andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-386 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Xian pointed me to this recycling of a classic probability error. It’s too bad it was in the New York Times, but at least it was in the Opinion Pages, so I guess that’s not so bad. And, on the plus side, several of the blog commenters got the point. What I was wondering, though, was who was this “Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv”? This is such a standard problem, I’m surprised to find a statistics professor making this mistake. I was curious what his area of research is and where he was trained. I started by googling Yitzhak Melechson but all I could find was this news story, over and over and over and over again. Then I found Tel Aviv University and navigated to its statistics department but couldn’t find any Melechson in the faculty list. Next stop: entering Melechson in the search engine at the Tel Aviv University website. It came up blank. One last try: I entered the Yitzhak Melechson into Google Scholar. Here’s what came up:
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Xian pointed me to this recycling of a classic probability error. [sent-1, score-0.089]
2 And, on the plus side, several of the blog commenters got the point. [sent-3, score-0.097]
3 What I was wondering, though, was who was this “Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv”? [sent-4, score-0.165]
4 This is such a standard problem, I’m surprised to find a statistics professor making this mistake. [sent-5, score-0.279]
5 I was curious what his area of research is and where he was trained. [sent-6, score-0.091]
6 I started by googling Yitzhak Melechson but all I could find was this news story, over and over and over and over again. [sent-7, score-0.218]
7 Then I found Tel Aviv University and navigated to its statistics department but couldn’t find any Melechson in the faculty list. [sent-8, score-0.252]
8 Next stop: entering Melechson in the search engine at the Tel Aviv University website. [sent-9, score-0.229]
9 One last try: I entered the Yitzhak Melechson into Google Scholar. [sent-11, score-0.08]
10 Here’s what came up: Your search – Yitzhak Melechson – did not match any articles Computing wrong probabilities for the lottery must be a full-time job! [sent-12, score-0.356]
11 If there’s some part of this story that I’m missing, please let me know. [sent-16, score-0.094]
12 How many statistics professors could there be in Tel Aviv, anyway? [sent-17, score-0.138]
13 Perhaps there’s some obvious explanation that’s eluding me. [sent-18, score-0.096]
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same-blog 1 1.0 386 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Classic probability mistake, this time in the (virtual) pages of the New York Times
Introduction: Xian pointed me to this recycling of a classic probability error. It’s too bad it was in the New York Times, but at least it was in the Opinion Pages, so I guess that’s not so bad. And, on the plus side, several of the blog commenters got the point. What I was wondering, though, was who was this “Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv”? This is such a standard problem, I’m surprised to find a statistics professor making this mistake. I was curious what his area of research is and where he was trained. I started by googling Yitzhak Melechson but all I could find was this news story, over and over and over and over again. Then I found Tel Aviv University and navigated to its statistics department but couldn’t find any Melechson in the faculty list. Next stop: entering Melechson in the search engine at the Tel Aviv University website. It came up blank. One last try: I entered the Yitzhak Melechson into Google Scholar. Here’s what came up:
2 0.14249092 2144 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-23-I hate this stuff
Introduction: Aki pointed me to this article . I’m too exhausted to argue all this in detail yet one more time, but let me just say that I hate this stuff for the reasons given in Section 5 of this paper from 1998 (based on classroom activities from 1994). I’ve hated this stuff for a long time. And I don’t think Yitzhak likes it either; see this discussion from 2005 and this from 2009.
3 0.082740843 731 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-Lottery probability update
Introduction: It was reported last year that the national lottery of Israel featured the exact same 6 numbers (out of 45) twice in the same month, and statistics professor Isaac Meilijson of Tel Aviv University was quoted as saying that “the incident of six numbers repeating themselves within a month is an event of once in 10,000 years.” I shouldn’t mock when it comes to mathematics–after all, I proved a false theorem once! (Or, to be precise, my collaborator and I published a false claim which we thought we’d proved, thus we thought was a theorem.) So let me retract the mockery and move, first to the mathematics and then to the statistics. First, how many possibilities are there in pick 6 out of 45? It’s (45*44*43*42*41*40)/6! = 8,145,060. Let’s call this number N. Second, what’s the probability that the same numbers repeat in a single calendar month? I’ve been told that the Israeli lottery has 2 draws per week, That’s 104/12=8.67 draws per month. Or maybe they skip some holiday
4 0.073973767 361 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-21-Tenure-track statistics job at Teachers College, here at Columbia!
Introduction: See below for the job announcement. It’s for Teachers College, which is about 2 blocks from the statistics department and 2 blocks from the political science department. So even though I don’t have any official connection with Teachers College (besides occasionally working with them on research projects), I very much would like to have another exciting young applied researcher here, to complement all the people we currently have in stat, poli sci, engineering, etc. In particular, we have zillions of interesting and important social science research projects going on here, and they all need statistics work. A lot of social scientists do statistics, but it’s not so easy to find a statistician who does serious social science research. All this is to say that I hope this job gets some applicants from some people who are serious about applied statistics and the development of new models and methods. Teachers College, Columbia University Department of Human Development APPLIE
5 0.060001571 571 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-13-A departmental wiki page?
Introduction: I was recently struggling with the Columbia University philophy department’s webpage (to see who might be interested in this stuff ). The faculty webpage was horrible: it’s just a list of names and links with no information on research interests. So I did some searching on the web and found a wonderful wikipedia page which had exactly what I wanted. Then I checked my own department’s page , and it’s even worse than what they have in philosophy! (We also have this page, which is even worse in that it omits many of our faculty and has a bunch of ridiculously technical links for some of the faculty who are included.) I don’t know about the philosophy department, but the statistics department’s webpage is an overengineered mess, designed from the outset to look pretty rather than to be easily updated. Maybe we could replace it entirely with a wiki? In the meantime, if anybody feels like setting up a wikipedia entry for the research of Columbia’s statistics faculty, that
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18 0.044634536 18 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-06-$63,000 worth of abusive research . . . or just a really stupid waste of time?
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simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95643115 386 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Classic probability mistake, this time in the (virtual) pages of the New York Times
Introduction: Xian pointed me to this recycling of a classic probability error. It’s too bad it was in the New York Times, but at least it was in the Opinion Pages, so I guess that’s not so bad. And, on the plus side, several of the blog commenters got the point. What I was wondering, though, was who was this “Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv”? This is such a standard problem, I’m surprised to find a statistics professor making this mistake. I was curious what his area of research is and where he was trained. I started by googling Yitzhak Melechson but all I could find was this news story, over and over and over and over again. Then I found Tel Aviv University and navigated to its statistics department but couldn’t find any Melechson in the faculty list. Next stop: entering Melechson in the search engine at the Tel Aviv University website. It came up blank. One last try: I entered the Yitzhak Melechson into Google Scholar. Here’s what came up:
2 0.78826237 571 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-13-A departmental wiki page?
Introduction: I was recently struggling with the Columbia University philophy department’s webpage (to see who might be interested in this stuff ). The faculty webpage was horrible: it’s just a list of names and links with no information on research interests. So I did some searching on the web and found a wonderful wikipedia page which had exactly what I wanted. Then I checked my own department’s page , and it’s even worse than what they have in philosophy! (We also have this page, which is even worse in that it omits many of our faculty and has a bunch of ridiculously technical links for some of the faculty who are included.) I don’t know about the philosophy department, but the statistics department’s webpage is an overengineered mess, designed from the outset to look pretty rather than to be easily updated. Maybe we could replace it entirely with a wiki? In the meantime, if anybody feels like setting up a wikipedia entry for the research of Columbia’s statistics faculty, that
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Introduction: This one is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but . . . wow! Pretty blatant. Maybe someone could endow the Raymond Keene Chair of Cut-and-Paste in the statistics department at George Mason University. Anyway, say what you want about this dude, at least he’s classy. He steals not from Wikipedia but from Gary Kasparov:
4 0.70187569 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
Introduction: A blog commenter pointed me to this news article on Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology professor here: He was the subject last year of a grueling investigation into a quarter-million dollars of spending that Columbia auditors said was insufficiently documented, misappropriated or outright fabricated. According to internal documents from that investigation, which were obtained by The New York Times, the auditors said that Professor Venkatesh directed $52,328 to someone without any “documented evidence of work performed.” He listed a dinner for 25 people, relating to research on professional baseball players; auditors found that only 8 people had attended . . . All told, auditors questioned expenses amounting to $241,364.83. . . . Professor Venkatesh said in a brief phone conversation in October that he had repaid $13,000. . . . “I have never been accused of fraud or embezzlement.” One thing that frustrates me with newspaper articles is when they don’t follow up. Venkatesh was
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Introduction: Here (from the Annals of Applied Statistics ). “Thus, arguably, all of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise.” As with retractions in general, it makes me wonder about the rest of this guy’s work. Dr. Anil Potti would be pooping in his pants spinning in his retirement .
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1 0.95347857 1778 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-27-My talk at the University of Michigan today 4pm
Introduction: Causality and Statistical Learning Andrew Gelman, Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University Wed 27 Mar, 4pm, Betty Ford Auditorium, Ford School of Public Policy Causal inference is central to the social and biomedical sciences. There are unresolved debates about the meaning of causality and the methods that should be used to measure it. As a statistician, I am trained to say that randomized experiments are a gold standard, yet I have spent almost all my applied career analyzing observational data. In this talk we shall consider various approaches to causal reasoning from the perspective of an applied statistician who recognizes the importance of causal identification yet must learn from available information. Two relevant papers are here and here .
2 0.92510915 1127 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-18-The Fixie Bike Index
Introduction: Where are the fixed-gear bike riders? Rohin Dhar explains : At Priceonomics, in order to build our bicycle price guide, we measure what kind of used bikes people are trying to sell and the quantity sold in any city. By mining our database of 1.3 million bicycle listings, we can tell what are the largest markets for used bicycles, how the prices vary by region, and where people who prize fixed gear bikes live. Fixies (fixed gear bikes) are considered to be a strong indicator of hipsterness. For those unfamiliar, a fixed gear bike requires riding in a single gear and the only way to stop the bike is to pedal backwards to help skid the bike to a halt. You can’t “coast” on a fixie; when you are biking downhill, your pedals will keep moving so you better keep pedaling too. Because of the minimalism of this fixed gear system, the bikes tend to be aesthetically pleasing but somewhat challenging to ride. . . . In short, fixed gear bikes = hipsters, and New York boroug
same-blog 3 0.89016557 386 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Classic probability mistake, this time in the (virtual) pages of the New York Times
Introduction: Xian pointed me to this recycling of a classic probability error. It’s too bad it was in the New York Times, but at least it was in the Opinion Pages, so I guess that’s not so bad. And, on the plus side, several of the blog commenters got the point. What I was wondering, though, was who was this “Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv”? This is such a standard problem, I’m surprised to find a statistics professor making this mistake. I was curious what his area of research is and where he was trained. I started by googling Yitzhak Melechson but all I could find was this news story, over and over and over and over again. Then I found Tel Aviv University and navigated to its statistics department but couldn’t find any Melechson in the faculty list. Next stop: entering Melechson in the search engine at the Tel Aviv University website. It came up blank. One last try: I entered the Yitzhak Melechson into Google Scholar. Here’s what came up:
4 0.88651979 992 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-Deadwood in the math curriculum
Introduction: Mark Palko asks : What are the worst examples of curriculum dead wood? Here’s the background: One of the first things that hit me [Palko] when I started teaching high school math was how much material there was to cover. . . . The most annoying part, though, was the number of topics that could easily have been cut, thus giving the students the time to master the important skills and concepts. The example that really stuck with me was synthetic division, a more concise but less intuitive way of performing polynomial long division. Both of these topics are pretty much useless in daily life but polynomial long division does, at least, give the student some insight into the relationship between polynomials and familiar base-ten numbers. Synthetic division has no such value; it’s just a faster but less interesting way of doing something you’ll never have to do. I started asking hardcore math people — mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, rocket scientists — if they.’d ever u
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Introduction: Completely non-gay historian Niall Ferguson, a man who we can be sure would never be caught at a ballet or a poetry reading, informs us that the British decision to enter the first world war on the side of France and Belgium was “the biggest error in modern history.” Ummm, here are a few bigger errors: The German decision to invade Russia in 1941. The Japanese decision to attack America in 1941. Oh yeah , the German decision to invade Belgium in 1914. The Russian decision to invade Afghanistan in 1981 doesn’t look like such a great decision either. And it wasn’t so smart for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, but maybe the countries involved were too small for this to count as “the biggest error in modern history.” It’s striking that, in considering the biggest error in modern history, Ferguson omits all these notorious acts of aggression (bombing Pearl Harbor, leading to the destruction of much of your country, that was pretty bad, huh?), and decides that the worst
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