andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-22 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote: I [Je
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. [sent-1, score-0.078]
2 Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. [sent-2, score-0.154]
3 This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. [sent-7, score-0.146]
4 But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. [sent-8, score-0.395]
5 It is tempting to rush to broad thematic generalizations about a work or an author, but how can you answer a big question about what something means if you can’t parse the meanings of the words in one enigmatic sentence? [sent-11, score-0.688]
6 This reminded me of the statistical saying that God is in every leaf of every tree . [sent-13, score-0.078]
7 I wonder how many of Jenny’s colleagues in the English and Comparative Literature department agree with her on this. [sent-14, score-0.185]
8 When it comes to statistics, I’ve heard theoreticians opine that applied statistics is just the routine application of existing principles. [sent-15, score-0.499]
9 And, of course, those who have this view tend to do their applied statistics in this way, thus confirming their view that this is all that applied statistics is. [sent-16, score-0.87]
10 Going deeper, though, I think the real issue is not how someone does applied statistics, but rather the idea of a continuity between one’s different research endeavors. [sent-17, score-0.246]
11 There is a connection between my work in probability theory, my work in theoretical statistics, my work in methods, in computation, in various applications, my teaching, and my consulting. [sent-18, score-0.375]
12 This all sounds natural–maybe inevitable–but it’s not always so. [sent-19, score-0.074]
13 I’ve known some statistics professors who have done complicated theoretical research and then use simple methods for consulting. [sent-20, score-0.24]
14 When teaching, they sometimes swing between extreme mathematical rigor (not always appropriate in applied work, given the shakiness of the assumptions in practice) and simple advice (listen to your client, think hard about selection bias, etc. [sent-21, score-0.312]
15 I wonder how this plays out for literature professors. [sent-24, score-0.247]
16 My impression is that there are continuous connections between Jenny’s teaching, research, and popular writing, but maybe it doesn’t work that way for everybody in that field. [sent-25, score-0.098]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('jenny', 0.441), ('teaching', 0.205), ('applied', 0.16), ('statistics', 0.159), ('comparative', 0.157), ('prose', 0.15), ('literature', 0.141), ('english', 0.107), ('wonder', 0.106), ('sentence', 0.102), ('work', 0.098), ('entertained', 0.095), ('parse', 0.095), ('richardson', 0.095), ('students', 0.095), ('enigmatic', 0.09), ('opine', 0.09), ('thematic', 0.09), ('theoreticians', 0.09), ('continuity', 0.086), ('humanities', 0.086), ('history', 0.086), ('dense', 0.083), ('humanity', 0.083), ('meanings', 0.083), ('theoretical', 0.081), ('client', 0.08), ('confirming', 0.08), ('excitement', 0.08), ('rush', 0.08), ('colleagues', 0.079), ('tempting', 0.078), ('inspiring', 0.078), ('leaf', 0.078), ('outstanding', 0.078), ('recipients', 0.078), ('rigor', 0.078), ('sentiments', 0.078), ('davidson', 0.077), ('view', 0.076), ('carbon', 0.075), ('instructor', 0.075), ('ranks', 0.075), ('always', 0.074), ('generalizations', 0.074), ('domains', 0.072), ('inevitable', 0.072), ('leadership', 0.072), ('listen', 0.072), ('enterprise', 0.07)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
Introduction: For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote: I [Je
2 0.19659162 34 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Non-academic writings on literature
Introduction: Jenny writes : The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else? I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess , Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton , etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
3 0.17974575 1517 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-01-“On Inspiring Students and Being Human”
Introduction: Rachel Schutt (the author of the Taxonomy of Confusion) has a blog! for the course she’s teaching at Columbia, “Introduction to Data Science.” It sounds like a great course—I wish I could take it! Her latest post is “On Inspiring Students and Being Human”: Of course one hopes as a teacher that one will inspire students . . . But what I actually mean by “inspiring students” is that you are inspiring me; you are students who inspire: “inspiring students”. This is one of the happy unintended consequences of this course so far for me. She then gives examples of some of the students in her class and some of their interesting ideas: Phillip is a PhD student in the sociology department . . . He’s in the process of developing his thesis topic around some of the themes we’ve been discussing in this class, such as the emerging data science community. Arvi works at the College Board and is a part time student . . . He analyzes user-level data of students who have signed up f
4 0.1647957 115 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-Whassup with those crappy thrillers?
Introduction: I was stunned this from Jenny Davidson about mystery writers: The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group – i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie – being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman – the list speaks for itself) . . . Why was I stunned? Because just a few days earlier I had a look at a book by Robert Crais. It just happened that Phil, when he was visiting, had finished this book (which he described as “pretty good”) and left it with me so he wouldn’t have to take it back with him. I’d never heard of Crais, but it had pretty amazing blurbs on the cover and Phil recommended it, so I took a look. It was bad. From page 1 it was bad. It was like a bad cop show. I could see the seams where the sentences were stitched together. I could see how somebody might like this sort of book, but I certainly can’t understand the blurbs or the i
5 0.14711639 831 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-30-A Wikipedia riddle!
Introduction: I was distinguished for over three years and now am renowned. For most of the past year and a half, though, I was neither. Who am I? First person who guesses the right answer in comments gets a free copy of Jenny Davidson’s book, “Breeding”–as soon as she sends it to me, as she promised a couple years ago! You’ll get an extra prize if you can express the answer in an indirect way, without using the person’s name or being too obvious about it but making the identification clear enough that I know you know the answer. P.S. Reading Wikipedia edits . . . that’s a new low in time-wasting!
6 0.14636001 498 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-02-Theoretical vs applied statistics
7 0.14212258 1582 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-18-How to teach methods we don’t like?
8 0.14085922 723 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-21-Literary blurb translation guide
9 0.1395309 361 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-21-Tenure-track statistics job at Teachers College, here at Columbia!
10 0.13659678 1977 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-11-Debutante Hill
12 0.12743182 1611 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-07-Feedback on my Bayesian Data Analysis class at Columbia
13 0.12598532 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
14 0.12579238 2151 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-27-Should statistics have a Nobel prize?
15 0.12175985 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
16 0.11999781 1864 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-20-Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course
18 0.11270896 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
19 0.11137281 1752 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-06-Online Education and Jazz
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.237), (1, -0.058), (2, -0.1), (3, 0.011), (4, -0.012), (5, 0.129), (6, -0.002), (7, 0.127), (8, -0.01), (9, 0.028), (10, 0.014), (11, 0.016), (12, 0.006), (13, -0.037), (14, -0.001), (15, -0.054), (16, -0.057), (17, 0.014), (18, -0.017), (19, -0.047), (20, 0.011), (21, -0.051), (22, -0.04), (23, 0.044), (24, -0.006), (25, 0.046), (26, 0.038), (27, 0.024), (28, -0.052), (29, 0.004), (30, 0.066), (31, 0.05), (32, -0.051), (33, -0.041), (34, -0.039), (35, -0.024), (36, -0.002), (37, 0.0), (38, -0.058), (39, -0.047), (40, -0.007), (41, -0.045), (42, 0.02), (43, -0.024), (44, 0.018), (45, -0.039), (46, -0.01), (47, 0.03), (48, 0.027), (49, 0.037)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97963357 22 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Jenny Davidson wins Mark Van Doren Award, also some reflections on the continuity of work within literary criticism or statistics
Introduction: For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote: I [Je
2 0.86671859 1864 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-20-Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course
Introduction: Frontiers of Science is a course offered as part of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. The course is controversial, with some people praising its overview of several areas of science, and others feeling that a more traditional set of introductory science courses would do the job better. Last month, the faculty in charge of the course wrote the following public letter : The United States is in the midst of a debate over the value of a traditional college education. Why enroll in a place like Columbia College when you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000 or learn everything from Massive Open Online Courses? In more parochial terms, what is the value added by approaches such as Columbia’s Core Curriculum? Recently students in our Core Course, Frontiers of Science (FoS), provided a partial answer. The FoS faculty designed a survey to gauge the scientific skills and knowledge of the Class of 2016 both before and after taking FoS. In an assembly held during orientati
Introduction: Columbia College has for many years had a Core Curriculum, in which students read classics such as Plato (in translation) etc. A few years ago they created a Science core course. There was always some confusion about this idea: On one hand, how much would college freshmen really learn about science by reading the classic writings of Galileo, Laplace, Darwin, Einstein, etc.? And they certainly wouldn’t get much out by puzzling over the latest issues of Nature, Cell, and Physical Review Letters. On the other hand, what’s the point of having them read Dawkins, Gould, or even Brian Greene? These sorts of popularizations give you a sense of modern science (even to the extent of conveying some of the debates in these fields), but reading them might not give the same intellectual engagement that you’d get from wrestling with the Bible or Shakespeare. I have a different idea. What about structuring the entire course around computer programming and simulation? Start with a few weeks t
Introduction: One of the most satisfying experiences for an academic is when someone asks a question that you’ve already answered. This happened in the comments today. Daniel Gotthardt wrote : So for applied stat courses like for sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and maybe also for economics, what do we actually want to accomplish with our intro courses? And how would it help to include Bayesian Statistics in them? And I was like, hey! This reminds me of a paper I published a few years ago, “Teaching Bayesian applied statistics to graduate students in political science, sociology, public health, education, economics, . . .” Here it is , and it begins as follows: I was trying to draw Bert and Ernie the other day, and it was really difficult. I had pictures of them right next to me, but my drawings were just incredibly crude, more “linguistic” than “visual” in the sense that I was portraying key aspects of Bert and Ernie but in pictures that didn’t look anything like t
5 0.82106709 236 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-26-Teaching yourself mathematics
Introduction: Some thoughts from Mark Palko: Of all the subjects a student is likely to encounter after elementary school, mathematics is by far the easiest to teach yourself. . . . What is it that makes math teachers so expendable? . . . At some point all disciplines require the transition from passive to active and that transition can be challenging. In courses like high school history and science, the emphasis on passively acquiring knowledge (yes, I realize that students write essays in history classes and apply formulas in science classes but that represents a relatively small portion of their time and, more importantly, the work those students do is fundamentally different from the day-to-day work done by historians and scientists). By comparison, junior high students playing in an orchestra, writing short stories or solving math problems are almost entirely focused on processes and those processes are essentially the same as those engaged in by professional musicians, writers and mat
7 0.79134816 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
8 0.78188336 1173 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-17-Sports examples in class
9 0.77517056 644 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-03-The saber saw, the ashtray, and other stories of misbehaving profs
10 0.76565742 1056 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-13-Drawing to Learn in Science
11 0.76352447 498 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-02-Theoretical vs applied statistics
12 0.7615574 34 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Non-academic writings on literature
13 0.75762814 749 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-06-“Sampling: Design and Analysis”: a course for political science graduate students
15 0.75592178 2151 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-27-Should statistics have a Nobel prize?
16 0.75228447 1135 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-22-Advice on do-it-yourself stats education?
18 0.74359566 1616 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-10-John McAfee is a Heinlein hero
19 0.74213803 1068 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-18-Faculty who don’t like teaching and hate working with students
20 0.73536962 1517 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-01-“On Inspiring Students and Being Human”
topicId topicWeight
[(1, 0.013), (9, 0.016), (15, 0.052), (16, 0.061), (21, 0.02), (22, 0.01), (24, 0.175), (43, 0.083), (45, 0.018), (53, 0.016), (55, 0.011), (59, 0.046), (72, 0.025), (82, 0.011), (86, 0.015), (99, 0.304)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
Introduction: Matt Taibbi writes : Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness . . . Hidden among the reams of material recently filed in connection with the lawsuit of monoline insurer MBIA against Bank of America and Countrywide is a deposition of none other than Columbia University’s Glenn Hubbard. . . . Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting. That’s interesting, because I worked on the other side of this case! I was hired by MBIA’s lawyers. It wouldn’t be polite of me to reveal my consulting rate, and I never actually got depose
same-blog 2 0.97490817 22 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Jenny Davidson wins Mark Van Doren Award, also some reflections on the continuity of work within literary criticism or statistics
Introduction: For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote: I [Je
3 0.97265482 1860 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-17-How can statisticians help psychologists do their research better?
Introduction: I received two emails yesterday on related topics. First, Stephen Olivier pointed me to this post by Daniel Lakens, who wrote the following open call to statisticians: You would think that if you are passionate about statistics, then you want to help people to calculate them correctly in any way you can. . . . you’d think some statisticians would be interested in helping a poor mathematically challenged psychologist out by offering some practical advice. I’m the right person to ask this question, since I actually have written a lot of material that helps psychologists (and others) with their data analysis. But there clearly are communication difficulties, in that my work and that of other statisticians hasn’t reached Lakens. Sometimes the contributions of statisticians are made indirectly. For example, I wrote Bayesian Data Analysis, and then Kruschke wrote Doing Bayesian Data Analysis. Our statistics book made it possible for Kruschke to write his excellent book for psycholo
4 0.97058415 2330 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-12-Historical Arc of Universities
Introduction: This post is by David K. Park Even though I’m an engineer with a PhD in political science, I tend to gravitate toward history to anchor my contextual lens. (If fact, if I were pressed to put a methodological stake in the ground, I would say I’m a historical comparative institutional ecologist.) In that regard, it may be helpful to situate this discussion within the broader historical arc of intellectual pursuits at universities. As we know with the birth of universities, we had scholars who embodied so many disciplines such as mathematics, philosophy, religion law, etc into one individual. Then in the 50′s and 60′s we started going into hyper-specialization mode, and it was necessary because we needed to better understand our specific domains. In the 80s and 90s, certain disciplines started to recognize the importance of other disciplines on their work but the tendency was to bring those skills into a single individual. So we produced, by way of e.g., law professors who could do ga
5 0.96815437 1920 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-30-“Non-statistical” statistics tools
Introduction: Ulrich Atz writes: I regard myself fairly familiar with modern “big data” tools and models such as random forests, SVM etc. However, HyperCube is something I haven’t come across yet (met the marketing guy last week) and they advertise it as “disruptive”, “unique”, “best performing data analysis tool available”. Have you seen it in action? Perhaps performing in any data science style competition? On a side note, they claim it is “non-statistical” which I find absurd. A marketing ploy, but sounds like physics without math. Hence, my question: Do you think there is such a thing as a (1) non-statistical data analysis and (2) non-statistical data set? Here’s what’s on the webpage: The technology is non-statistical, meaning it does not take a sample and use algorithms in order to validate a hypothesis. Instead, it takes input from a large volume of data and outputs the results from the data alone. This means that all the available data is taken into account. I’m not
6 0.96767282 1253 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-08-Technology speedup graph
7 0.96674269 481 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-22-The Jumpstart financial literacy survey and the different purposes of tests
8 0.96304262 1347 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-27-Macromuddle
9 0.95917177 1882 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-03-The statistical properties of smart chains (and referral chains more generally)
10 0.95843303 2013 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-08-What we need here is some peer review for statistical graphics
11 0.95782292 247 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-01-How does Bayes do it?
12 0.95767903 511 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-11-One more time on that ESP study: The problem of overestimates and the shrinkage solution
13 0.95748985 2244 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-11-What if I were to stop publishing in journals?
14 0.95728379 770 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-15-Still more Mr. P in public health
15 0.95723832 2208 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-12-How to think about “identifiability” in Bayesian inference?
16 0.95550138 392 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-03-Taleb + 3.5 years
17 0.95409352 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
18 0.95397365 902 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-12-The importance of style in academic writing
19 0.95391834 970 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-24-Bell Labs
20 0.95356166 427 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-23-Bayesian adaptive methods for clinical trials