andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-335 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was unsurprised to read that Lou Dobbs, the former CNN host who crusaded against illegal immigrants, had actually hired a bunch of them himself to maintain his large house and his horse farm. (OK, I have to admit I was surprised by the part about the horse farm.) But I think most of the reactions to this story missed the point. Isabel Macdonald’s article that broke the story was entitled, “Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite,” and most of the discussion went from there, with some commenters piling on Dobbs and others defending him by saying that Dobbs hired his laborers through contractors and may not have known they were in the country illegally. To me, though, the key issue is slightly different. And Macdonald’s story is relevant whether or not Dobbs knew he was hiring illegals. My point is not that Dobbs is a bad guy, or a hypocrite, or whatever. My point is that, in his setting, it would take an extraordinary effort to not hire illegal immigrants to take care of his house
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I was unsurprised to read that Lou Dobbs, the former CNN host who crusaded against illegal immigrants, had actually hired a bunch of them himself to maintain his large house and his horse farm. [sent-1, score-0.838]
2 (OK, I have to admit I was surprised by the part about the horse farm. [sent-2, score-0.12]
3 ) But I think most of the reactions to this story missed the point. [sent-3, score-0.151]
4 And Macdonald’s story is relevant whether or not Dobbs knew he was hiring illegals. [sent-6, score-0.278]
5 My point is not that Dobbs is a bad guy, or a hypocrite, or whatever. [sent-7, score-0.045]
6 My point is that, in his setting, it would take an extraordinary effort to not hire illegal immigrants to take care of his house and his horses. [sent-8, score-0.833]
7 Here’s Lou Dobbs–a man who has the money, the inclination, and every incentive to not hire illegals–and he hires them anyway. [sent-10, score-0.279]
8 It doesn’t matter to me whether he knew about it or not, whether he hired contractors in a wink-and-nod arrangement to preserve his plausible deniability, or whether he was genuinely innocent of what was going on. [sent-11, score-0.949]
9 Either way, he did it–even though he, more than most people, had every incentive not to. [sent-12, score-0.184]
10 For Lou Dobbs, as for so many other American individuals and corporations, going without illegal immigrants is like trying to live a zero-emissions lifestyle: it might sound like a good idea but it’s too much work to actually do! [sent-13, score-0.559]
11 This does not mean that Dobbs’s goal of reducing illegal immigration is a bad idea–but it does suggest that his attacks on illegal immigrants and their U. [sent-14, score-1.01]
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Introduction: I was unsurprised to read that Lou Dobbs, the former CNN host who crusaded against illegal immigrants, had actually hired a bunch of them himself to maintain his large house and his horse farm. (OK, I have to admit I was surprised by the part about the horse farm.) But I think most of the reactions to this story missed the point. Isabel Macdonald’s article that broke the story was entitled, “Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite,” and most of the discussion went from there, with some commenters piling on Dobbs and others defending him by saying that Dobbs hired his laborers through contractors and may not have known they were in the country illegally. To me, though, the key issue is slightly different. And Macdonald’s story is relevant whether or not Dobbs knew he was hiring illegals. My point is not that Dobbs is a bad guy, or a hypocrite, or whatever. My point is that, in his setting, it would take an extraordinary effort to not hire illegal immigrants to take care of his house
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Introduction: As many of you know, this blog is on an approximate one-month delay. I schedule my posts to appear roughly once a day, and there’s currently a backlog of about 20 or 30 posts. Recently I’ve decided to spend less time blogging, but I have some ideas I’d still like to share. To tweet, if you will. So I thought I’d just put a bunch of ideas out there that interested readers could follow up on. Think of it like one of those old-style dot-dot-dot newspaper columns. - One thing statisticians could learn from economists: if you want to control for a continuous variable, throw it in as a fifth-order polynomial on the right hand side of a regression. A lot of statisticians will either do simple linear or else spaz out with a spline. But good old polynomials are fine. - One thing that not so many political scientists realize is that nowadays the rich voters are Democrats! You don’t always see that in surveys, but remember that survey nonresponse rates are typically 80%+. Heck,
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Introduction: Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle argue about the economics of landlord/tenant laws in D.C., a topic I know nothing about. But it did remind me of a few stories . . . 1. In grad school, I shared half of a two-family house with three other students. At some point, our landlord (who lived in the other half of the house) decided he wanted to sell the place, so he had a real estate agent coming by occasionally to show the house to people. She was just a flat-out liar (which I guess fits my impression based on screenings of Glengarry Glen Ross). I could never decide, when I was around and she was lying to a prospective buyer, whether to call her on it. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. 2. A year after I graduated, the landlord actually did sell the place but then, when my friends moved out, he refused to pay back their security deposit. There was some debate about getting the place repainted, I don’t remember the details. So they sued the landlord in Mass. housing court
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Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. An Oregon legislator, Mitch Greenlick, has proposed to make it illegal in Oregon to carry a child under six years old on one’s bike (including in a child seat) or in a bike trailer. The guy says “”We’ve just done a study showing that 30 percent of riders biking to work at least three days a week have some sort of crash that leads to an injury… When that’s going on out there, what happens when you have a four year old on the back of a bike?” The study is from Oregon Health Sciences University, at which the legislator is a professor. Greenlick also says “”If it’s true that it’s unsafe, we have an obligation to protect people. If I thought a law would save one child’s life, I would step in and do it. Wouldn’t you?” There are two statistical issues here. The first is in the category of “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” and involves the statement about how many riders have injuries. As quoted on a blog , the author of the study in question says th
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Introduction: Michael Betancourt will be speaking at Google and at the University of California, Berkeley. The Google talk is closed to outsiders (but if you work at Google, you should go!); the Berkeley talk is open to all: Friday March 22, 12:10 pm, Evans Hall 1011. Title of talk: Stan : Practical Bayesian Inference with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Abstract: Practical implementations of Bayesian inference are often limited to approximation methods that only slowly explore the posterior distribution. By taking advantage of the curvature of the posterior, however, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) efficiently explores even the most highly contorted distributions. In this talk I will review the foundations of and recent developments within HMC, concluding with a discussion of Stan, a powerful inference engine that utilizes HMC, automatic differentiation, and adaptive methods to minimize user input. This is cool stuff. And he’ll be showing the whirlpool movie!
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