andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-571 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
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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1 I was recently struggling with the Columbia University philophy department’s webpage (to see who might be interested in this stuff ). [sent-1, score-0.441]
2 The faculty webpage was horrible: it’s just a list of names and links with no information on research interests. [sent-2, score-1.095]
3 So I did some searching on the web and found a wonderful wikipedia page which had exactly what I wanted. [sent-3, score-0.637]
4 Then I checked my own department’s page , and it’s even worse than what they have in philosophy! [sent-4, score-0.384]
5 (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. [sent-5, score-1.623]
6 ) 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. [sent-6, score-0.904]
7 In the meantime, if anybody feels like setting up a wikipedia entry for the research of Columbia’s statistics faculty, that would be great. [sent-8, score-0.598]
8 As it is, I think it would be difficult for outsiders who don’t know us to have any idea of what we do here! [sent-9, score-0.197]
9 The political science department’s faculty listing is useless as well. [sent-12, score-0.774]
10 The physics department’s wikipage is pretty useless for a potential student’s purposes, though–lots on history but nothing much on what the faculty are doing now. [sent-17, score-0.985]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 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
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).
3 0.17160805 956 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-13-Hey, you! Don’t take that class!
Introduction: Back when I taught at Berkeley, I once asked a Ph.D. student how he’d decided to work with me. He said that a couple of the tenured professors had advised him not to take my class, and that this advice had got him curious: What about Bayesian statistics is so dangerous that it can scare these otherwise unflappable stat professors. Overall, my senior colleagues’ advice to students to avoid my course probably decreased my enrollment, but the students who did decide to attend surely had better character than the ones who followed directions. (Or, at least I’d like to think that.) I was reminded of that incident recently when reading a news article by Marc Tracy: A U.S. Department of Education committee is investigating whether a Columbia University department head “steered” a Jewish student away from taking a class on the Mideast taught by Professor Joseph Massad due to the perception that she would be “uncomfortable” because of the professor’s pro-Palestinian tilt . . . “Ba
Introduction: Speakers: Cyrus Samii, PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, Columbia University: “Peacebuilding Policies as Quasi-Experiments: Some Examples” Macartan Humphreys, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University: “Sampling in developing countries: Five challenges from the field” Friday 22 Oct, 3-5pm in the Playroom (707 International Affairs Building). Open to all.
5 0.16540541 213 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Matching at two levels
Introduction: Steve Porter writes with a question about matching for inferences in a hierarchical data structure. I’ve never thought about this particular issue, but it seems potentially important. Maybe one or more of you have some useful suggestions? Porter writes: After immersing myself in the relatively sparse literature on propensity scores with clustered data, it seems as if people take one of two approaches. If the treatment is at the cluster-level (like school policies), they match on only the cluster-level covariates. If the treatment is at the individual level, they match on individual-level covariates. (I have also found some papers that match on individual-level covariates when it seems as if the treatment is really at the cluster-level.) But what if there is a selection process at both levels? For my research question (effect of tenure systems on faculty behavior) there is a two-step selection process: first colleges choose whether to have a tenure system for faculty; then f
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20 0.10028718 35 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-16-Another update on the spam email study
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same-blog 1 0.97174615 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
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).
3 0.74367565 2012 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-07-Job openings at American University
Introduction: American University in Washington, D.C. has two full-time tenure-line positions available : An ideal candidate will have facility with computation, and can identify specific prospects for on-campus collaboration, possibly interdepartmental. We are particularly interested in candidates who can assist colleagues who need to deal with data sets that are too large, distributed, or heterogeneous to be amenable to traditional methods of analysis. From a mathematician, we also seek a research program with deep roots in mathematics. From a statistician, we seek a familiarity with Bayesian modeling. We are open to researchers who ignore traditional disciplinary boundaries. I like the bits about computation, interdepartmental, and Bayesian modeling. My former colleagues at Berkeley would be spinning in their theorems were they to see this (but, don’t worry, I doubt they read blogs). I really do think that computation is more important than theorem-proving. Both are important (for exam
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:
Introduction: (1) Hop the Q-Train ! That is, the Columbia/NYU Quantitative Training Program, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to create a cohort of postdoctoral scholars both to develop the new statistical methods required to meet future research challenges and to effectively train and consult with other education researchers. You’ll be working with Jennifer Hill, Marc Scott, and me on our exciting research projects, some of which are here ! Candidates must be United States citizens or permanent residents. For best consideration applications must be submitted before 15 Nov 2012. Please direct administrative inquiries to Jonathan Winters at jonathan.winters@nyu.edu and substantive inquiries to Jennifer or me. (2) The Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellows program ! Every year a select group of recent Ph.D.s in a variety of fields come to the Earth Institute for this two-year research fellowship. I’d love to see more statisticians applying. To apply, candidates must compl
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8 0.67875481 866 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-23-Participate in a research project on combining information for prediction
9 0.67590308 361 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-21-Tenure-track statistics job at Teachers College, here at Columbia!
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19 0.63178909 1643 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-29-Sexism in science (as elsewhere)
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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
2 0.95760798 2260 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-22-Postdoc at Rennes on multilevel missing data imputation
Introduction: Julie Josse sends along this job announcement: A post-doctoral position is available in the applied mathematics department of Agrocampus Rennes. The postdoc will be funded by the Henri Lebesgue Center (see http://www.lebesgue.fr/) if the application is selected. Applicants are expected to send their application before 31 March 2014. The research focus is on development of new methods to deal with missing values and their implementation in the free R software to make them available. We study new multiple imputation methods based on principal component methods. Different aspects are expected to be covered: dealing with missing values in multi-blocks, multi-groups data (groups of individuals and variables); regularization in this framework using a Bayesian approach, dealing with different types of data (continuous, categoricals, etc.). Fields of application are wide and include biological data as well as socio-economic data. Key words: missing values, matrix completion, PCA, B
3 0.9538303 1595 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-28-Should Harvard start admitting kids at random?
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to an article where Ron Unz provides evidence that Jews are way overrepresented at Ivy League colleges, with Asians-Americans and non-Jewish whites correspondingly underrepresented. Unz attributes this to bias and pressure in the admissions office and recommends that, instead, top colleges should switch to a system based purely academic credentials (he never clearly defines these, but I assume he’s talking about high school grades, SAT scores, and prizes in recognized academic competitions). He recommends that Harvard, for example, get rid of preferences for athletes, musicians, and rich people, and instead reserve one-fifth of their slots based on pure academic merit and with the remaining four-fifth “being randomly selected from the 30,000 or so American applicants considered able to reasonably perform at the school’s required academic level and thereby benefit from a Harvard education.” A lot would depend on where that lower threshold is set. As a teacher
Introduction: One of the new examples for the third edition of Bayesian Data Analysis is a spell-checking story. Here it is (just start at 2/3 down on the first page, with “Spelling correction”). I like this example—it demonstrates the Bayesian algebra, also gives a sense of the way that probability models (both “likelihood” and “prior”) are constructed from existing assumptions and data. The models aren’t just specified as a mathematical exercise, they represent some statement about reality. And the problem is close enough to our experience that we can consider ways in which the model can be criticized and improved, all in a simple example that has only three possibilities.
5 0.94797593 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
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