Ethics and the wrong answer

Incentivising sustainable living: the wrong answer to the right question?

Tenotomy and congenital nystagmus: a failure to answer the wrong question

Two companion papers used wavelet and dynamical systems analyses in an attempt to show that the new four-muscle tenotomy surgical procedure had little or no effect on either the ‘‘waveform structure’’ or the ‘‘underlying mechanism’’ of congenital nystagmus (CN). (Miura, Hertle, FitzGibbon, & Optican, 2003a; Miura, Hertle, FitzGibbon, & Optican, 2003b) We believe these papers (Parts I and II) as...

Alphas, betas and skewy distributions: two ways of getting the wrong answer

Although many parametric statistical tests are considered to be robust, as recently shown in Methodologist's Corner, it still pays to be circumspect about the assumptions underlying statistical tests. In this paper I show that robustness mainly refers to α, the type-I error. If the underlying distribution of data is ignored there can be a major penalty in terms of the β, the type-II error, repr...

The Right Answer to the Wrong Question: Identifying Superior Active Portfolio Management

The debate over the value of active portfolio management has often centered on whether the average active manager is capable of producing returns that exceed expectations. We argue that a more useful way to frame this issue is to focus on identifying those managers who are the most likely to generate superior risk-adjusted returns (i.e., alpha) in the future. Using a style-classified sample of ...

The right answer for the wrong question: consequences of type III error for public health research.

OBJECTIVES This study examined the impact of assessing the causes of interindividual variation within a population when the research question of interest is about causes of differences between populations or time periods. This discrepancy between the research focus and the research question is referred to as a type III error, one that provides the right answer for the wrong question. METHODS ...