Dear Sir,
In compliance with your request, I will now give you a history, as full in detail as the limits of the letter will permit, of the late awful visitation of Providence in this place and vicinity.
On the 16th of December, 1811, about two o'clock, A.M., we were visited by a violent...
2014 Winter Olympics: Home Court Advantage – Russia
-- Winston Churchill, radio address in 1939
A couple of weeks ago, Graph of the Week published an article describing the significant improvement in medals won by the host...
2012 Summer Olympics: Home Court Advantage – How Will the Brits Perform?
The Olympics are a big deal on a global scale. How big? Perhaps Paula Radcliffe (an English long distance runner) said it best: "I have achieved a lot and I'm grateful for that - I'm just a bit greedy because I want to add the Olympics. It's...
Health Care Costs – Part 3, "Why You Are Paying More"
Malpractice - A Booming Industry? Perhaps authors Frank Sloan, Randall Bovbjerg and Penny Githens capture it best from their book Insuring Medical Malpractice: "If aging Doctor Kildare were to return to medical practice today, having been...
Health Care Costs – Part 2, "Unhealthy Things Not Related to the Problem"
Lighting Up Way back in the day, folks believed that smoking was not only cool but also completely safe. As Marcel Danesi states in his book Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, Second Edition: An Introduction to Semiotics ...
Health Care Costs – Part 1, "The Problem"
The Problem In the United States, health care costs have been going up for a number of years, even when adjusted for inflation. Not unlike a runaway freight train, this rampant inflation cannot continue indefinitely without crashing. ...
Body Weight in the United States – Part 3, "Contributing Factors"
Carbs In Part 2 of this series, micro-nutrients were cited as a non-factor for weight gain. This is not the case with macro-nutrients (carbohydrates, fats, proteins, water). While fats, proteins and water are essential (without them you could no...
Body Weight in the United States – Part 2, "Non Factors"
Sometimes the story isn't what is a trend, but rather what is not a trend. In this second installment about body weight in the U.S., listing what doesn't seem to be contributing factors will help narrow down what might actually be the p...
Body Weight in the United States – Part 1, "The Problem"
Global Fires, the Amazon and Humans
Fires are natural - most of the time (click on image for larger view). Natural Global Fires Many plants and animals have evolved to depend on fires periodically occurring in certain parts of the world. This phenomenon has been occurring for...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
