andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-92 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil. Hatch … said his idea would help battle drug addiction and could reduce the nation’s debt. He will try to get the Senate to include his amendment to a $140 billion bill extending tax breaks and social programs this week. “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. Something’s gotta be done about this
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7 ” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. [sent-7, score-0.77]
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same-blog 1 1.0 92 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-Drug testing for recipents of NSF and NIH grants?
Introduction: People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil. Hatch … said his idea would help battle drug addiction and could reduce the nation’s debt. He will try to get the Senate to include his amendment to a $140 billion bill extending tax breaks and social programs this week. “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. Something’s gotta be done about this
2 0.11284837 411 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-13-Ethical concerns in medical trials
Introduction: I just read this article on the treatment of medical volunteers, written by doctor and bioethicist Carl Ellliott. As a statistician who has done a small amount of consulting for pharmaceutical companies, I have a slightly different perspective. As a doctor, Elliott focuses on individual patients, whereas, as a statistician, I’ve been trained to focus on the goal of accurately estimate treatment effects. I’ll go through Elliott’s article and give my reactions. Elliott: In Miami, investigative reporters for Bloomberg Markets magazine discovered that a contract research organisation called SFBC International was testing drugs on undocumented immigrants in a rundown motel; since that report, the motel has been demolished for fire and safety violations. . . . SFBC had recently been named one of the best small businesses in America by Forbes magazine. The Holiday Inn testing facility was the largest in North America, and had been operating for nearly ten years before inspecto
3 0.10202143 645 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
Introduction: We all have opinions about the federal budget and how it should be spent. Infrequently, those opinions are informed by some knowledge about where the money actually goes. It turns out that most people don’t have a clue. What about you? Here, take this poll/quiz and then compare your answers to (1) what other people said, in a CNN poll that asked about these same items and (2) compare your answers to the real answers. Quiz is below the fold. The questions below are from a CNN poll. ======== Think about all the money that the federal government spent last year. I’m going to name a few federal programs and for each one, I’d like you to estimate what percentage of the federal government’s budget last year was spent on each of those programs. Medicare — the federal health program for the elderly Medicaid — the federal health program for the poor Social Security Military spending by the Department of Defense Aid to foreign countries for international development
4 0.096370265 196 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The U.S. as welfare state
Introduction: My Columbia colleague Irv Garfinkel recently came out with a book (with coauthors Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding), “Mythbusters: The U.S. Social Welfare State,” where they argue: The United States is a capitalist nation that has eschewed Scandinavian-style socialist policies in favor of capitalism and economic growth, right? Wrong. The U.S. is not only one of the largest welfare states in the world, but it is strong economically precisely because of its adoption of some socialist policies–with public education as the primary driver. The American welfare state faces large challenges. Restoring its historical lead in education is the most important but requires investing large sums in education–beginning with universal pre-school–and in complementary programs–including selected cash benefits for families with children–that aid children’s development. The American health insurance system is by far the most costly in the rich world, yet fails to insure one sixth of its population
5 0.095844984 444 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-02-Rational addiction
Introduction: Ole Rogeberg sends in this: and writes: No idea if this is amusing to non-economists, but I tried my hand at the xtranormal-trend. It’s an attempt to spoof the many standard “incantations” I’ve encountered over the years from economists who don’t want to agree that rational addiction theory lacks justification for some of the claims it makes. More specifically, the claims that the theory can be used to conduct welfare analysis of alternative policies. See here (scroll to Rational Addiction) and here for background.
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same-blog 1 0.94690222 92 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-Drug testing for recipents of NSF and NIH grants?
Introduction: People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil. Hatch … said his idea would help battle drug addiction and could reduce the nation’s debt. He will try to get the Senate to include his amendment to a $140 billion bill extending tax breaks and social programs this week. “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. Something’s gotta be done about this
2 0.81211585 645 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
Introduction: We all have opinions about the federal budget and how it should be spent. Infrequently, those opinions are informed by some knowledge about where the money actually goes. It turns out that most people don’t have a clue. What about you? Here, take this poll/quiz and then compare your answers to (1) what other people said, in a CNN poll that asked about these same items and (2) compare your answers to the real answers. Quiz is below the fold. The questions below are from a CNN poll. ======== Think about all the money that the federal government spent last year. I’m going to name a few federal programs and for each one, I’d like you to estimate what percentage of the federal government’s budget last year was spent on each of those programs. Medicare — the federal health program for the elderly Medicaid — the federal health program for the poor Social Security Military spending by the Department of Defense Aid to foreign countries for international development
3 0.69753391 284 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Continuing efforts to justify false “death panels” claim
Introduction: Brendan Nyhan gives the story . Here’s Sarah Palin’s statement introducing the now-notorious phrase: The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. And now Brendan: Palin’s language suggests that a “death panel” would determine whether individual patients receive care based on their “level of productivity in society.” This was — and remains — false. Denying coverage at a system level for specific treatments or drugs is not equivalent to “decid[ing], based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society.’” Seems like an open-and-shut case to me. The “bureaucrats” (I think Palin is referring to “government employees”) are making decisions based on studies of the drug’s effectiveness: An FDA advisory committee
Introduction: Sandeep Baliga writes : [In a recent study , Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner write:] For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we [Duranton and Turner] find that VKT (vehicle kilometers traveled) increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the fundamental law of highway congestion.’ Provision of public transit also simply leads to the people taking public transport being replaced by drivers on the road. Therefore: These findings suggest that both road capacity expansions and extensions to public transit are not appropriate policies with which to combat traffic congestion. This leaves congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion. To which I reply: Sure, if your goal is to curb traffic congestion . But what sort of goal is that? Thinking like a microeconomist, my policy goal is to increase people’s utility. Sure, traffic congestion is annoying, but there must be some advantages to driving on that crowded road or pe
Introduction: Jeff Lax sends along this good catch from Ben Somberg, who noticed this from Washington Post writer Lori Montgomery: If Congress doesn’t provide additional stimulus spending, economists inside and outside the administration warn that the nation risks a prolonged period of high unemployment or, more frightening, a descent back into recession. But a competing threat — the exploding federal budget deficit — seems to be resonating more powerfully in Congress and among voters. Somberg is skeptical, though, at least of the part about “resonating among voters.” He finds that in four out of five recent polls, people are much more concerned about jobs than about the deficit: A Pew Research / National Journal poll from early June asked “Which of the following national economic issues worries you most?” Number one was “job situation” with 41%. “Federal budget deficit” got 23%. An NBC / Wall Street Journal poll from early May asked “Please tell me which one of these items you thi
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same-blog 1 0.91937792 92 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-Drug testing for recipents of NSF and NIH grants?
Introduction: People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil. Hatch … said his idea would help battle drug addiction and could reduce the nation’s debt. He will try to get the Senate to include his amendment to a $140 billion bill extending tax breaks and social programs this week. “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. Something’s gotta be done about this
2 0.91189784 448 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-03-This is a footnote in one of my papers
Introduction: In the annals of hack literature, it is sometimes said that if you aim to write best-selling crap, all you’ll end up with is crap. To truly produce best-selling crap, you have to have a conviction, perhaps misplaced, that your writing has integrity. Whether or not this is a good generalization about writing, I have seen an analogous phenomenon in statistics: If you try to do nothing but model the data, you can be in for a wild and unpleasant ride: real data always seem to have one more twist beyond our ability to model (von Neumann’s elephant’s trunk notwithstanding). But if you model the underlying process, sometimes your model can fit surprisingly well as well as inviting openings for future research progress.
3 0.89156759 1037 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-01-Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy
Introduction: Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy. That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary : 1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement 2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous”
4 0.88270545 1700 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-31-Snotty reviewers
Introduction: I had a submission a couple years ago that was rejected by a journal. One of the reviewers began with the following snotty aside: In this manuscript Gelman and Shalizi (there’s no anonymity here; this thing has been floating around the web for some time) . . . Actually, we posted it on the same day we submitted it to the journal. But double-blindness allowed the reviewer to act as if we had done something wrong! And, even if it had been “floating around the web for some time,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it just meant that the article had previously been rejected by a bad-attitude reviewer!
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Introduction: Maria Wolters writes: The parenting club Bounty, which distributes their packs through midwives, hospitals, and large UK supermarket and pharmacy chains, commissioned a fun little survey for Halloween from the company OnePoll . Theme: Mothers as tricksters – tricking men into fathering their babies. You can find a full smackdown courtesy of UK-based sex educator and University College London psychologist Petra Boynton here . (One does wonder how a parenting club with such close links to the UK National Health Service thought a survey on this topic was at all appropriate, but that’s another rant.) So far, so awful, but what I [Wolters] thought might grab your attention was the excuse OnePoll offered for their work in their email to Petra. (Petra is very well known in the UK, and so was able to get a statement from the polling company.) Here it is in its full glory, taken from Petra’s post: As the agency which commissioned this research and distributed the resulting new
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