Of Significance

With the State Supreme Court of California considering the case of Camp v. Home Depot and whether net neutral rounding policies are acceptable when more accurate timekeeping methods are available, Brent, Nathan, and Steve are joined by Ryan Kenney to discuss the potential effects of this ruling on the workforce, whether rounding makes sense today, and the practical significance of this decision.

It’s the data analyst equivalent of Shark Week: it’s (potentially) Bad Study Week for Nathan, Steve, and Brent as they comb through some analyses that made them wonder what constitutes a “study”. Can an NFL anecdote and discussion count as a study? Does playing volleyball really shorten your lifespan? What does replicating previously published studies tell us about those findings? Join the team on this journey because they’ve never meta analysis they didn’t want to talk about!

Nathan and Brent take a look at some of the analyses performed by their co-host Steve Bronars. Are job layoffs less frequent than they were in the 1970s? Are college professors paid too much? Steve calculates, Nathan and Brent evaluate, and you decide!

A year has passed since the Trump Administration’s deployment of troops in DC and other cities in the country with the goal of reducing crime. The Center for American Progress recently released a study looking at this policy and so Brent, Nathan, and Steve looked at this study to see if there’s causation in the correlation and what further robustness checks are needed.

With the nation wondering about the right amount to tax high income earners, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) released a study reviewing millionaire acquisition by New York and other states to estimate how much tax revenue was lost by not being able to maintain the same share of these earners. Steve and Brent break down the methodology and see whether analysis holds water or if the connections are too tenuous.

With more data on hand, Brent and Steve take a second look at the effects of California’s minimum wage changes for limited-service restaurants. They dive deep into the theory, evidence, and consequences of the network of minimum wage policies in the state and try to see what story the data tells and if they’ve been wrong the whole time.

With the explosion of data collection, the growth of artificial intelligence, and accessibility of bad statistics, Nathan, Brent, and Steve thought it was necessary to talk about the future of data literacy with John Johnson, an expert on the ways people use, misuse, and abuse numbers in their every day lives.

Steve, Nathan, and Brent are joined by one of Steve’s co-authors, Carol Ma, to talk about a new solution they have developed for understanding significance within age discrimination contexts as well as the problems of trying to apply statistical tests where the assumptions of the test don’t match the parameters of the real world.

New Federal Reserve data on un- and underemployment raises questions about whether too many people are getting degrees they don’t need for the jobs they can get, so Steve, Nathan, and Brent are here to dig into the data and figure out whether this is a crisis in over-education or if everyone is reading the data wrong.

A new class of lower-cost alternatives to brand name drugs has emerged: biosimilars. With the development of new technology, we have new complications for antitrust litigation and to explore these issues and more Nathan, Steve, and Brent are joined by antitrust expert Catia Twal.