The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/signif4.pdf

A paper that I read years ago (via a Cosma Shalizi post on the file drawer problem) and then totally failed to find when I wanted to re-read it.  Up there with the "No Free Lunch Theorem" as being simultaneously blindingly obvious and something that I'd never thought about.

It discusses exactly what the title says.  A highly significant result may be indistinguishable from an insignifcant one, statistically speaking.

Comparisons of the sort, “X is statistically significant but Y is not,” can be misleading.

Curse of the Mistwraith

The Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are some nice moments in this book, the first of lord-knows-how-many in a series, and maybe I'd even recommend it if it told a complete story. And was maybe half as long. But in too many ways it just comes off as a standard fantasy setup with prophecies and wizards and destinies. Maybe the later books will deliver a great payoff but I'm unlikely ever to find out.

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The Attempted Murder of Thurgood Marshall

In late 1946, Thurgood Marshall was an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and finishing the last of an amazing series of trials in Tennessee.  Following race riots in Columbia, in a pre-civil rights court room and with all white juries, Marshall would still win acquittals for 22 black men charged in the aftermath.

The last trial ended in November, with the spectator area atypically empty.  After another acquittal, Marshal and his associates left quickly and quietly, only to be stopped by the police on the way out of town.  Marshall's associates--Looby, Raymond and a white attorney named Weaver--were told to leave town but Marshall was arrested for drunk driving.

The police turned down a dirt road.  "Marshall knew that nothing good ever happened when police cars drove black men down unpaved roads."  But Looby had followed the police instead of leaving town and managed to intercept the police sedan near Duck River; he stopped the car and refused to move.  Frustrated, the police turned around and tried to book Marshall on drunk driving charges.  A judge name Jim Pogue took a look at Marshall, decided it was BS, the smelled his breath and let him go.  Pogue "stated that those offiers had come to the wrong man if they watned to frame Marshall. He said he was the one magistrate in Columbia who had refused to sign warrants for the arrests of Negroes during the February trouble."

By this point Marshall had realized why the courtroom was empty earlier in the day; the usual spectators were unwilling to take another defeat and had instead gathered at Duck River ahead of time for the planned lynching.  This time Marshall and the other attorneys left town secretly, sending another driver in Looby's car as a decoy.  Marshall made it out by the decoy car was in fact stopped and the driver beaten.

Source for this account: Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King.
Alternate version, not contradicting anything above but omitting the dirt road detour and the beating of the decoy driver, is here: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=296