Sunday, April 21, 2013

my two (dented) cents

J1 introduces me to two non-pubmed type of papers that are making waves, this and this. the first is the pronunciation on austerity drives by the global gurus and the second is the debunking of the first by an upstart post-grad student.

if you ask me, here's what happened with the first paper. there was bias (okay) and they didn't correct for confounding factors (not so good) and they used fishy composite numbers (horrors) AND it was an observational study from which they drew conclusions about causality (gosh).

moral of the story: you could just get away with it.
second moral of the story: ebm stuff applied to social science papers might just work.
heh heh.

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