Editing 2323: Modeling Study

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The caption opens like a typical statement in favor of modeling studies, "A mathematical model is a powerful tool for taking hard problems," but while a researcher who works with models might go on to say "...and breaking them down," or "...and studying them in ways that would be impractical for empirical studies," Randall concludes that they can't actually make hard problems any easier.  His title text, "You've got questions, we've got assumptions," plays on the slogan of the now-defunct electronics chain Radio Shack of "You've got questions, we've got answers" by pointing out that any answers provided are built on assumptions by the modelers.  In other words, {{w|garbage in, garbage out}}.
 
The caption opens like a typical statement in favor of modeling studies, "A mathematical model is a powerful tool for taking hard problems," but while a researcher who works with models might go on to say "...and breaking them down," or "...and studying them in ways that would be impractical for empirical studies," Randall concludes that they can't actually make hard problems any easier.  His title text, "You've got questions, we've got assumptions," plays on the slogan of the now-defunct electronics chain Radio Shack of "You've got questions, we've got answers" by pointing out that any answers provided are built on assumptions by the modelers.  In other words, {{w|garbage in, garbage out}}.
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Randall doesn't call this a [[:Category:Tips|"tip"]], but it does fit in with his [[:Category:Science tip|science tip]] in [[2311: Confidence Interval]], namely, that "If your model is bad enough, the confidence intervals will fall outside the printable area."  Much as that tip suggests that a model's results can be made to look more impressive by hiding the error bounds outside the printed area of a graph, this comic strip suggests that acknowledgments of problems can be moved to less-trafficked parts of the paper by switching from empirical to modeling studies.
 
  
 
==Transcript==
 
==Transcript==

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