My lovely and talented wife is a statistics graduate student, currently employed as a research assistant to Professor Susan Murphy, of our statistics department over in the next building. Susan's speciality is theoretical statistics as applied to social policy, and as part of that she happens to sit on a National Academy of Sciences panel on ... firearm data. Yes, that panel. (Kris works for her on a completely different project, namely adaptive sequential decision processes.) Actually, I learned Susan was on the panel when, one of the first times I talked with her socially, I asked her if she'd heard of John Lott's infamous survey, which was amusing the blogs at the time. Watching the unfolding of the Lott/Kopel/Reynolds/Levitt/Rosh/Lambert affair with malicious glee is common enough; but there is a special satisfaction to the knowing that it has led Glenn Reynolds to denounce my wife's boss, though not, sadly, by name.
Posted at April 25, 2003 18:10 | permanent link