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A comment on A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers. Parent comment

Re:A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors... by tyingq on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @07:41AM (#13975742)
It's worse than just not knowing statistics. These errors were in a table in one of the published papers. Every single row is calculated wrong.

  > (43.67 - 44.55)/sqrt(18.5^2/43 + 14.3^2/52)
  should be 0.2551872, rounds to 0.26, he put 0.25
  > (68.65 - 66.51)/sqrt(3.67^2/43 + 9.44^2/52)
  should be 1.503114, rounds to 1.5, he put 1.38
  > (184.83 - 178.38)/sqrt(63.7^2/43 + 45.71^2/52)
  should be 0.556064, rounds to 0.56, he put 0.52
source: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/01/25/statistical-heartburn-att...

And that's just basic math, nothing fancy. So, he knows it's bad. I assume it's difficult to get a doctorate at Stanford and then become a professor at Cornell, so there's got to be more to this than him just being stupid.

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Re:A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors... by nonbel on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @12:33PM (#13978063)
There are variants on the t-statistic calculation. I assume these were all checked? Either way this should be mentioned in the methods of the paper, along with the software used... I wonder if they used excel, in that case who knows what may have happened. I've seen excel change numbers/names to dates, and all sorts of wackiness.
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Re:A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors... by throwaway729 on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @10:53AM (#13977039)
> a doctorate at Stanford and then become a professor at Cornell

As an aside, academia is no meritocracy. A lot of what's required to get posts at schools like these amounts to self-promotion and luck (graduating in the right year & from the right lab).

Of course hard work and technical competence is also required, so your point stands.

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Re:A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors... by tyingq on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @11:17AM (#13977287)
Yeah...wasn't saying that path implies genius. It should, though, denote the ability to do basic math, or the common sense to have someone proofread your papers. This is just so odd to me, has me wondering if he's trolling.
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