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One way of evaluating individual scientists is the determination of the number of highly cited publications, where the threshold is given by a large reference set. It is shown that this indicator behaves in a counterintuitive way, leading…
The existence of "Hot Hands" and "Streaks" in sports and gambling is hotly debated, but there is no uncertainty about the recent batting-average of the New York Times: it is now two-for-two in mangling and misunderstanding elementary…
Many writers have observed that default logics appear to contain the "lottery paradox" of probability theory. This arises when a default "proof by contradiction" lets us conclude that a typical X is not a Y where Y is an unusual subclass of…
We present a formal measure of argument strength, which combines the ideas that conclusions of strong arguments are (i) highly probable and (ii) their uncertainty is relatively precise. Likewise, arguments are weak when their conclusion…
We review the well known Bertrand paradoxes, and we first maintain that they do not point to any probabilistic inconsistency, but rather to the risks incurred with a careless use of the locution "at random". We claim then that these…
The Brier score is frequently used by meteorologists to measure the skill of binary probabilistic forecasts. We show, however, that in simple idealised cases it gives counterintuitive results. We advocate the use of an alternative measure…
Predicting X from Twitter is a popular fad within the Twitter research subculture. It seems both appealing and relatively easy. Among such kind of studies, electoral prediction is maybe the most attractive, and at this moment there is a…
In narrative synthesis of evidence, it can be the case that the only quantitative measures available concerning the efficacy of an intervention is the direction of the effect, i.e. whether it is positive or negative. In such situations, the…
Multiple-choice tests are a common approach for assessing candidates' comprehension skills. Standard multiple-choice reading comprehension exams require candidates to select the correct answer option from a discrete set based on a question…
The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be…
Incidence Calculus and Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence are both theories to describe agents' degrees of belief in propositions, thus being appropriate to represent uncertainty in reasoning systems. This paper presents a straightforward…
Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not…
Sarcasm can be defined as saying or writing the opposite of what one truly wants to express, usually to insult, irritate, or amuse someone. Because of the obscure nature of sarcasm in textual data, detecting it is difficult and of great…
Likelihood ratio tests are intuitively appealing. Nevertheless, a number of examples are known in which they perform very poorly. The present paper discusses a large class of situations in which this is the case, and analyzes just how…
I think we can agree that dealing with uncertainty is not easy. Probability is the main tool for dealing with uncertainty, and we know there are many probability-related puzzles and paradoxes. Here I describe a rather idiosyncratic…
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using ``simple and objective'' methods is increasingly prevalent today. The ``simple and…
An individual's variation in writing style is often a function of both social and personal attributes. While structured social variation has been extensively studied, e.g., gender based variation, far less is known about how to characterize…
(To appear in The American Statistician.) Distance covariance (Sz\'ekely, Rizzo, and Bakirov, 2007) is a fascinating recent notion, which is popular as a test for dependence of any type between random variables $X$ and $Y$. This approach…
The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but…
Texts exhibit considerable stylistic variation. This paper reports an experiment where a corpus of documents (N= 75 000) is analyzed using various simple stylistic metrics. A subset (n = 1000) of the corpus has been previously assessed to…