Mick Bransfield

GOP Primary Candidates’ Polls, Probabilities, and PACs (from June 30th)

Elections / / , , , ,

This is a (very late) campaign finance article looking at the 2024 GOP Presidential candidates, and how their spending is correlated with their standing in the polls and probability of winning. In the aftermath of McCain-Feingold, Citizens United, Speechnow, and Wisconsin Right to Life, candidates for President cannot hope to be competitive without relying on […]

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The Experts Versus Gamblers in 1944

Elections / / , ,

As the 1944 presidential election approached, predictions differed between the political pundits who prognosticated and the bookmakers who took bets on the presidential election.  The former, who were seen as experts in politics, were forecasting a neck-and-neck race between incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, while the bookies

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LK-99: The Dream Will Never Die

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Continuing the last article’s theme of ‘too good to be true,’ we now turn our attention to LK-99. LK-99 is a compound that researchers in South Korea claimed could serve as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Superconductors are materials that, when cooled to a “critical temperature,” conduct electricity without energy loss.  The most common use of

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What exactly happened when Francis Galton went to the livestock show?

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Nearly every lecture, article, book, discussion, and PowerPoint presentation about the “Wisdom of Crowds” contains the story of Sir Francis Galton and the weight-judging contest at a country fair, if not mentioning it at the very beginning.  There are two problems with the account of ‘Galton at the country fair.’ First, the story rings false

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