>Average annual hours worked is defined as the total number of hours actually worked per year divided by the average number of people in employment per year. Actual hours worked include regular work hours of full-time, part-time and part-year workers, paid and unpaid overtime, hours worked in additional jobs, and exclude time not worked because of public holidays, annual paid leave, own illness, injury and temporary disability, maternity leave, parental leave, schooling or training, slack work for technical or economic reasons, strike or labour dispute, bad weather, compensation leave and other reasons
If the statistical significance of your results is algorithm-dependent, shouldn't they be regarded as suspect? Perhaps it might be just a failure of imagination on my part, but I find it odd to think that changing a software package might budge estimates far enough to push them outside the zone of statistical significance unless they were only marginally significant in the first place.
I could imagine algorithmic differences adding bias in error margins. Both versions might be accurate approximations of the answer, but one might lean towards one end of the error space and one might lean towards the other.
It's like when fixing a bug in library code breaks application code. Usually it's because there was some undefined behavior in the library - which wasn't part of the contract - which the application (knowingly or unknowingly) relied upon, and then the updated version produces a different undefined behavior.
> If the statistical significance of your results is algorithm-dependent, shouldn't they be regarded as suspect?
It's a fair question.
Here's a possible recipe to get such variations in estimates: (1) an estimator that does not really match the distribution of the dependent variable; (2) small sample sizes with insufficiently well-handled influential observations; (3) (robust) standard error corrections leading to disproportionate confidence intervals; and (4) limited work on diagnostics, which is another way to make all of the previous points.
The points above can be used to 'take down' many papers published in journals like the one in which the incident happened, but you can also take a more charitable view and rescue most of those papers by claiming, for instance, that statistical significance should not govern (and even less govern alone) over the identification of the data generation process.
My conclusion is therefore: yes, algorithmic variation makes those results suspect, but on a single dimension that should probably not stand as the most important one in assessing those results in the first place.
>Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used . . . since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence.
I don't know what is the context of this quote, but this sounds like a deep misrepresentation of Popper's position. As far as I know, he explicitly addresses the issue of ad hoc and auxiliary hypotheses. Unless this is part of a bigger point about some the "fine-tuning" of theories i.e. just how much the main proposition can be off the mark given the additional hypotheses.
I'd say that lambs are more associated with docility than with peace, and it's a very fair association to anyone who has ever had any contact with sheep. Animal symbolism seems to have much more to do with animal traits, animal behavior or supposed animal behavior (e.g. strength with bulls, courage with lions and altruism with the pelican) than anything else and I see no reason to break that pattern. Furthermore, if it were the case that the reverence of some animals were due to degree is which they are useful, compared to the degree to which they are removed from preferred human ecological niches, then the most revered animals on the earth should probably have been fish.
Supposing there's a 1955 Cadillac Series 62 Coupe in the middle of Antartica, which most likely there isn't, it didn't fall there from space.
I have no particular stakes on this discussion besides this one, I just dropped by to say this: I don't see any problem with the construction of that statement. At least as an informal or "folk" logic argument.
