Fracking back in the news

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf says research will address “the concern that there is a relationship between hydraulic fracturing and childhood cancers.”

In my stats class on Thursday students were upset that they couldn't ever "accept" the null hypothesis: it seems to them that one should either reject the null hypothesis or accept it. Well, here's one reason why not: as the article says, “The fact that there is no known environmental factor associated with the development of Ewing Sarcoma does not mean there is no environmental factor in the development of Ewing Sarcoma,” Dr. Ketyer said. “It just hasn’t been studied. The cancer is very rare.” Just because we don't find evidence doesn't mean that the truth is elsewhere!

In other news, natural gas is showing a lot less promise than it did as little as a few years ago. For one thing, it has proven to be really cheap, and for another, renewables are proving cheaper still. 

Update, January 2020: "produced water" from fracking is often radioactive, and workers dealing with it are often ill-protected, according to this Rolling Stone exposé.

Value of a Statistical dog's life

While this may seem whimsical, creepy, or just nuts, actually this is useful: if a hypothetical policy saves 100 dogs' lives, how much should we be willing to pay for that policy? This paper says that the answer is easy: about $10,000 per dog. Now to find a way to include this in my class in the spring.... :)