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Gaurav

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(No) Value Added Models

This note is in response to some of the points raised in the Agnoff Lecture by Ed Haertel. The lecture makes two big points: 1) Teacher effectiveness ratings based on current Value Added Models are ‘unreliable.’ They are actually much worse than just unreliable; see below. 2) Simulated counterfactuals of

(No) Missing daughters of Indian Politicians

Indian politicians get a bad rap. They are thought to be corrupt, inept, and sexist. Here we check whether there is prima facie evidence for sex-selective abortion. According to data on the Indian Government ‘Archive’, 15th Lok Sabha members (csv) had, in all, 696 sons and 666 daughters for a

Impact of selection bias in experiments where people treat each other

Selection biases in the participant pool generally have limited impact on inference. One way to estimate population treatment effect from effects estimated using biased samples is to check if treatment effect varies by ‘kinds of people’, and then weight the treatment effect to population marginals. So far so good. When

A Quick Scan: From Paper to Digital

Additional Note: See this presentation on paper to digital (pdf). There are two ways of converting paper to digital data: ‘human OCR and input,’ and machine-assisted. Here are some useful pointers about the latter. Scanning Since the success of so much of what comes after depends on the quality of

Gandhi And His Critics

Gandhi could never come to terms with the fact that he took leave from his dying father to have sex with his wife; his father died while he copulated. This episode produced a lifelong obsession with overcoming sexual desire and sanitation (or so Freudians will claim). Unrelatedly, Gandhi had unconventional

Capuchin Monkeys and Fairness: I Want At Least As Much As The Other

In a much heralded experiment, we see that a Capuchin monkey rejects a reward (food) for doing a task after seeing another monkey being rewarded with something more appetizing for doing the same task. It has been interpreted as evidence for our ‘instinct for fairness’. But there is more to