andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-526 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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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1 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. [sent-2, score-1.427]
2 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? [sent-3, score-0.475]
3 ” The study is from Oregon Health Sciences University, at which the legislator is a professor. [sent-4, score-0.421]
4 Greenlick also says “”If it’s true that it’s unsafe, we have an obligation to protect people. [sent-5, score-0.158]
5 If I thought a law would save one child’s life, I would step in and do it. [sent-6, score-0.249]
6 The first is in the category of “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” and involves the statement about how many riders have injuries. [sent-9, score-0.157]
7 As quoted on a blog , the author of the study in question says that, when it comes to what is characterized as an injury, “It could just be skinning your knee or spraining your ankle, but it couldn’t just be a near miss. [sent-10, score-0.17]
8 ” By this standard, lots of other things one might do with one’s child — such as playing with her, for instance — might be even more likely to cause injury. [sent-11, score-0.303]
9 The second problem with Greenlick’s approach is that it seems predicated on the idea that, in his words, “If I thought a law would save one child’s life, I would step in and do it. [sent-14, score-0.409]
10 Any reasonable person should be in favor of saving children’s lives, but not at all cost. [sent-17, score-0.066]
11 We could make it illegal to allow children to climb trees, to eat peanuts, to cross the street without holding an adult’s hand…perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to ride in cars. [sent-18, score-0.387]
12 ” If true, this is a really wasteful and inefficient system. [sent-21, score-0.145]
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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
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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: Speaking of Tyler Cowen, I’m puzzled by this paragraph of his: Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner. In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else. I don’t know anything about guns so I’ll set that part aside. My bafflement is with the claim that “there is an elite which has absolutely no problem handling [alcohol].” Is he kidding? Unless Cowen is circularly defining “an elite” as the subset of elites who don’t have an alcohol problem, I don’t buy this claim. And I actually think it’s a serious problem, that various “elites” are so sure that they have “absolutely no problem” that they do dangerous, dangerous things. Consider the notorious incident when Dick Cheney shot a
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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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Introduction: This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to pick just one. But here ya go. This figure shows fatalities (among cyclists) versus distance cycled, with a point for each year…unfortunately ending in way back in 1998, but still: This is a good alternative to the more common choice for this sort of plot, which would be overlaying curves of fatalities vs time and distance cycled vs time. The article also explicitly discusses the fact, previously discussed on this blog , that it’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer . Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if peo
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Introduction: William Perkins, Mark Tygert, and Rachel Ward write : If a discrete probability distribution in a model being tested for goodness-of-fit is not close to uniform, then forming the Pearson χ2 statistic can involve division by nearly zero. This often leads to serious trouble in practice — even in the absence of round-off errors . . . The problem is not merely that the chi-squared statistic doesn’t have the advertised chi-squared distribution —a reference distribution can always be computed via simulation, either using the posterior predictive distribution or by conditioning on a point estimate of the cell expectations and then making a degrees-of-freedom sort of adjustment. Rather, the problem is that, when there are lots of cells with near-zero expectation, the chi-squared test is mostly noise. And this is not merely a theoretical problem. It comes up in real examples. Here’s one, taken from the classic 1992 genetics paper of Guo and Thomspson: And here are the e
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Introduction: NYT columnist Douthat asks: Should we be disturbed that a leading presidential candidate endorses a pro-slavery position? Who’s on the web? And where are they? Sowell, Carlson, Barone: fools, knaves, or simply victims of a cognitive illusion? Don’t blame the American public for the D.C. deadlock Calvin College update Help reform the Institutional Review Board (IRB) system! Powerful credit-rating agencies are a creation of the government . . . what does it mean when they bite the hand that feeds them? “Waiting for a landslide” A simple theory of why Obama didn’t come out fighting in 2009 A modest proposal Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Family Research Council and the Barnard Center for Research on Women Sleazy data miners Genetic essentialism is in our genes Wow, that was a lot! No wonder I don’t get any research done…
Introduction: Earlier today, Nate criticized a U.S. military survey that asks troops the question, “Do you currently serve with a male or female Service member you believe to be homosexual.” [emphasis added] As Nate points out, by asking this question in such a speculative way, “it would seem that you’ll be picking up a tremendous number of false positives–soldiers who are believed to be gay, but aren’t–and that these false positives will swamp any instances in which soldiers (in spite of DADT) are actually somewhat open about their same-sex attractions.” This is a general problem in survey research. In an article in Chance magazine in 1997, “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun uses: a case study of survey overestimates of rare events” [see here for related references], David Hemenway uses the false-positive, false-negative reasoning to explain this bias in terms of probability theory. Misclassifications that induce seemingly minor biases in estimates of certain small probab
Introduction: David Ebert sends this along: Purdue University School of ECE Faculty Position in Human-Centered Computing The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University invites applications for a faculty position at any level in human-centered computing, including but not limited to visualization, visual analytics, human-computer interaction (HCI), imaging, and graphics. . . . Applications should consist of a cover letter, a CV, research and teaching statements, names and contact information for at least three references, and URLs for three to five online papers. . . . We will consider applications through March 2013. It’s great to see this sort of thing. P.S. Amusingly enough, the Purdue Visualization and Analytics Center has an ugly, bureaucratic, text-heavy webpage . Not that I’m one to talk, the Columbia stat dept has an ugly webpage too (although I think we’ll be switching soon to something better).
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