andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-203 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This blog is threatening to turn into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Social Science, and Literature Criticism, but I’m just going to go with the conversational flow, so here’s another post about an essayist. I’m not a big fan of Janet Malcolm’s essays — and I don’t mean I don’t like her attitude or her pro-murderer attitude, I mean I don’t like them all that much as writing. They’re fine, I read them, they don’t bore me, but I certainly don’t think she’s “our” best essayist. But that’s not a debate I want to have right now, and if I did I’m quite sure most of you wouldn’t want to read it anyway. So instead, I’ll just say something about John McPhee. As all right-thinking people agree, in McPhee’s long career he has written two kinds of books: good, short books, and bad, long books. (He has also written many New Yorker essays, and perhaps other essays for other magazines too; most of these are good, although I haven’t seen any really good recent work from him, and so
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1 I’m not a big fan of Janet Malcolm’s essays — and I don’t mean I don’t like her attitude or her pro-murderer attitude, I mean I don’t like them all that much as writing. [sent-2, score-0.243]
2 As all right-thinking people agree, in McPhee’s long career he has written two kinds of books: good, short books, and bad, long books. [sent-6, score-0.131]
3 (He has also written many New Yorker essays, and perhaps other essays for other magazines too; most of these are good, although I haven’t seen any really good recent work from him, and some of it has been really bad, by his standards). [sent-7, score-0.249]
4 Unlike some of Andrew’s favorite Janet Malcolm essays, and unlike many of my favorite micro-history books (“Cod” by Mark Kurlansky, for example), “Oranges” does not use its subject as a home base from which it explores all kinds of other issues. [sent-10, score-0.375]
5 I will now open the book haphazardly and choose my favorite paragraph from the page I land on. [sent-12, score-0.342]
6 Clay and limestone are under the sand, but the sand is about twenty feet deep. [sent-15, score-0.151]
7 There are traces of phosphate in it and occasional suggestions of organic matter, but it would be a scandalous exaggeration to call it sandy soil. [sent-16, score-0.223]
8 “The sand holds up the trees, and we do the rest. [sent-19, score-0.151]
9 Or maybe you don’t, so I’ll do it again, from another haphazardly selected page. [sent-21, score-0.109]
10 An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. [sent-22, score-0.379]
11 Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. [sent-23, score-0.327]
12 California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. [sent-24, score-0.671]
13 In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement. [sent-26, score-0.382]
14 The differences from which these hyperboles arise will prevail in the two states even if the type of orange is the same. [sent-27, score-0.327]
15 In arid climates, like California’s, oranges develop a thick albedo, which is the white part of the skin. [sent-28, score-0.677]
16 California uses the Colorado River and similarly impressive sources to irrigate its oranges, but of course irrigation can only do so much. [sent-30, score-0.127]
17 For years, California was the leading orange state, but Florida surpassed California in 1942, and grows three times as many oranges now. [sent-32, score-1.008]
18 California oranges, for their part, can safely be called three times as beautiful. [sent-33, score-0.111]
19 Here’s the biggest departure I have noted from the topic of oranges: [Orange researcher] Grierson is a trim and well-groomed man in his late forties, with brown hair and a modest mustache. [sent-34, score-0.11]
20 (That’s a fine, New Yorkerish paragraph, that could just as easily have been written by Mark Singer. [sent-37, score-0.115]
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Introduction: This blog is threatening to turn into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Social Science, and Literature Criticism, but I’m just going to go with the conversational flow, so here’s another post about an essayist. I’m not a big fan of Janet Malcolm’s essays — and I don’t mean I don’t like her attitude or her pro-murderer attitude, I mean I don’t like them all that much as writing. They’re fine, I read them, they don’t bore me, but I certainly don’t think she’s “our” best essayist. But that’s not a debate I want to have right now, and if I did I’m quite sure most of you wouldn’t want to read it anyway. So instead, I’ll just say something about John McPhee. As all right-thinking people agree, in McPhee’s long career he has written two kinds of books: good, short books, and bad, long books. (He has also written many New Yorker essays, and perhaps other essays for other magazines too; most of these are good, although I haven’t seen any really good recent work from him, and so
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Introduction: In a post entitled, “A holiday message from the creative class to Richard Florida — screw you,” Mark Palko argues that Florida’s famous theories about the rise of the creative class have not held up over time: Florida paints a bright picture of these people and their future, with rapidly increasing numbers, influence and wealth. He goes so far as to say “Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t.” . . . But, Palko argues, Except for a few special cases, this may be the worst time to make a living in the arts since the emergence of modern newspapers and general interest magazines and other mass media a hundred and twenty years ago . . . Though we now have tools that make creating and disseminating art easier than ever, no one has come up with a viable business model that supports creation in today’s economy. . . . OK, fine, so individual creatives aren’t doing so well? But what about the larger urban economies? P
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Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
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Introduction: In an article provocatively entitled, “Will Ohio State’s football team decide who wins the White House?”, Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier report : It is statistically possible that the outcome of a handful of college football games in the right battleground states could determine the race for the White House. Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in a fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. T
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Introduction: I recently read a bizarre article by Janet Malcolm on a murder trial in NYC. What threw me about the article was that the story was utterly commonplace (by the standards of today’s headlines): divorced mom kills ex-husband in a custody dispute over their four-year-old daughter. The only interesting features were (a) the wife was a doctor and the husband were a dentist, the sort of people you’d expect to sue rather than slay, and (b) the wife hired a hitman from within the insular immigrant community that she (and her husband) belonged to. But, really, neither of these was much of a twist. To add to the non-storyness of it all, there were no other suspects, the evidence against the wife and the hitman was overwhelming, and even the high-paid defense lawyers didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to convince anyone of their client’s innocents. (One of the closing arguments was that one aspect of the wife’s story was so ridiculous that it had to be true. In the lawyer’s wo
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Introduction: I happened to come across a little book, “Current Glossary: Words Coined Since the War.” Here are some of them: as’pi-rin, n. A white compound used as a drug in the cure of headaches and rheumatism. bob’go, n. A kind of antelope in Africa; its meat is good for food. cat’ta-lo, n. A cross between an American bison and a cow. dart, n. A short, pointed spear-like weapon of steel dropped by airmen in attacks on the enemy. free’lance, n. A rover in literature, a writer not in the employ of one firm. griz’zly bear. A new kind of dance. You get the idea. P.S. Some more literary nostalgia from the archives: Prolefeed 70 Years of Best Sellers More on book sales . . . and reflections on the disappearance of millions of copies of the once-ubiquitous “Alive!”
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Introduction: From Anthony Burgess’s review of “The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature,” by Victor Neuberg: Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) was no gentleman. During the 1930s, when he would sometimes have nearly two million words in current publication, he aimed at producing 18,000 words a day. Editors would call me up and ask me to do a novelette by the next afternoon, and I would, but it nearly killed me. . . . I once appeared on the covers of eleven magazines the same month, and then almost killed myself for years trying to make it twelve. I never did. [Masanao: I think you know where I'm heading with that story.] Ursula Bloom, born 1985 and still with us [this was written sometime between 1978 and 1985], is clearly no lady. Writing also under the pseudonyms of Lozania Prole (there’s an honest name for you), Sheila Burnes and Mary Essex, she has produced 486 boooks, beginning with Tiger at the age of seven. . . . Was Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) a gentleman? .
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Introduction: This conference touches nicely on many of the more Biostatistics related topics that have come up on this blog from a pragmatic and perceptive Bayesian perspective. Fourth Annual Bayesian Biostatistics Conference Including the star of that recent Cochrane TV debate who will be the key note speaker. See here Subtle statistical issues to be debated on TV. and perhaps the last comment which is my personal take on that debate. Reruns are still available here http://justin.tv/cochranetv/b/272278382 K?
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