You don’t tug on Superman’s cape…

December 7th, 2018

…and you don’t mess around with The Joy of Cooking.

Shot: Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University (he runs the “Food and Brand Lab”) published a paper in 2009: “The Joy of Cooking Too Much”.

…Wansink and his frequent collaborator, the New Mexico State University professor Collin R. Payne, had examined the cookbook’s recipes in multiple “Joy” editions, beginning with the 1936 version, and determined that their calorie counts had increased over time by an average of forty-four per cent.

The people currently behind Joy were a little upset by this, and a little skeptical. But they didn’t really get fed up until 2015. They started looking at Wansink’s research and found that some of his claims didn’t quite add up.

Recently, Buzzfeed came into the picture:

Academic standards call for researchers to articulate a hypothesis ahead of time, and then to conduct an experiment that produces data that will either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Lee’s article—which was based on interviews with Cornell Food and Brand Lab employees, and also private e-mails from within the lab, which were obtained through a public-records request—showed that Wansink regularly urged his staff to work the other way around: to manipulate sets of data in order to find patterns (a practice known as “p-hacking”) and then reverse-engineer hypotheses based on those conclusions. “Think of all the different ways you can cut the data,” he wrote to a researcher, in an e-mail from 2013; for other studies, he pressed his staff to “squeeze some blood out of this rock.” One of Wansink’s lab assistants told Lee, in regard to data from a weight-loss study she had been assigned to analyze, “He was trying to make the paper say something that wasn’t true.”

Here’s the Buzzfeed article.

And here’s chaser #1: Wansink’s paper has been retracted. Per “Retraction Watch”, this is retraction number 17 for Wansink.

Chaser #2: Wansink has been found guilty of academic misconduct, and has “resigned” effective June 2019.

In a statement, the university told BuzzFeed News that Wansink was found to have “committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.”

Posted in Books, Food | No Comments »

TMQ Watch watch.

December 5th, 2018

We are seeing unconfirmed rumors that the Weekly Standard is shutting down, or will be shutting down very soon (after December 14th).

It isn’t clear if this is just the print magazine, or both the magazine and the website. It also isn’t clear what this will mean for me, Al Franken “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”.

Losing his column in the middle of an NFL season wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented for Easterbrook, but (as far as we are aware) this would be the first time it has happened because the publication shut down.

We plan to keep a weather eye on the situation, and will be checking Easterbrook’s Twitter feed for updates.

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TMQ Watch: December 4, 2018.

December 4th, 2018

If we had thought ahead (and hadn’t been putting out fires all day long) we would have scheduled this week’s TMQ Watch to post at 4:20 PM.

Why? After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cars, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | No Comments »

Y’all say what?

December 4th, 2018

Fred Hoiberg out as head coach of the Chicago Bulls. Since Chicago still has two newspapers, here’s the Sun Times story.

And the Carolina Panthers fired two defensive assistants (defensive line coach Brady Hoke and assistant secondary coach Jeff Imamura).

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 3, 2018.

December 3rd, 2018

Ken Berry, noted television actor. (“Mama’s Family”, “Mayberry R.F.D.”, “Dr. Kildare”, and he did a bunch of work on “Fantasy Island”, among his other credits.)

Yeah, I was going to put up the “F Troop” opening credits, but you know what? The paper of record beat me to it.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Firings watch.

December 3rd, 2018

Mike McCarthy out as head coach of the Green Bay Packers.

The Pack is not exactly noted for random coach shuffles, but McCarthy was 4-7-1 this season, lost to Arizona on Sunday, and Green Bay is pretty much out of the playoffs for the second season in a row.

McCarthy is 125-77-2 overall in 13 seasons, 10-8 in the playoffs, and has one Super Bowl win (and three NFC Championship losses) to his credit.

I don’t think he’s a bad coach, and someone’s going to be lucky to get him. But it does seem like it just wasn’t working out in Green Bay.

Terry Bowden done as coach of the University of Akron Zips. 35-52 overall, 4-8 (2-6 in conference) this season.

Division I football has been a struggle on and off the field for Akron since the Zips moved up to the top tier in 1987. Since then, no Akron head coach has been successful. Gerry Faust only had two winning Division I seasons out of nine with the Zips; Lee Owens had three out of nine; J.D. Brookhart had two winning seasons out of six; Rob Ianello had none in two years and Bowden only had two in seven years.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: December 1, 2018.

December 1st, 2018

George Herbert Walker Bush. NYT. HouChron. WP. LAT. Lawrence. McThag.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits, Politics | No Comments »

Obit watch: November 30, 2018.

November 30th, 2018

Lady Trumpington (Jean Alys Campbell-Harris).

She was a member of the House of Lords from 1980 to 2017, and held various other governmental positions.

But she gets her obit linked here because she was one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

This month, she was among a group of Bletchley Park veterans awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, for their contributions to the liberation of France.
“Oh, I had such fun in Paris after the war,” she said after receiving the medal in a ceremony at her home. “While this award recognized my time at Bletchley, I still find it difficult to discuss my time there, as we were taught to never talk about it.”

…

During her husband’s tenure at the Leys School in Cambridge, Lady Trumpington kept up her society habits. “I smoked and drank and did everything naughty,” she said.
Once, when presenting awards to Leys athletes, she jumped fully clothed into the school’s swimming pool, followed by the students. “My husband was furious,” she said.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits | No Comments »

TMQ Watch: November 27, 2018.

November 29th, 2018

NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.

Why?

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Obit watch: November 28, 2018.

November 28th, 2018

For the historical record: Stephen Hillenburg, creator of “SpongeBob SquarePants”.

Jeeez. 57 is way too young. Also, ALS stinks.

Posted in Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: November 27, 2018.

November 27th, 2018

For the historical record, because I really have nothing to say about the man: Bernardo Bertolucci.

Posted in Movies, Obits | No Comments »

Ricky Jay.

November 25th, 2018

He was a personal hero of mine, but I never met him or even saw him perform. Somehow, it seems like he never came through Austin. (A friend of mine told me a great story about seeing him live: I hope that person will post that story on their own blog.)

I’ve said before that my three favorite magicians are Penn, Teller, and Ricky Jay. But I admired Jay as a magic historian as well.

NYT. The legendary New Yorker profile.

It is the Daileys’ impression—a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula—that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as “an incunable romantic.”
“Probably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally—or should the word be ‘bibliographically’? Anyway, he’d be overextended,” William Dailey has said. “The first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He’s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book’s emergence. He’s not just interested in the book’s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.”

I don’t know what else I can say, except that the world is a smaller, colder, and less interesting place today.

Posted in Books, Magic, Movies, Obits | No Comments »

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