andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-579 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Val has reported success with the following trick: Get to the classroom a few minutes earlier and turn on soft music. Then set everything up and, the moment it’s time for class to begin, put a clicker question on the screen and turn off the music. The students quiet down and get to work right away. I’ve never liked the usual struggle with students to get them to settle down in class, as it seemed to set up a dynamic in which I was trying to get the students to focus and they were trying to goof off. Turning off the music seems like a great non-confrontational way to send the signal that class is starting.
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Introduction: Val has reported success with the following trick: Get to the classroom a few minutes earlier and turn on soft music. Then set everything up and, the moment it’s time for class to begin, put a clicker question on the screen and turn off the music. The students quiet down and get to work right away. I’ve never liked the usual struggle with students to get them to settle down in class, as it seemed to set up a dynamic in which I was trying to get the students to focus and they were trying to goof off. Turning off the music seems like a great non-confrontational way to send the signal that class is starting.
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Introduction: Alex Tabarrok writes : There is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. . . . Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit: Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences. Excellent points (and Tabarrok has additional good points that I haven’t quoted). We’re not all
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Introduction: Rachel Schutt (the author of the Taxonomy of Confusion) has a blog! for the course she’s teaching at Columbia, “Introduction to Data Science.” It sounds like a great course—I wish I could take it! Her latest post is “On Inspiring Students and Being Human”: Of course one hopes as a teacher that one will inspire students . . . But what I actually mean by “inspiring students” is that you are inspiring me; you are students who inspire: “inspiring students”. This is one of the happy unintended consequences of this course so far for me. She then gives examples of some of the students in her class and some of their interesting ideas: Phillip is a PhD student in the sociology department . . . He’s in the process of developing his thesis topic around some of the themes we’ve been discussing in this class, such as the emerging data science community. Arvi works at the College Board and is a part time student . . . He analyzes user-level data of students who have signed up f
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Introduction: X marks the spot . I’ll post the slides soon (not just for the students in my class; these should be helpful for anyone teaching Bayesian data analysis from our book ). But I don’t think you’ll get much from reading the slides alone; you’ll get more out of the book (or, of course, from taking the class).
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, a few months ago Val Johnson published an article, “Revised standards for statistical evidence,” making a Bayesian argument that researchers and journals should use a p=0.005 publication threshold rather than the usual p=0.05. Christian Robert and I were unconvinced by Val’s reasoning and wrote a response , “Revised evidence for statistical standards,” in which we wrote: Johnson’s minimax prior is not intended to correspond to any distribution of effect sizes; rather, it represents a worst case scenario under some mathematical assumptions. Minimax and tradeoffs do well together, and it is hard for us to see how any worst case procedure can supply much guidance on how to balance between two different losses. . . . We would argue that the appropriate significance level depends on the scenario and that what worked well for agricultural experiments in the 1920s might not be so appropriate for many applications in modern biosciences . . .
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Introduction: I’ll defer to Nate on the details but just wanted to add a couple of general thoughts. My quick answer is that you can’t learn much from primary elections. They can be important in their effects–both directly on the composition of Congress and indirectly in how they can affect behavior of congressmembers who might be scared of being challenged in future primaries–but I don’t see them as very informative indicators of the general election vote. Primaries are inherently unpredictable and are generally decided by completely different factors, and from completely different electorates, than those that decide general elections. The PA special election is a bit different since it’s a Dem vs. a Rep, but it’s also an n of 1, and it’s an election now rather than in November. Nate makes a convincing case that it’s evidence in favor of the Democrats, even if not by much.
Introduction: Devrup Ghatak writes: I am a student of economics and recently read your review of Mostly Harmless Econometrics. In the review you mention that the book contains no time series. Given that your book on data analysis (Data Analysis using Regression) does not contain any time series material either, I wonder if you happen to have any favourite time series reference similar in style/level to the data analysis book. I don’t know. The closest thing might be Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis for Spatial Data by Banerjee, Carlin, and Gelfand, but I don’t know of anything focused on time series that’s quite in the format that I’d prefer. This is not my area, though. Maybe you, the readers, have some suggestions?
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