andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-148 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed? I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . . “Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right? According to the materials on its website, Centre College is
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY. [sent-3, score-0.294]
2 , March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. [sent-4, score-0.786]
3 According to the materials on its website, Centre College is ranked very high on some measures, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an excellent place to get an education. [sent-13, score-0.173]
4 Still, there’s something Onion-like about all of this. [sent-14, score-0.071]
5 Nonetheless, there’s no harm in studying this sort of thing and keeping it in the news now and then. [sent-19, score-0.356]
6 Some of their findings didn’t seem so horrible (“Female main characters nurtured more than did male main characters . [sent-20, score-0.748]
7 I also am not trying to slam or even mock Centre College for publicizing this work. [sent-25, score-0.348]
8 Certainly, I’m always trying to get Columbia to publicize my own research findings. [sent-26, score-0.273]
9 There’s just something funny about how the whole thing got put together in such an Onion-worthy way. [sent-27, score-0.071]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('centre', 0.383), ('college', 0.256), ('children', 0.241), ('characters', 0.239), ('onion', 0.219), ('gender', 0.216), ('roles', 0.156), ('female', 0.152), ('books', 0.145), ('sex', 0.124), ('amidst', 0.122), ('studying', 0.118), ('website', 0.117), ('publicizing', 0.115), ('stereotyping', 0.115), ('bias', 0.109), ('occupation', 0.106), ('encountering', 0.106), ('publicize', 0.106), ('professor', 0.104), ('unsurprising', 0.103), ('hamilton', 0.103), ('knocking', 0.1), ('documented', 0.098), ('research', 0.096), ('ranked', 0.096), ('main', 0.095), ('disturbing', 0.089), ('else', 0.088), ('anderson', 0.088), ('existed', 0.087), ('news', 0.086), ('titled', 0.083), ('harm', 0.082), ('mock', 0.082), ('nonetheless', 0.081), ('exists', 0.081), ('slam', 0.08), ('march', 0.08), ('male', 0.08), ('journal', 0.078), ('materials', 0.077), ('discover', 0.076), ('expression', 0.076), ('century', 0.073), ('trend', 0.071), ('something', 0.071), ('trying', 0.071), ('keeping', 0.07), ('professors', 0.07)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000002 148 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-15-“Gender Bias Still Exists in Modern Children’s Literature, Say Centre Researchers”
Introduction: You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed? I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . . “Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right? According to the materials on its website, Centre College is
2 0.17497991 857 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-17-Bayes pays
Introduction: George Leckie writes: The Centre for Multilevel Modelling at the University of Bristol is seeking to appoint an applied statistician to work on a new ESRC-funded project, Longitudinal Effects, Multilevel Modelling and Applications (LEMMA 3). LEMMA 3 is one of six Nodes of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM). The LEMMA 3 Node will focus on methods for the analysis of longitudinal data. The appointment, at Research Assistant or Research Associate level, will be for 2.5 years with likelihood of extension to the end of September 2014. For further details, including information on how to apply online, please go to http://www.bris.ac.uk/boris/jobs/feeds/ads?ID=100571 By “modelling,” I think he means “modeling.” And by “centre,” I think he means “center.” But I think you get the basic idea. It looks like a great place to do research.
3 0.15462539 1688 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-22-That claim that students whose parents pay for more of college get worse grades
Introduction: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
4 0.1451391 80 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-11-Free online course in multilevel modeling
Introduction: George Leckie points to this free online course from the Centre for Multilevel Modelling (approx 600 pages of materials covering theory and implementation in MLwiN and Stata).
5 0.13747866 1114 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-12-Controversy about average personality differences between men and women
Introduction: Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article , “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. . . . We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES [effect size], the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). Echidne quotes a news article in which one of the study’s authors going overboard: “Psychologically, men a
6 0.13393864 174 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-01-Literature and life
7 0.12420307 1381 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-16-The Art of Fielding
8 0.11932012 943 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-04-Flip it around
9 0.11723878 202 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-Job openings in multilevel modeling in Bristol, England
10 0.11496544 361 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-21-Tenure-track statistics job at Teachers College, here at Columbia!
11 0.10861297 1643 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-29-Sexism in science (as elsewhere)
13 0.0989988 161 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-24-Differences in color perception by sex, also the Bechdel test for women in movies
14 0.094933033 32 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Causal inference in economics
16 0.09037073 2336 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-16-How much can we learn about individual-level causal claims from state-level correlations?
17 0.089895621 532 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-23-My Wall Street Journal story
18 0.089860946 2252 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-17-Ma conférence demain (mardi) à l’École Polytechnique
19 0.087441206 595 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-28-What Zombies see in Scatterplots
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.15), (1, -0.095), (2, -0.023), (3, -0.048), (4, -0.007), (5, 0.031), (6, 0.03), (7, 0.007), (8, -0.022), (9, 0.05), (10, -0.007), (11, -0.016), (12, -0.008), (13, 0.0), (14, 0.032), (15, 0.005), (16, 0.027), (17, -0.002), (18, 0.033), (19, -0.011), (20, -0.025), (21, 0.006), (22, 0.011), (23, -0.008), (24, 0.044), (25, -0.008), (26, -0.069), (27, -0.003), (28, -0.032), (29, 0.01), (30, -0.065), (31, 0.01), (32, 0.014), (33, 0.01), (34, -0.016), (35, 0.049), (36, 0.001), (37, -0.0), (38, -0.056), (39, -0.089), (40, 0.012), (41, 0.043), (42, 0.081), (43, 0.006), (44, 0.008), (45, -0.008), (46, 0.024), (47, 0.025), (48, 0.033), (49, 0.002)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97280473 148 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-15-“Gender Bias Still Exists in Modern Children’s Literature, Say Centre Researchers”
Introduction: You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed? I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . . “Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right? According to the materials on its website, Centre College is
2 0.77990651 1053 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-11-This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf
Introduction: Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher? The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the athe
3 0.73273796 1643 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-29-Sexism in science (as elsewhere)
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang sends along this from Corinne Moss-Racusin, John Dovidio, Victoria Brescoll, Mark Graham, and Jo Handelsman: Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. . . . In a randomized double-blind study . . . science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. . . . I hate to talk about things like this since presumably I’m a beneficiary. But now that I’ve climbed the ladder myself I suppose I’m not at any risk. I don’t know anything much about lab manager positions—that’s more something you’d see in a biology department—but I do
4 0.72764534 1128 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-19-Sharon Begley: Worse than Stephen Jay Gould?
Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
5 0.71777803 161 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-24-Differences in color perception by sex, also the Bechdel test for women in movies
Introduction: Here’s a pretty funny example of silly statistics, caught by Lisa Wade : A study published in 2001 . . . asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex. Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right: The authors of the study, Lee Ellis and Christopher Ficek, wrote: We are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans. As Wade points out, that all seems a bit ridiculous giv
6 0.71359885 2301 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-22-Ticket to Baaaaarf
7 0.68362826 1480 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-02-“If our product is harmful . . . we’ll stop making it.”
8 0.67041487 1184 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-25-Facebook Profiles as Predictors of Job Performance? Maybe…but not yet.
9 0.66839576 370 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-25-Who gets wedding announcements in the Times?
10 0.6681726 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
11 0.66683763 1303 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-06-I’m skeptical about this skeptical article about left-handedness
12 0.65993679 1391 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-25-A question about the Tiger Mom: what if she’d had boys instead of girls?
13 0.65745795 1887 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-07-“Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending”
14 0.65410483 1741 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-27-Thin scientists say it’s unhealthy to be fat
16 0.65096384 2220 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-22-Quickies
17 0.64527029 1591 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-26-Politics as an escape hatch
19 0.64288694 1305 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-07-Happy news on happiness; what can we believe?
20 0.6418047 568 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-11-Calibration in chess
topicId topicWeight
[(1, 0.109), (2, 0.051), (5, 0.011), (10, 0.011), (16, 0.079), (21, 0.06), (24, 0.082), (43, 0.039), (45, 0.025), (81, 0.015), (88, 0.011), (98, 0.012), (99, 0.374)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97652745 148 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-15-“Gender Bias Still Exists in Modern Children’s Literature, Say Centre Researchers”
Introduction: You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed? I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . . “Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right? According to the materials on its website, Centre College is
Introduction: Kyle Peyton writes: I’m passing you this recent news article by Ewen Callaway in the hope that you will make a comment about the methodology on your blog. It’s generated some back and forth between the economics and science communities. I [Peyton] am very sceptical of the reductive approach taken by the economics profession generally, and the normative implications this kind of research generates. For example, p. 7 of the working paper states: “…[according to our model] decreasing the diversity of the most diverse country in the sample (Ethopia) by 1 percentage point would raise its income per capita by 21 percent”. Understandably, this piece is couched in assumptions that would take hours to pick apart, but their discussion of the approach belies the uncertainty involved. The main response by the authors in defense is that genetic diversity is a ‘proxy variable’. This is a common assertion, but I find it really infuriating. I happen to drink coffee most days, which correla
3 0.96266735 697 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-A statistician rereads Bill James
Introduction: Ben Lindbergh invited me to write an article for Baseball Prospectus. I first sent him this item on the differences between baseball and politics but he said it was too political for them. I then sent him this review of a book on baseball’s greatest fielders but he said they already had someone slotted to review that book. Then I sent him some reflections on the great Bill James and he published it ! If anybody out there knows Bill James, please send this on to him: I have some questions at the end that I’m curious about. Here’s how it begins: I read my first Bill James book in 1984, took my first statistics class in 1985, and began graduate study in statistics the next year. Besides giving me the opportunity to study with the best applied statistician of the late 20th century (Don Rubin) and the best theoretical statistician of the early 21st (Xiao-Li Meng), going to graduate school at Harvard in 1986 gave me the opportunity to sit in a basement room one evening that
4 0.96189219 973 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-26-Antman again courts controversy
Introduction: Commenter Zbicyclist links to a fun article by Howard French on biologist E. O. Wilson: Wilson announced that his new book may be his last. It is not limited to the discussion of evolutionary biology, but ranges provocatively through the humanities, as well. . . . Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.” This reminds me of my recent remarks on the use of crude folk-psychology models as microfoundations for social sciences. The article also discusses Wilson’s recent crusade against selfish-gene-style simplifications of human and animal nature. I’m with Wilson 100% on this one. “Two brothers or eight cousins” is a cute line but it doesn’t seem to come close to describing how species or societies work, and it’s always seemed a
5 0.95886242 525 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-19-Thiel update
Introduction: A year or so ago I discussed the reasoning of zillionaire financier Peter Thiel, who seems to believe his own hype and, worse, seems to be able to convince reporters of his infallibility as well. Apparently he “possesses a preternatural ability to spot patterns that others miss.” More recently, Felix Salmon commented on Thiel’s financial misadventures: Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, ain’t doing so well. Its assets under management are down 90% from their peak, and total returns from the high point are -65%. Thiel is smart, successful, rich, well-connected, and on top of all that his calls have actually been right . . . None of that, clearly, was enough for Clarium to make money on its trades: the fund was undone by volatility and weakness in risk management. There are a few lessons to learn here. Firstly, just because someone is a Silicon Valley gazillionaire, or any kind of successful entrepreneur for that matter, doesn’t mean they should be trusted with oth
6 0.95831627 1154 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-04-“Turn a Boring Bar Graph into a 3D Masterpiece”
7 0.95596129 272 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-13-Ross Ihaka to R: Drop Dead
8 0.94947076 906 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-14-Another day, another stats postdoc
10 0.94516456 2368 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-11-Bayes in the research conversation
11 0.94492877 2301 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-22-Ticket to Baaaaarf
12 0.94447768 261 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-07-The $900 kindergarten teacher
13 0.94437152 1912 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-24-Bayesian quality control?
14 0.94410378 430 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-25-The von Neumann paradox
15 0.94279242 1859 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-16-How do we choose our default methods?
16 0.94274843 1451 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-08-Robert Kosara reviews Ed Tufte’s short course
17 0.94273859 1864 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-20-Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course
18 0.94196332 1951 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-22-Top 5 stat papers since 2000?
19 0.94114166 707 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Human nature can’t be changed (except when it can)
20 0.94103688 738 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Works well versus well understood