Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway

Second Thoughts on the Bootstrap

This brief review article is appearing in the issue of Statistical Science that marks the 25th anniversary of the bootstrap. It concerns some of the theoretical and methodological aspects of the bootstrap and how they might influence future work in statistics.

Second Thoughts on Ayurveda

This article takes up a few "riddles" in the theory of Ayurveda and suggests explanations. It also looks into the Mahabhutas in pharmacology and discusses the real causes of diseases starts with. An interesting graphic representation of the six rasas, is also presented.

Second thoughts on development accounting

We estimate the relative roles of factor inputs and productivity in explaining the level of economic development, which is measured as output per worker. For a large sample of countries, we show that alternative identifying productivity assumptions and alternative measures of human capital have a large impact on the relative weights of factor inputs and productivity in a decomposition of output...

Second thoughts on the Jarman index.

Test Automation Snake Oil

Case #5: A program consisting of many hundreds of nearly independent functions is put into service with only rudimentary testing. Just prior to delivery, a large proportion of the functions are deactivated as part of debugging. Almost a year passes before anyone notices that those functions are missing. These are vignettes from my own experience, but I bet they sound familiar. It’s a common com...