Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Naming things in programming is hard. I can see 2 reasons for this. 1) It is hard to pick a name you won’t want to change later. With large projects, where things are not designed in detail before beginning to write the code, I often find that the names I gave things initially were not…
Continue ReadingConsider the findings from the large UK study I recently blogged (Akarlin blogs it too): Some of these have steep declines. It’s not just an artifact of the FLynn effect, age really has a strong negative effect on cognitive abilities. Consider the rates of dementia and age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10891908 So, by age ≥85 some close to…
Continue Reading(Partial Rnotebook) Last year I convinced Charles Murray to share some of his data underlying his great book Human Accomplishment. He put it on OSF, where it remains available. So far so good. At some later point in 2016, I finally had a closer look at the dataset and made some rudimentary plots based on…
Continue ReadingWhitley, E., Deary, I. J., Ritchie, S. J., Batty, G. D., Kumari, M., & Benzeval, M. (2016). Variations in cognitive abilities across the life course: Cross-sectional evidence from Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study.Intelligence, 59, 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2016.07.001 Background Populations worldwide are aging. Cognitive decline is an important precursor of dementia, illness and death and,…
Continue ReadingI have only been able to find one fairly detailed dataset of immigrant performance in the Netherlands (covered in this study). It found the usual things, but with much uncertainty because the numbers were old (fewer immigrants back then → sampling error), covered a single year only (sampling error) and there was only one kind…
Continue ReadingI was working on a study and while doing so, I updated all my R packages. To my surprise, this changed the results in my analysis to a degree that it caused a change in the conclusion. I suspected it was due to an update in the psych package. The update notes read: Bug fixed…
Continue ReadingThis is just a brief post summarizing some stuff because I don’t have time to do more right now. Noah Carl asks me: Can you point me to some evidence (e.g., a blog post) on “PC-bias” in polling in recent years? It is hard to establish biased polling. One has to: Obtain datasets of polling…
Continue Reading