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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Assessing Spurious Correlations In Big Search Data, Jesse T. Richman, Ryan J. Roberts
Assessing Spurious Correlations In Big Search Data, Jesse T. Richman, Ryan J. Roberts
Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications
Big search data offers the opportunity to identify new and potentially real-time measures and predictors of important political, geographic, social, cultural, economic, and epidemiological phenomena, measures that might serve an important role as leading indicators in forecasts and nowcasts. However, it also presents vast new risks that scientists or the public will identify meaningless and totally spurious ‘relationships’ between variables. This study is the first to quantify that risk in the context of search data. We find that spurious correlations arise at exceptionally high frequencies among probability distributions examined for random variables based upon gamma (1, 1) and Gaussian random …
The Political Economy Of Congressional Patent Policymaking In The Late 20th Century, Jesse T. Richman
The Political Economy Of Congressional Patent Policymaking In The Late 20th Century, Jesse T. Richman
Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications
Beginning in the early 1980s, the U.S. Government reformed the patent law in ways that made patents easier to acquire and defend, but further efforts to expand the rights of patent owners had stalled by the mid-1990s. I use a political economy model to explain these changes in terms of the shifting constituency interests represented by members of the U.S. Congress. As the distribution of patenting became less skewed in the 1980s, more members represented constituencies likely to benefit from inefficient patent policy. But as the distribution of patent holding became more skewed once again in the later 1990s, support …