andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-329 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like te
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). [sent-1, score-0.635]
2 The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. [sent-2, score-0.07]
3 ” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. [sent-4, score-0.104]
4 Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. [sent-5, score-0.746]
5 McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. [sent-6, score-0.311]
6 I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. [sent-8, score-0.293]
7 Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. [sent-9, score-0.65]
8 Like textbooks, journals have gone totally out of control . [sent-11, score-0.072]
9 Mostly I’m focused on journal prices rather than textbooks, although of course I contributed a free text. [sent-12, score-0.451]
10 People report liking it and a few schools, including Harvard and NYU, used it, but it fizzled in the marketplace. [sent-13, score-0.1]
11 org to see if things like testbanks make a difference; their model is free online, cheap ($35) printed. [sent-15, score-0.207]
12 The beauty of free online is it limits the sort of price increases your book experienced. [sent-16, score-0.5]
13 Here is a link to the FOIA work which also has some discussion of the failed attempts to block us. [sent-17, score-0.151]
14 By the way, I had a spoof published in “Studies in Economic Analysis”, a student-run journal that was purchased by Emerald Press. [sent-18, score-0.335]
15 I wrote them a take-down notice since SEA didn’t bother with copyright forms so I still owned the copyright. [sent-20, score-0.309]
16 They took it down but are not returning any money they collected on my article, pleading a lack of records. [sent-21, score-0.204]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('mcafee', 0.461), ('textbooks', 0.273), ('emerald', 0.253), ('schmucks', 0.253), ('prices', 0.135), ('free', 0.126), ('notice', 0.121), ('posting', 0.121), ('price', 0.121), ('pleading', 0.115), ('spoof', 0.115), ('sues', 0.115), ('takedown', 0.115), ('journal', 0.111), ('purchased', 0.109), ('symptom', 0.104), ('online', 0.102), ('threatening', 0.1), ('nyu', 0.1), ('liking', 0.1), ('ted', 0.1), ('owned', 0.097), ('sue', 0.097), ('noticing', 0.095), ('sea', 0.095), ('acts', 0.093), ('books', 0.092), ('copyright', 0.091), ('deals', 0.089), ('returning', 0.089), ('charging', 0.089), ('mediocre', 0.087), ('charges', 0.085), ('especially', 0.083), ('extract', 0.082), ('cheap', 0.081), ('publishers', 0.081), ('contributed', 0.079), ('state', 0.077), ('beauty', 0.077), ('block', 0.076), ('publisher', 0.075), ('attempts', 0.075), ('limits', 0.074), ('routinely', 0.073), ('totally', 0.072), ('intro', 0.071), ('keeps', 0.07), ('sad', 0.07), ('stat', 0.069)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
Introduction: After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like te
2 0.14555371 1616 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-10-John McAfee is a Heinlein hero
Introduction: “A small group of mathematicians” Jenny Davidson points to this article by Krugman on Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Given the silliness of the topic, Krugman’s piece is disappointingly serious (“Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it’s not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it’s set in the future, there’s interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details . . . the story can sound arid and didactic. . . . you’ll also be disappointed if you’re looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. . . .”). What really jumped out at me from Krugman’s piece, though, was this line: In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed “psychohistory”, the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Like Davidson (and Krugman), I read the Foundation books as a child. I remember the “psychohisto
3 0.099896006 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
4 0.088556245 1342 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-24-The Used TV Price is Too Damn High
Introduction: Rohin Dhar points me to this post : At Priceonomics, we’ve learned that our users don’t want to buy used products. Rather, they want to buy inexpensive products, and used items happen to be inexpensive. Let someone else eat the initial depreciation, Priceonomics users will swoop in later and get a good deal. . . . But if you want to buy a used television, you are in for a world of hurt. As you peruse through the Craigslist listings for used TVs, you may notice something surprising – the prices are kind of high. Do a quick check on Amazon and your suspicions will be confirmed; lots of people try to sell their used television for more than that same TV would cost brand new. . . . To test our suspicions that something was amiss in the used television market, we compared used TV prices to the prices of buying them new instead. . . . It turns out, people have very inflated expectations for how much they call sell their used TV. Only 3 of the 26 televisions we analyzed were discounte
Introduction: The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad papers get published—but rather that it had nothing really going for it, except that it was headline bait. It was a survey done on Mechanical Turk, that’s it. No clever design, no clever questions, no care in dealing with nonresponse problems, no innovative data analysis, no nothing. The paper had nothing to offer, except that it had no obvious flaws. Psychology is a huge field full of brilliant researchers.
6 0.081513539 607 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-11-Rajiv Sethi on the interpretation of prediction market data
7 0.076171651 598 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-03-Is Harvard hurting poor kids by cutting tuition for the upper middle class?
8 0.075731397 1435 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-30-Retracted articles and unethical behavior in economics journals?
10 0.072966605 773 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-18-Should we always be using the t and robit instead of the normal and logit?
11 0.071661167 297 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-27-An interesting education and statistics blog
12 0.068130173 58 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-29-Stupid legal crap
13 0.068076357 1572 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-10-I don’t like this cartoon
14 0.068065166 1954 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-24-Too Good To Be True: The Scientific Mass Production of Spurious Statistical Significance
16 0.067115724 120 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-30-You can’t put Pandora back in the box
17 0.06710735 1605 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-04-Write This Book
18 0.066764489 2009 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-05-A locally organized online BDA course on G+ hangout?
19 0.063547961 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
20 0.06325309 2088 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-04-Recently in the sister blog
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.127), (1, -0.057), (2, -0.042), (3, -0.001), (4, -0.011), (5, 0.002), (6, 0.038), (7, -0.032), (8, -0.009), (9, 0.012), (10, 0.044), (11, -0.024), (12, -0.004), (13, 0.021), (14, 0.015), (15, -0.004), (16, 0.016), (17, 0.001), (18, 0.007), (19, -0.02), (20, 0.02), (21, 0.021), (22, 0.007), (23, 0.005), (24, -0.013), (25, 0.007), (26, -0.014), (27, -0.009), (28, -0.011), (29, 0.033), (30, -0.016), (31, -0.019), (32, 0.02), (33, 0.002), (34, -0.007), (35, 0.055), (36, 0.006), (37, -0.014), (38, 0.003), (39, 0.015), (40, 0.005), (41, -0.002), (42, -0.011), (43, 0.042), (44, 0.017), (45, 0.028), (46, -0.016), (47, 0.001), (48, -0.038), (49, -0.009)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97075379 329 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-08-More on those dudes who will pay your professor $8000 to assign a book to your class, and related stories about small-time sleazoids
Introduction: After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like te
2 0.76752675 1446 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-06-“And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well”
Introduction: In our recent discussion of plagiarism and fake quotes, a commenter points to two recent posts by Mark Liberman ( here and here ) where Liberman links to about a zillion cases of journalists publishing quotes that were never said. He goes into some detail about two journalists from the New Yorker: Jared Diamond, who created quotes from a some dude in Papua New Guinea (ironically, one of Diamond’s accusers here is the widow of Stephen Jay Gould), and Janet Malcolm, who not only apparently falsified quotes by a subject of one of her articles, she also may have faked the notes for her interviews. I didn’t know that particular bit about Janet Malcolm, but I’ve felt very uncomfortable about her ever since she her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. Between that case and her earlier The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm really does seem to have some sort of sympathy for people who kill their family members. She’s a good writer, but I still find
3 0.76579368 1683 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-19-“Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy”
Introduction: Mark Palko writes : I can understand the appeal of the cutting edge. The new stuff is sexier. It gets people’s attention. The trouble is, those cutting edge studies often collapse under scrutiny. Some can’t be replicated. Others prove to be not that important. Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy. It doesn’t drive traffic. It’s harder to fit into a paragraph. In a way, though, it’s more interesting because it has a high likelihood of being true and fills in the gaps in big, important questions. The interaction between the ideas is usually the interesting part. In this particular example, Palko is telling the story of a journalist who reports a finding as new when it is essentially a replication of decades-old work. Palko’s point is not that there’s anything wrong with replication but rather that the journalist seems to feel that it is necessary to report the idea as new and cutting-edge, even if it falls within a long tradition. (Also, Palko is not claiming that this
4 0.75590038 2233 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-04-Literal vs. rhetorical
Introduction: Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone is a methodologist.” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. The final twist was that one of the orgtheory bloggers deleted a comment and then closed the thread entirely when the discussion got too conflictual. In a few days I’ll return to the meta-topic of the discussion, but right now I want to focus on one thing Davis wrote, a particular statement that illustrates to me the gap between the rhetorical and the literal, the way in which a statement can sound good but make no sense. He
5 0.75024331 2177 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-19-“The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness”
Introduction: Andrew Anthony tells the excellent story of how Nick Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman shot down some particularly silly work in psychology. (“According to the graph, it all came down to a specific ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life. If your ratio was less than that number you were languishing.” And, yes, the work they were shooting down really is that bad.) If you want to see what the fuss is about, just google “2.9013.” Here’s an example (from 2012) of an uncritical reporting of the claim, here’s another one from 2010, here’s one from 2011 . . . well, you get the idea. And here’s a quick summary posted by Rolf Zwaan after Brown et al. came out with their paper. I know Sokal and Brown and so this story was not news to me. I didn’t post anything about it on this blog because it seemed like it was getting enough coverage elsewhere. I think Ni
6 0.74852532 2304 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-24-An open site for researchers to post and share papers
7 0.73728859 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
8 0.72972989 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
9 0.72918487 532 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-23-My Wall Street Journal story
10 0.72487903 1756 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-10-He said he was sorry
11 0.72355896 1917 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-28-Econ coauthorship update
12 0.71983707 1273 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-20-Proposals for alternative review systems for scientific work
13 0.71879631 760 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-12-How To Party Your Way Into a Multi-Million Dollar Facebook Job
15 0.71333528 1254 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-09-In the future, everyone will publish everything.
16 0.71203578 2244 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-11-What if I were to stop publishing in journals?
17 0.70967627 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree
19 0.70470089 865 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-22-Blogging is “destroying the business model for quality”?
20 0.70026934 1901 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-16-Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad
topicId topicWeight
[(6, 0.021), (15, 0.332), (16, 0.065), (17, 0.011), (20, 0.011), (21, 0.018), (24, 0.099), (48, 0.01), (66, 0.018), (72, 0.024), (92, 0.011), (93, 0.011), (99, 0.25)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.9891634 439 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-30-Of psychology research and investment tips
Introduction: A few days after “ Dramatic study shows participants are affected by psychological phenomena from the future ,” (see here ) the British Psychological Society follows up with “ Can psychology help combat pseudoscience? .” Somehow I’m reminded of that bit of financial advice which says, if you want to save some money, your best investment is to pay off your credit card bills.
2 0.97115564 908 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-14-Type M errors in the lab
Introduction: Jeff points us to this news article by Asher Mullard: Bayer halts nearly two-thirds of its target-validation projects because in-house experimental findings fail to match up with published literature claims, finds a first-of-a-kind analysis on data irreproducibility. An unspoken industry rule alleges that at least 50% of published studies from academic laboratories cannot be repeated in an industrial setting, wrote venture capitalist Bruce Booth in a recent blog post. A first-of-a-kind analysis of Bayer’s internal efforts to validate ‘new drug target’ claims now not only supports this view but suggests that 50% may be an underestimate; the company’s in-house experimental data do not match literature claims in 65% of target-validation projects, leading to project discontinuation. . . . Khusru Asadullah, Head of Target Discovery at Bayer, and his colleagues looked back at 67 target-validation projects, covering the majority of Bayer’s work in oncology, women’s health and cardiov
3 0.95003498 834 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-01-I owe it all to the haters
Introduction: Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. Some of my most influential papers were accepted right
4 0.94663966 1394 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-99!
Introduction: Those of you who know what I’m talking about, know what I’m talking about.
5 0.93565857 1081 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-24-Statistical ethics violation
Introduction: A colleague writes: When I was in NYC I went to this party by group of Japanese bio-scientists. There, one guy told me about how the biggest pharmaceutical company in Japan did their statistics. They ran 100 different tests and reported the most significant one. (This was in 2006 and he said they stopped doing this few years back so they were doing this until pretty recently…) I’m not sure if this was 100 multiple comparison or 100 different kinds of test but I’m sure they wouldn’t want to disclose their data… Ouch!
6 0.91960782 1541 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-19-Statistical discrimination again
same-blog 7 0.91945112 329 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-08-More on those dudes who will pay your professor $8000 to assign a book to your class, and related stories about small-time sleazoids
8 0.91293895 1624 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-15-New prize on causality in statstistics education
9 0.89756185 945 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-06-W’man < W’pedia, again
10 0.89545214 2278 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-01-Association for Psychological Science announces a new journal
11 0.88985229 133 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-08-Gratuitous use of “Bayesian Statistics,” a branding issue?
12 0.88691843 1794 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-09-My talks in DC and Baltimore this week
13 0.88101363 1908 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-21-Interpreting interactions in discrete-data regression
14 0.85724092 1800 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-12-Too tired to mock
15 0.85408789 762 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-13-How should journals handle replication studies?
16 0.84029162 1833 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-30-“Tragedy of the science-communication commons”
17 0.83592784 1998 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-25-A new Bem theory
18 0.81928039 1393 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-26-The reverse-journal-submission system
19 0.8167209 1779 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-27-“Two Dogmas of Strong Objective Bayesianism”