Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If one would expect the authors to have built their Noise (a.k.a. variance) thesis using research and references which attended to the cautions and caveats of the American Statistical Association (2016) regarding p-values and the now deprecated "statistical significance," one will be most disappointed. One should not be surprised as many of the references illustrating their thesis are in some cases a half-century old, when "statistical significance" was the key to getting published and the core of degree-earning dissertations. Consider that the following studies listed in the Notes to the Introduction all used p-values: (2) Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care (4) Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication In Chapter 1: (14) A Survey(!!!) of 47 Judges (dated 1977) (Survey vs. Random Control Study) (16) Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions cites a p-value <.0001 on page 5 ... and similar p-value references associated with judges' differential and variance in sentencing: related to food breaks, nearby NFL Team winning recently, birthdays, outside air temperature. IMHO, the identification of these explanatory factors based on p-values are bogus and illustrative of John Ioannidis' 2005 paper: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. It is disconcerting that these scholar authors utilize many questionable references to architect a thesis about what is more commonly known as variance. As the normal Gaussian distribution is ubiquitous, one should not be startled that selected ranges within it vary significantly. Given the presence of uncertainty and the idiosyncracy and variability of individual experience, human judgments will vary. Human judgment is noisy! DUH !!! The authors have failed their scholarship and profession.