andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-298 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Tapen Sinha writes: Living in Mexico, I have been witness to many strange (and beautiful) things. Perhaps the strangest happened during the first outbreak of A(H1N1) in Mexico City. We had our university closed, football (soccer) was played in empty stadiums (or should it be stadia) because the government feared a spread of the virus. The Metro was operating and so were the private/public buses and taxis. Since the university was closed, we took the opportunity to collect data on facemask use in the public transport systems. It was a simple (but potentially deadly!) exercise in first hand statistical data collection that we teach our students (Although I must admit that I did not dare sending my research assistant to collect data – what if she contracted the virus?). I believe it was a unique experiment never to be repeated. The paper appeared in the journal Health Policy. From the abstract: At the height of the influenza epidemic in Mexico City in the spring of 2009, the f
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1 Tapen Sinha writes: Living in Mexico, I have been witness to many strange (and beautiful) things. [sent-1, score-0.083]
2 Perhaps the strangest happened during the first outbreak of A(H1N1) in Mexico City. [sent-2, score-0.21]
3 We had our university closed, football (soccer) was played in empty stadiums (or should it be stadia) because the government feared a spread of the virus. [sent-3, score-0.569]
4 The Metro was operating and so were the private/public buses and taxis. [sent-4, score-0.068]
5 Since the university was closed, we took the opportunity to collect data on facemask use in the public transport systems. [sent-5, score-0.59]
6 ) exercise in first hand statistical data collection that we teach our students (Although I must admit that I did not dare sending my research assistant to collect data – what if she contracted the virus? [sent-7, score-0.467]
7 From the abstract: At the height of the influenza epidemic in Mexico City in the spring of 2009, the federal government of Mexico recommended that passengers on public transport use facemasks to prevent contagion. [sent-11, score-1.438]
8 The Mexico City government made the use of facemasks mandatory for bus and taxi drivers, but enforcement procedures differed for these two categories. [sent-12, score-1.084]
9 Using an evidence-based approach, we collected data on the use of facemasks over a 2-week period. [sent-13, score-0.453]
10 In the specific context of the Mexico City influenza outbreak, these data showed mask usage rates mimicked the course of the epidemic and gender difference in compliance rates among metro passengers. [sent-14, score-1.175]
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Introduction: Tapen Sinha writes: Living in Mexico, I have been witness to many strange (and beautiful) things. Perhaps the strangest happened during the first outbreak of A(H1N1) in Mexico City. We had our university closed, football (soccer) was played in empty stadiums (or should it be stadia) because the government feared a spread of the virus. The Metro was operating and so were the private/public buses and taxis. Since the university was closed, we took the opportunity to collect data on facemask use in the public transport systems. It was a simple (but potentially deadly!) exercise in first hand statistical data collection that we teach our students (Although I must admit that I did not dare sending my research assistant to collect data – what if she contracted the virus?). I believe it was a unique experiment never to be repeated. The paper appeared in the journal Health Policy. From the abstract: At the height of the influenza epidemic in Mexico City in the spring of 2009, the f
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Introduction: Basbøll writes: In re your recent post : Can you make sense of this ? My reply: This is not the kind of thing that I like at all. But for some reason it doesn’t bother me enough for me to want to mock it. Perhaps because I sense that the people who write this sort of thing have very little power or influence. Then again, a check of Wikipedia reveals that the author of the above article is “currently Professor and Bill Daniels Ethics Fellow, a past endowed Bank of America professor of management at New Mexico State University.” The connection between “Ethics Fellow” and “Bank of America professor of management,” that’s a bit creepy.
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Introduction: Christian points me to this interesting (but sad) analysis by Diego Valle with an impressive series of graphs. There are a few things I’d change (notably the R default settings which result in ridiculously over-indexed y-axes, as well as axes for homicide rates which should (but do not) go town to zero (and sometimes, bizarrely, go negative), and a lack of coherent ordering of the 32 states (including D.F.), I’m no expert on Mexico (despite having coauthored a paper on Mexican politics) so I’ll leave it to others to evaluate the substantive claims in Valle’s blog. Just looking at what he’s done, though, it seems impressive to me. To put it another way, it’s like something Nate Silver might do.
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Introduction: My short answer (based on the research of Leighley and Nagler): Whether or not mandatory voting is a good idea, I think it’s unlikely to happen at a national level. Even setting aside the practical difficulties of taking a now-voluntary action and making it compulsory, bringing in the other half of the potential electorate would change the political conversation so much that it’s hard for me to see current officeholders supporting such a plan. For the full story, see here .
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Introduction: Chris Chambers and I had an enlightening discussion the other day at the blog of Rolf Zwaan, regarding the Garden of Forking Paths ( go here and scroll down through the comments). Chris sent me the following note: I’m writing a book at the moment about reforming practices in psychological research (focusing on various bad practices such as p-hacking, HARKing, low statistical power, publication bias, lack of data sharing etc. – and posing solutions such as pre-registration, Bayesian hypothesis testing, mandatory data archiving etc.) and I am arriving at rather unsettling conclusion: that null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) simply isn’t valid for observational research. If this is true then most of the psychological literature is statistically flawed. I was wonder what your thoughts were on this, both from a statistical point of view and from your experience working in an observational field. We all know about the dangers of researcher degrees of freedom. We also know
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Introduction: Tapen Sinha writes: Living in Mexico, I have been witness to many strange (and beautiful) things. Perhaps the strangest happened during the first outbreak of A(H1N1) in Mexico City. We had our university closed, football (soccer) was played in empty stadiums (or should it be stadia) because the government feared a spread of the virus. The Metro was operating and so were the private/public buses and taxis. Since the university was closed, we took the opportunity to collect data on facemask use in the public transport systems. It was a simple (but potentially deadly!) exercise in first hand statistical data collection that we teach our students (Although I must admit that I did not dare sending my research assistant to collect data – what if she contracted the virus?). I believe it was a unique experiment never to be repeated. The paper appeared in the journal Health Policy. From the abstract: At the height of the influenza epidemic in Mexico City in the spring of 2009, the f
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Introduction: People keep pointing me to this excellent news article by David Brown, about a scientist who was convicted of data manipulation: In all, 330 patients were randomly assigned to get either interferon gamma-1b or placebo injections. Disease progression or death occurred in 46 percent of those on the drug and 52 percent of those on placebo. That was not a significant difference, statistically speaking. When only survival was considered, however, the drug looked better: 10 percent of people getting the drug died, compared with 17 percent of those on placebo. However, that difference wasn’t “statistically significant,” either. Specifically, the so-called P value — a mathematical measure of the strength of the evidence that there’s a true difference between a treatment and placebo — was 0.08. . . . Technically, the study was a bust, although the results leaned toward a benefit from interferon gamma-1b. Was there a group of patients in which the results tipped? Harkonen asked the statis
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Introduction: X pointed me to this atrocity: The data on obesity are pretty unequivocal: we’re fat, and we’re getting fatter. Explanations for this trend, however, vary widely, with the blame alternately pinned on individual behaviour, genetics and the environment. In other words, it’s a race between “we eat too much”, “we’re born that way” and “it’s society’s fault”. Now, research by Lazaros Gallos has come down strongly in favour of the third option. Gallos and his colleagues at City College of New York treated the obesity rates in some 3000 US counties as “particles” in a physical system, and calculated the correlation between pairs of “particles” as a function of the distance between them. . . . the data indicated that the size of the “obesity cities” – geographic regions with correlated obesity rates – was huge, up to 1000 km. . . . Just to be clear: I have no problem with people calculating spatial autocorrelations (or even with them using quaint terminology such as referring to coun
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Introduction: Visual Economics shows statistics on average food consumption in America: My brief feedback is that water is confounded with these results. They should have subtracted water content from the weight of all dietary items, as it inflates the proportion of milk, vegetable and fruit items that contain more water. They did that for soda (which is represented as sugar/corn syrup), amplifying the inconsistency. Time Magazine had a beautiful gallery that visualizes diets around the world in a more appealing way.
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Introduction: In the email the other day, subject line “Casting blogger, writer, journalist to host cable series”: Hi there Andrew, I’m casting a male journalist, writer, blogger, documentary filmmaker or comedian with a certain type personality for a television pilot along with production company, Pipeline39. See below: A certain type of character – no cockiness, no ego, a person who is smart, savvy, dry humor, but someone who isn’t imposing, who can infiltrate these organizations. This person will be hosting his own show and covering alternative lifestyles and secret societies around the world. If you’re interested in hearing more or would like to be considered for this project, please email me a photo and a bio of yourself, along with contact information. I’ll respond to you ASAP. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. *** Casting Producer (646) ***.**** ***@gmail.com I was with them until I got to the “no ego” part. . . . Also, I don’t think I could infiltrate any org
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Introduction: Tapen Sinha writes: Living in Mexico, I have been witness to many strange (and beautiful) things. Perhaps the strangest happened during the first outbreak of A(H1N1) in Mexico City. We had our university closed, football (soccer) was played in empty stadiums (or should it be stadia) because the government feared a spread of the virus. The Metro was operating and so were the private/public buses and taxis. Since the university was closed, we took the opportunity to collect data on facemask use in the public transport systems. It was a simple (but potentially deadly!) exercise in first hand statistical data collection that we teach our students (Although I must admit that I did not dare sending my research assistant to collect data – what if she contracted the virus?). I believe it was a unique experiment never to be repeated. The paper appeared in the journal Health Policy. From the abstract: At the height of the influenza epidemic in Mexico City in the spring of 2009, the f
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Introduction: I think it’s part of my duty as a blogger to intersperse, along with the steady flow of jokes, rants, and literary criticism, some material that will actually be useful to you. So here goes. Jarno Vanhatalo, Jaakko Riihimäki, Jouni Hartikainen, Pasi Jylänki, Ville Tolvanen, and Aki Vehtari write : The GPstuff toolbox is a versatile collection of Gaussian process models and computational tools required for Bayesian inference. The tools include, among others, various inference methods, sparse approximations and model assessment methods. We can actually now fit Gaussian processes in Stan . But for big problems (or even moderately-sized problems), full Bayes can be slow. GPstuff uses EP, which is faster. At some point we’d like to implement EP in Stan. (Right now we’re working with Dave Blei to implement VB.) GPstuff really works. I saw Aki use it to fit a nonparametric version of the Bangladesh well-switching example in ARM. He was sitting in his office and just whip
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Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.
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