andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-413 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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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same-blog 1 0.99999994 413 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-14-Statistics of food consumption
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.
2 0.22755268 238 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-27-No radon lobby
Introduction: Kaiser writes thoughtfully about the costs, benefits, and incentives for different policy recommendation options regarding a recent water crisis. Good stuff: it’s solid “freakonomics”–and I mean this in positive way: a mix of economic and statistical analysis, with assumptions stated clearly. Kaiser writes: Using the framework from Chapter 4, we should think about the incentives facing the Mass. Water Resources Authority: A false positive error (people asked to throw out water when water is clean) means people stop drinking tap water temporarily, perhaps switching to bottled water, and the officials claim victory when no one falls sick, and businesses that produce bottled water experience a jump in sales. It is also very difficult to prove a “false positive” when people have stopped drinking the water. So this type of error is easy to hide behind. A false negative error (people told it’s safe to drink water when water is polluted) becomes apparent when someone falls sick
3 0.1500414 1698 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-30-The spam just gets weirder and weirder
Introduction: In the inbox today, under the header, “Hidden Costs behind Milk & Dairy Consumption (video)”: Hey Professor Gelman, Our site’s production team recently released a short video uncovering the local and global impact that milk has on our lives. After spending some time on your posts, I noticed you talked about dairy products and milk so I thought I’d email you. Are you the correct person to contact in regards to the content on the site? If so, let me know if you’re interested in checking out the video. Thanks, Emily S. Hmmm . . . I guess I do talk a lot about dairy products and milk on this site!
4 0.14232951 271 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-12-GLM – exposure
Introduction: Bernard Phiri writes: I am relatively new to glm models, anyhow, I am currently using your book “Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models” (pages 109-115). I am using a Poisson GLM model to analyse an aerial census dataset of wild herbivores on a ranch in Kenya. In my analysis I have the following variables: 1. Outcome variable: count of wild herbivores sighted at a given location 2. Explanatory variable1: vegetation type i.e. type of vegetation of the grid in which animals were sighted (the ranch is divided into 1x1km grids) 3. Explanatory variable2: animal species e.g. eland, elephant, zebra etc 4. Exposure: proximity to water i.e. distance (km) to the nearest water point My questions are as follows: 1. Am I correct to include proximity to water point as an offset? I notice that in the example in your book the offset is a count, does this matter? 2. By including proximity to water in the model as an exposure am I correct to interpret th
5 0.12490685 179 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-03-An Olympic size swimming pool full of lithium water
Introduction: As part of his continuing plan to sap etc etc., Aleks pointed me to an article by Max Miller reporting on a recommendation from Jacob Appel: Adding trace amounts of lithium to the drinking water could limit suicides. . . . Communities with higher than average amounts of lithium in their drinking water had significantly lower suicide rates than communities with lower levels. Regions of Texas with lower lithium concentrations had an average suicide rate of 14.2 per 100,000 people, whereas those areas with naturally higher lithium levels had a dramatically lower suicide rate of 8.7 per 100,000. The highest levels in Texas (150 micrograms of lithium per liter of water) are only a thousandth of the minimum pharmaceutical dose, and have no known deleterious effects. I don’t know anything about this and am offering no judgment on it; I’m just passing it on. The research studies are here and here . I am skeptical, though, about this part of the argument: We are not talking a
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18 0.051655117 188 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Fake newspaper headlines
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same-blog 1 0.89783257 413 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-14-Statistics of food consumption
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.
2 0.66528583 12 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-More on problems with surveys estimating deaths in war zones
Introduction: Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. Our responses to the debate were posted on our website last week. “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. We also argued that deaths from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition had declined. (The exec. summary is here .) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries w
3 0.61231124 2308 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-27-White stripes and dead armadillos
Introduction: Paul Alper writes: For years I [Alper] have been obsessed by the color of the line which divides oncoming (i.e., opposing) traffic because I was firmly convinced that the color of the center line changed during my lifetime. Yet, I never could find anyone who had the same remembrance (or interest in the topic). The other day I found this this explanation that vindicates my recollection (and I was continuously out of the U.S. from 1969 to 1973): The question of which color to use for highway center lines in the United States enjoyed considerable debate and changing standards over a period of several decades. By November 1954, 47 states had adopted white as their standard color for highway centerlines, with Oregon being the last holdout to use yellow. In 1958, the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads adopted white as the standard color for the new interstate highway system. The 1971 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, however, mandated yellow as the standard color o
4 0.60493261 1147 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-30-Statistical Murder
Introduction: Image via Wikipedia Robert Zubrin writes in “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3
5 0.5884915 2022 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-13-You heard it here first: Intense exercise can suppress appetite
Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. The New York Times recently ran an article entitled “How Exercise Can Help Us Eat Less,” which begins with this: “Strenuous exercise seems to dull the urge to eat afterward better than gentler workouts, several new studies show, adding to a growing body of science suggesting that intense exercise may have unique benefits.” The article is based on a couple of recent studies in which moderately overweight volunteers participated in different types of exercise, and had their food intake monitored at a subsequent meal. The article also says “[The volunteers] also displayed significantly lower levels of the hormone ghrelin, which is known to stimulate appetite, and elevated levels of both blood lactate and blood sugar, which have been shown to lessen the drive to eat, after the most vigorous interval session than after the other workouts. And the appetite-suppressing effect of the highly intense intervals lingered into the next day, according to food diarie
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same-blog 1 0.97037184 413 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-14-Statistics of food consumption
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.
2 0.74733293 1589 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-25-Life as a blogger: the emails just get weirder and weirder
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
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
4 0.67937428 1677 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-16-Greenland is one tough town
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.
5 0.66964287 1856 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-14-GPstuff: Bayesian Modeling with Gaussian Processes
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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