The best I have ever seen :)
________________________________
From: Kit Baum <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Sunday, September 20, 2009 7:23:47 AM
Subject: st: Fwd: false positives
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Arthur Lewbel <[email protected]>
> Date: September 19, 2009 9:57:57 AM EDT
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: false positives
>
> Faculty,
>
> I just came across a wonderful illustration of the problem that if you estimate too many parameters, some will be significant just by random chance. This is the link to a poster that was presented at the 15th annual conference of the organization of human brain mapping: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
>
> In this study, the authors put a Salmon in an MRI machine. They showed the fish pictures of human faces, and recorded the responses in thousands of tiny areas within its brain. A small number of statistically significance responses (p value less than .001) were found. What's most amazing is that the fish was dead at the time.
>
> Arthur
>
> =================================================+
> Arthur Lewbel [email protected] http://www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/
> phone: (617)-552-3678 fax: (617)-552-2308
> Dept. of Economics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA
> ==================================================
>
Kit Baum | Boston College Economics & DIW Berlin | http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Stata Programming | http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata | http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
