andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-484 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. . . . Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any
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1 This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. [sent-1, score-1.408]
2 Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? [sent-4, score-0.091]
3 Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. [sent-5, score-0.322]
4 Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. [sent-6, score-0.14]
5 Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. [sent-10, score-0.161]
6 The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? [sent-11, score-0.425]
7 Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? [sent-12, score-0.369]
8 And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any other subject) are simply a sign of grossly pushy parents convinced that their little darlings have a good chance of running the nation. [sent-13, score-0.82]
9 Or of collecting the rents from being seen to be so…. [sent-14, score-0.08]
10 Speaking as as American who is, unfortunately, basically monoglot, I see the ability to converse, read, and wrote fluently in a foreign language to be a positive thing in itself. [sent-18, score-0.39]
11 And, we all know that foreign languages are much easier to learn when you’re a little kid. [sent-20, score-0.494]
12 Finally, if demand for French immersion education in Vancouver outstrips the supply, why don’t they start up some more French-immersion schools? [sent-21, score-0.746]
13 How does this all relate to the topics of our blog? [sent-24, score-0.063]
14 ” When people study the effects of education, they look at test scores. [sent-26, score-0.083]
15 This leads to the silliness of considering foreign language skills as a purely positional good or as a method for selecting students, while forgetting the direct benefits of being able to communicate in various ways with different cultures. [sent-30, score-0.525]
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Introduction: This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. . . . Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any
2 0.10234845 709 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-13-D. Kahneman serves up a wacky counterfactual
Introduction: I followed a link from Tyler Cowen to this bit by Daniel Kahneman: Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge. I think I know what he’s saying–if you regress income on education and other factors, and then you take education out of the model, R-squared decreases by 10%. Or something like that. Not necessarily R-squared, maybe you fit the big model, then get predictions for everyone putting in the mean value for education and look at the sd of incomes or the Gini index or whatever. Or something else along those lines. My problem is with the counterfactual: “If everyone had the same education . . .” I have a couple problems with this
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Introduction: I was updating my Mac and noticed the following: Lots of obscure European languages there. That got me wondering: what’s the least obscure language not on the above list? Igbo? Swahili? Or maybe Tagalog? I did a quick google and found this list of languages by number of native speakers. Once you see the list, the answer is obvious: Hindi, first language of 295 million people, is not on Apple’s list. The next most popular languages not included: Bengali, Punjabi, Javanese, Wu, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu. Wow: most of these are Indian! Then comes Persian and a bunch of others. It turns out that Tagalog, Igbo, and Swahili, are way down on this list with 28 million, 24 million, and 26 million native speakers, respectively. Only 26 million for Swahili? This made me want to check the list of languages by total number of speakers . The ranking of most of the languages isn’t much different, but Swahili is now #10, at 140 million. Hindi and Bengali are still th
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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: This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. . . . Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any
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: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
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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: In discussing the ongoing Los Angeles Times series on teacher effectiveness, Alex Tabarrok and I both were impressed that the newspaper was reporting results on individual teachers, moving beyond the general research findings (“teachers matter,” “KIPP really works, but it requires several extra hours in the school day,” and so forth) that we usually see from value-added analyses in education. My first reaction was that the L.A. Times could get away with this because, unlike academic researchers, they can do whatever they want as long as they don’t break the law. They don’t have to answer to an Institutional Review Board. (By referring to this study by its publication outlet rather than its authors, I’m violating my usual rule (see the last paragraph here ). In this case, I think it’s ok to refer to the “L.A. Times study” because what’s notable is not the analysis (thorough as it may be) but how it is being reported.) Here I’d like to highlight a few other things came up in our
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Introduction: This (forwarded to me from Jeff, from a powerpoint by Willam Gawthrop) wins not on form but on content: Really this graph should stand alone but it’s so wonderful that I can’t resist pointing out a few things: - The gap between 610 and 622 A.D. seems to be about the same as the previous 600 years, and only a little less than the 1400 years before that. - “Pious and devout” Jews are portrayed as having steadily increased in nonviolence up to the present day. Been to Israel lately? - I assume the line labeled “Bible” is referring to Christians? I’m sort of amazed to see pious and devout Christians listed as being maximally violent at the beginning. Huh? I thought Christ was supposed to be a nonviolent, mellow dude. The line starts at 3 B.C., implying that baby Jesus was at the extreme of violence. Gong forward, we can learn from the graph that pious and devout Christians in 1492 or 1618, say, were much more peaceful than Jesus and his crew. - Most amusingly g
Introduction: I just want to share with you the best comment we’ve every had in the nearly ten-year history of this blog. Also it has statistical content! Here’s the story. After seeing an amusing article by Tom Scocca relating how reporter John Lee Anderson called someone as a “little twerp” on twitter: I conjectured that Anderson suffered from “tall person syndrome,” that problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them. But I had no idea of Anderson’s actual height. Commenter Gary responded with this impressive bit of investigative reporting: Based on this picture: he appears to be fairly tall. But the perspective makes it hard to judge. Based on this picture: he appears to be about 9-10 inches taller than Catalina Garcia. But how tall is Catalina Garcia? Not that tall – she’s shorter than the high-wire artist Phillipe Petit: And he doesn’t appear
3 0.91536343 552 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-03-Model Makers’ Hippocratic Oath
Introduction: Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott wonder how to get their fellow modelers to give up their fantasy of perfection. In a Business Week article they proposed, not entirely in jest, a model makers’ Hippocratic Oath: I will remember that I didn’t make the world and that it doesn’t satisfy my equations. Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics. I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights. I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension. Found via Abductive Intelligence .
Introduction: Elsewhere: 1. They asked me to write about my “favorite election- or campaign-related movie, novel, or TV show” (Salon) 2. The shopping period is over; the time for buying has begun (NYT) 3. If anybody’s gonna be criticizing my tax plan, I want it to be this guy (Monkey Cage) 4. The 4 key qualifications to be a great president; unfortunately George W. Bush satisfies all four, and Ronald Reagan doesn’t match any of them (Monkey Cage) 5. The politics of eyeliner (Monkey Cage)
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