I’ve redesigned the right sidebar to use a bunch of buttons from Steal These Buttons (converted to PNGs). For now, the buttons I created that aren’t available from that site are available in a ZIP file here in PNG and GIF formats.

Jonathan Foreman writes on the New York Post op-ed page about some serious problems in the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). If it’s accurate—and the legion of “state-versus-defense” pissing match stories we’ve heard over the past two months that amounted to nothing and Foreman’s inability to correctly name the agency suggests it may not be—it’s a very troubling situation, one that Andrew Sullivan and others are right to be concerned about.

And if the eight-pointed star that Foreman is complaining about turns out to be the logo in the upper-left corner of this page, which is part of the Great Seal of the United States, I’ll be even less impressed with his account.

The Imperialist Dog is the rare specimen that enjoyed his experience in research methods:

Of course, the vast majority of undergraduates hated the class and panned it (disclosure: I liked it and got an A-). They are apparently happy being spoonfed and unable to analyze data for themselves. Given the tendency to take the easiest possible path, the department will probably make the class an elective at some point, then abolish it entirely.

Everyone doesn’t need to know how to do multiple linear regression, but a knowledge of what terms mean (sampling, confidence interval, etc.) and how data may be manipulated would prevent some of the more egregious deceptions perpetrated by misusers of statistics.

One of the things I bumped into teaching the equivalent course here at the University of Mississippi is that a lot of the students didn’t seem to get the point of the statistical portion of the course (which may have been partially my fault, since it was my first time teaching the course). Understanding why we’d want to test hypotheses and talk about variances is perhaps more important than the actual algebra involved, but I’m not sure you can have a solid understanding of the former without comprehending at least some of the latter. (That’s not to say I know the formulas for most of these things off the top of my head; that’s why we have R and Stata, not to mention Greene and Kennedy.)

I firmly believe nobody should draw any conclusions from survey data unless they fully comprehend what the terms “margin of error” and “confidence interval” mean. Furthermore, anyone who ever uses the results of a “web poll” to decide or justify anything more important than the SportsCenter showcase highlight ought to be publicly executed.

The Atlantic Coast Conference has officially decided to raid the Big East, adding Boston College, Miami, and Syracuse to the mix to create an SEC/Big 12-style “superleague” with a conference title game in football.

What does this mean for college football? It might put some pressure on the Pac-10 and Big Eleven Ten to add enough teams for a conference title game, a potentially problematic proposition for the Pac-10 due to geography and team quality (Boise State? Fresno State? UNLV? San Jose State?), but well within the abilities of the Big Ten (Pitt, Notre Dame, or Virginia Tech). It opens up the field a little for the BCS title game; with the rump Big East essentially demoted to mid-major status in football, no matter what conferences (C-USA, the MAC?) they try to raid in response, they’ll probably lose their automatic bid.

More importantly, it may prompt a more immediate shakeout in the lower end of Division I-A as the mid-majors react to the new alignment; new eligibility rules for I-A schools were likely to force some serious realignments in 2004 (principally in the Sunbelt and the 16-team MAC) anyway, but with the Big East probably fragmenting (with the basketball-only schools going their own way and the remaining schools likely to break up C-USA to get back to a reasonable size) there may be a knock-on effect as mid-major conferences like the MAC try to “move up” a notch and bring in up-and-coming programs like Southern Miss and USF. The coming two years should be very interesting both on and off the field.

Now, I’m not one who normally goes out on a limb to defend Paul Krugman. Heck, I’ve called him a snakeoil salesman in this weblog, so I’m hardly the world’s biggest fan. But I also think Eugene Volokh is right to disparage Neal Cavuto’s immature response to a drive-by insult at the end of Tuesday’s Krugman column in The New York Times.

I don’t disagree with Cavuto’s basic point—“Your World,” his daily Fox News show, has a designated commentary segment, and Cavuto’s comments were made during that segment, so he’s not under any obligation to be objective there, just as Krugman’s column’s presence on the op-ed page (and, some might argue, in the Times itself) relieves him of any obligation to be “fair and balanced” in that column. But I think Cavuto could have produced a more mature response. Similarly, I think Donald Luskin’s “Krugman Truth Squad” feature at his weblog and NRO would be far more effective if he limited the name-calling and stuck to the (frequent) instances where Krugman is clearly wrong or is distorting the truth to serve his left-wing agenda.

James Joyner agrees.