Impossibly Hungry Judges
Here is the refutation being referred to in the article, the article author did a poor job explaining it, and the reason to reject isn't "effect is too large", because the effect is real -- but this study explains it:
<a href="http://journal.sjdm.org/16/16823/jdm16823.html" rel="nofollow">http://journal.sjdm.org/16/16823/jdm16823.html</a><p>1. Prisoners are ordered by whether they have an attorney (so those going last in a session are self-represented)<p>2. Judges order prisoners often by "complexity of the case", so the ones taking most time are first (and therefore most likely to have a favorable decision, a short/easy case is probably a no-parole situation)<p>3. Statistically, the cases that gained parole take longer than those that don't, so even if they are random/normally distributed, then if one falls at the end, it will come back to the beginning of next session. A simulation shows that even with random ordering, you still get the same graph (because the long/complex cases that could be paroled tend to be moved to next session when the session is almost out of time).<p>So after reading this, the graph means:
Ratio of cases with a lawyer that can be finished in the remaining time in the session.<p>Both values are decreasing as the session continues, so it produces a heavy down sloping graph that resets each session to some approximately random value (.65).