Sandbox
Virginia election
VA changes vote count rules while counting (YouTube video)
The Rachel Maddow Show, 11 November 2013
The Virginia Attorney General contest this fall exceeding close. Democrat Mark Herring led Republican Mark D. Obenshain by 165 votes out of some 2.2 million. Even more amazing than just the numbers, is that the discussion seemed to turn on the (mis)interpretation of a Venn diagram! Starting around 14:50 mark in the video you will hear that for Fairfax County--which is heavily Democratic-- and only for Fairfax County, the State Board of Elections suddenly said that provisional ballots should be counted only if the voter and their representative are present whereas in all previous elections, the interpretation by Fairfax County officials was that provisional ballots would be counted if either the voter or their representative is present.
Followup
Herring wins Virginia attorney general race, elections board announces
by Laura Vozzella, Washington Post, 25 November 2013
In the weeks since the election, the lead has swung back and forth between the two candidates, as election officials sorted throught various re-tallies and certification processes. We read, "The most significant discovery came in Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest jurisdiction, where officials discovered nearly 2,000 uncounted ballots on a single optical-scan voting machine...In a typical year, these additions and subtractions don’t affect the outcome. This year, the contest for attorney general was so close that the normal process of fixing errors and counting provisional ballots caused the results tally to narrow dramatically in an already close race."
[Obenshain concedes Virginia attorney general’s race to Herring]
by Laura Vozzella and Ben Pershing, Washington Post, 18 December 2013
Submitted by Paul Alper
Nuts and death
Association of nut consumption with total and cause-specific mortality
by Ying Bao, M.D., et al, New England Journal of Medicine, 369:2001-2011, 21 November, 2013
Submitted by Paul Alper
Trouble at the lab
Economist, 19 Oct 2013
The subtitle of this article announces, "Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not."
Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility
by Erika Check Hayden, Nature News, 11 November 2013