonable people can disagree even on the meaning of "majority". The US Senate certainly does. But it's rather difficult to stretch the definition of "most" to mean 8% of people .