andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-370 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I was flipping through the paper yesterday and noticed something which I think is a bit of innumeracy–although I don’t have all the facts at my disposal so I can’t be sure. It came in an item by Robert Woletz, society editor of the New York Times, in response to the following letter from Max Sarinsky ( click here and scroll down): The heavy majority of couples typically featured in the Sunday wedding announcements either attended elite universities, hold corporate management positions or have parents with corporate management positions. It’s nice to learn about the nuptials of the privileged, but Times readers would benefit from learning about a more representative sampling of weddings in our diverse city. I [Sarinksy] am curious as to how editors select which announcements to publish, and why editors don’t make a sustained effort to include different types of couples. Woletz replied: The Weddings/Celebrations pages are truly open to everyone, and The Times persistentl
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 It’s nice to learn about the nuptials of the privileged, but Times readers would benefit from learning about a more representative sampling of weddings in our diverse city. [sent-3, score-0.1]
2 I [Sarinksy] am curious as to how editors select which announcements to publish, and why editors don’t make a sustained effort to include different types of couples. [sent-4, score-0.319]
3 Woletz replied: The Weddings/Celebrations pages are truly open to everyone, and The Times persistently encourages couples from all backgrounds to submit their stories. [sent-5, score-0.265]
4 And they do, typically in the hundreds during the peak wedding season. [sent-6, score-0.176]
5 Like any other part of The Times, however, the section’s editors and writers must identify and put before its readers the most interesting stories. [sent-7, score-0.12]
6 Given the finite amount of space and personnel that The Times can devote to reporting on these couples, only a representative sample of what has been submitted appears in the Weddings/Celebrations pages on any given week. [sent-8, score-0.205]
7 The only truly fair way to select one submission over another is on the basis of achievement. [sent-9, score-0.129]
8 When the daughter of a seamstress and a line cook graduates at the top of her medical school class at Yale or Stanford, or creates a well-received play or innovative Web site, that represents an achievement for both the subject and her parents. [sent-11, score-0.508]
9 Yes, readers are also likely to see items about the unions of sons and daughters of corporate managers, and even a few who can trace their roots to the landing of the Mayflower. [sent-13, score-0.133]
10 But you will also find police officers, prosecutors and military personnel. [sent-14, score-0.058]
11 Sousa achieved was worthy of recognition, and demonstrated that the definition of achievement is ever-changing. [sent-18, score-0.059]
12 Really, how often do they have wedding announcements where “the daughter of a seamstress and a line cook graduates at the top of her medical school class at Yale,” etc? [sent-20, score-0.744]
13 I’m in no position to complain about the Times’s choice of wedding announcements. [sent-30, score-0.176]
14 Most of whom have parents who did pretty well themselves. [sent-33, score-0.563]
15 Picking out the occasional line cook, police officer, or whatever, and describing the pages as “truly open to everyone. [sent-34, score-0.194]
16 I teach at an expensive private university that surely draws more than its share of students from wealthy families. [sent-37, score-0.077]
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Introduction: I was flipping through the paper yesterday and noticed something which I think is a bit of innumeracy–although I don’t have all the facts at my disposal so I can’t be sure. It came in an item by Robert Woletz, society editor of the New York Times, in response to the following letter from Max Sarinsky ( click here and scroll down): The heavy majority of couples typically featured in the Sunday wedding announcements either attended elite universities, hold corporate management positions or have parents with corporate management positions. It’s nice to learn about the nuptials of the privileged, but Times readers would benefit from learning about a more representative sampling of weddings in our diverse city. I [Sarinksy] am curious as to how editors select which announcements to publish, and why editors don’t make a sustained effort to include different types of couples. Woletz replied: The Weddings/Celebrations pages are truly open to everyone, and The Times persistentl
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Introduction: Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m always on the lookout for new items for the lexicon . It’s been a good month on that front. In addition to the Garden of Forking Paths, I’ve encountered two entirely new (to me) fallacies. The first of the two new fallacies has a name that’s quite a mouthful; I’ll hold off on telling you about it right now, as Eric Loken and I are currently finishing a paper on it. Once the paper’s done, I’ll post it in the usual place (or here , once it is scheduled to be published) and I’ll add it to the lexicon as well. What I want to talk about today is a fallacy I noticed a couple days ago. I can’t think of a good name for it. And that’s where you, the readers, come in. Please give this fallacy a name! Here’s the story. The other day on the sister blog I reported on a pair of studies involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely
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Introduction: I used this convenient site to create some images for a talk I’m preparing. (The competing headlines: “Beautiful parents have more daughters” vs. “No compelling evidence that beautiful parents are more or less likely to have daughters.” The latter gets cut off at “No compelling evidence that,” which actually works pretty well to demonstrate the sort of dull headline that would result if newspapers were to publish null results.)
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Introduction: Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. To get back to the school-choice issue . . . Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opp
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Introduction: The last time we encountered Slate columnist Shankar Vedantam was when he puzzled over why slightly more than half of voters planned to vote for Republican candidates, given that polls show that Americans dislike the Republican Party even more than they dislike the Democrats. Vedantam attributed the new Republican majority to irrationality and “unconscious bias.” But, actually, this voting behavior is perfectly consistent with there being some moderate voters who prefer divided government. The simple, direct explanation (which Vedantam mistakenly dismisses) actually works fine. I was flipping through Slate today and noticed a new article by Vedantam headlined, “If parenthood sucks, why do we love it? Because we’re addicted.” I don’t like this one either. Vedantam starts by reviewing the evidence that people with kids are less happy than people without kids and that parents report that they are unhappy when they are around their young children. Given this, Vedantam asks
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Introduction: I was flipping through the paper yesterday and noticed something which I think is a bit of innumeracy–although I don’t have all the facts at my disposal so I can’t be sure. It came in an item by Robert Woletz, society editor of the New York Times, in response to the following letter from Max Sarinsky ( click here and scroll down): The heavy majority of couples typically featured in the Sunday wedding announcements either attended elite universities, hold corporate management positions or have parents with corporate management positions. It’s nice to learn about the nuptials of the privileged, but Times readers would benefit from learning about a more representative sampling of weddings in our diverse city. I [Sarinksy] am curious as to how editors select which announcements to publish, and why editors don’t make a sustained effort to include different types of couples. Woletz replied: The Weddings/Celebrations pages are truly open to everyone, and The Times persistentl
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Introduction: Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m always on the lookout for new items for the lexicon . It’s been a good month on that front. In addition to the Garden of Forking Paths, I’ve encountered two entirely new (to me) fallacies. The first of the two new fallacies has a name that’s quite a mouthful; I’ll hold off on telling you about it right now, as Eric Loken and I are currently finishing a paper on it. Once the paper’s done, I’ll post it in the usual place (or here , once it is scheduled to be published) and I’ll add it to the lexicon as well. What I want to talk about today is a fallacy I noticed a couple days ago. I can’t think of a good name for it. And that’s where you, the readers, come in. Please give this fallacy a name! Here’s the story. The other day on the sister blog I reported on a pair of studies involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely
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Introduction: In our Cliff thread from yesterday, sociologist Philip Cohen pointed to his discussions in the decline in the popularity of the name Mary. One thing that came up was the traditional trendiness of girls’ names. So I thought I’d share my thoughts from a couple of years ago, as reported by David Leonhardt: Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing. By the 1990s, of course, not many girls from the 1880s were still around, and that era’s names could seem fresh again. This search for youthfulness makes girls’ names more volatile — and increasingly so, as more statistics about names become available and parents grow more willing to experiment
Introduction: Howard Wainer writes : When we focus only on the differences between groups, we too easily lose track of the big picture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current public discussions of the size of the gap in test scores that is observed between racial groups. It has been noted that in New Jersey the gap between the average scores of white and black students on the well-developed scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shrunk by only about 25 percent over the past two decades. The conclusion drawn was that even though the change is in the right direction, it is far too slow. But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one — 4th grade mathematics. . . . there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper g
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Introduction: Wayne Folta writes, “In light of your recent blog post on women in higher education, here’s one I just read about on a techie website regarding elementary education”: Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? New research . . . suggests that it’s because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts. . . . The study, co-authored by [Christopher] Cornwell and David Mustard at UGA and Jessica Van Parys at Columbia, analyzed data on more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade. It examined students’ performance on standardized tests in three categories—reading, math and science-linking test scores to teachers’ assessments of their students’ progress, both academically and more broadly. The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, bo
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Introduction: Washington Post and Slate reporter Anne Applebaum wrote a dismissive column about Wikileaks, saying that they “offer nothing more than raw data.” Applebaum argues that “The notion that the Internet can replace traditional news-gathering has just been revealed to be a myth. . . . without more journalism, more investigation, more work, these documents just don’t matter that much.” Fine. But don’t undervalue the role of mere data! The usual story is that we don’t get to see the raw data underlying newspaper stories. Wikileaks and other crowdsourced data can be extremely useful, whether or not they replace “traditional news-gathering.”
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Introduction: [Update: Revised given comments from Wingfeet, Andrew and germo. Thanks! I'd mistakenly translated the dlnorm priors in the first version --- amazing what a difference the priors make. I also escaped the less-than and greater-than signs in the constraints in the model so they're visible. I also updated to match the thin=2 output of JAGS.] We’re going to be starting a Stan “model of the P” (for some time period P) column, so I thought I’d kick things off with one of my own. I’ve been following the Wingvoet blog , the author of which is identified only by the Blogger handle Wingfeet ; a couple of days ago this lovely post came out: PK calculation of IV and oral dosing in JAGS Wingfeet’s post implemented an answer to question 6 from chapter 6 of problem from Rowland and Tozer’s 2010 book, Clinical Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics , Fourth edition, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. So in the grand tradition of using this blog to procrastinate, I thought I’d t
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Introduction: Anna Lena Phillips writes : I. Many people will not, of their own accord, look at a poem. II. Millions of people will, of their own accord, spend lots and lots of time looking at photographs of cats. III. Therefore, earlier this year, I concluded that the best strategy for increasing the number of viewers for poems would be to print them on top of photographs of cats. IV. I happen to like looking at both poems and cats. V. So this is, for me, a win-win situation. VI. Fortunately, my own cat is a patient model, and (if I am to be believed) quite photogenic. VII. The aforementioned cat is Tisko Tansi, small hero. VII. Thus I present to you (albeit in digital rather than physical form) an Endearments broadside, featuring a poem that originally appeared in BlazeVOX spring 2011. VIII. If you want to share a copy of this image, please ask first. If you want a real copy, you can ask about that too. She follows up with an image of a cat, on which is superimposed a short
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Introduction: 10,000 iterations for 4 chains on the (precompiled) efficiently-parameterized 8-schools model: > date () [1] "Thu Aug 30 22:12:53 2012" > fit3 <- stan (fit=fit2, data = schools_dat, iter = 1e4, n_chains = 4) SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 1). Iteration: 10000 / 10000 [100%] (Sampling) SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 2). Iteration: 10000 / 10000 [100%] (Sampling) SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 3). Iteration: 10000 / 10000 [100%] (Sampling) SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 4). Iteration: 10000 / 10000 [100%] (Sampling) > date () [1] "Thu Aug 30 22:12:55 2012" > print (fit3) Inference for Stan model: anon_model. 4 chains: each with iter=10000; warmup=5000; thin=1; 10000 iterations saved. mean se_mean sd 2.5% 25% 50% 75% 97.5% n_eff Rhat mu 8.0 0.1 5.1 -2.0 4.7 8.0 11.3 18.4 4032 1 tau 6.7 0.1 5.6 0.3 2.5 5.4 9.3 21.2 2958 1 eta[1] 0.4 0.0 0.9 -1.5 -0
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Introduction: I was flipping through the paper yesterday and noticed something which I think is a bit of innumeracy–although I don’t have all the facts at my disposal so I can’t be sure. It came in an item by Robert Woletz, society editor of the New York Times, in response to the following letter from Max Sarinsky ( click here and scroll down): The heavy majority of couples typically featured in the Sunday wedding announcements either attended elite universities, hold corporate management positions or have parents with corporate management positions. It’s nice to learn about the nuptials of the privileged, but Times readers would benefit from learning about a more representative sampling of weddings in our diverse city. I [Sarinksy] am curious as to how editors select which announcements to publish, and why editors don’t make a sustained effort to include different types of couples. Woletz replied: The Weddings/Celebrations pages are truly open to everyone, and The Times persistentl
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