/dev/mull

Rebeccmeister@lj mentioned this study of cities and relationship between their economic output and their walkability. I've got some interest in urban planning and the study seemed have plausible and well-presented statistics, so I thought I'd dig into it. Which I did, and found that – as expected – the answer isn't as clear-cut as the study's authors would have you believe. So, I was gonna write that up... and it occurred to me that only a handful of my readers could make any sense of what I was writing about, so I wrote a simple introduction to the statistical method the study uses.

The result is kinda long. So, I've broken it up into sections:

( the claims )
( my initial impressions )
( So, what's this regression thing this study relies on? )
( The skeletons in the study's closet )
( What it means (I think) )