andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-622 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that “the problem with solar panels is that they’re black .” I’m not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that one? Well, I think I’ve found the answer in this article by John Lanchester: In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet.org . . . At the time he grew interested in sous vide, there was no book in English on the subject, and he resolved to write one. . . . broadened it further to include information about the basic physics of heating processes, then to include the physics and chemistry of traditional cooking techniques, and then to include the science and practical application of the highly inventive new techniq
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1 Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that “the problem with solar panels is that they’re black . [sent-1, score-1.125]
2 ” I’m not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that one? [sent-2, score-0.472]
3 Well, I think I’ve found the answer in this article by John Lanchester: In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet. [sent-3, score-0.266]
4 At the time he grew interested in sous vide, there was no book in English on the subject, and he resolved to write one. [sent-7, score-0.141]
5 But what does this have to do with solar panels? [sent-13, score-0.407]
6 Just wait: Notwithstanding its title, “Modernist Cuisine” contains hundreds of pages of original, firsthand, surprising information about traditional cooking. [sent-14, score-0.1]
7 Some of the physics is quite basic: it had never occurred to me that the reason many foods go from uncooked to burned at such speed is that light-colored foods reflect heat better than dark: “As browning reactions begin, the darkening surface rapidly soaks up more and more of the heat rays. [sent-15, score-1.214]
8 Now, I’m just guessing here, but my conjecture is that after studying this albedo effect in the kitchen, Myhrvold was primed to see it everywhere. [sent-18, score-0.307]
9 Of course, maybe it went the other way: he was thinking about solar panels first and then applied his ideas to the kitchen. [sent-19, score-0.818]
10 But, given that the experts seem to think the albedo effect is a red herring (so to speak) regarding solar panels, I wouldn’t be surprised if Myhrvold just started talking about reflectivity because it was on his mind from the cooking project. [sent-20, score-1.069]
11 My own research ideas often leak from one project to another, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens to others too. [sent-21, score-0.173]
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same-blog 1 1.0 622 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-21-A possible resolution of the albedo mystery!
Introduction: Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that “the problem with solar panels is that they’re black .” I’m not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that one? Well, I think I’ve found the answer in this article by John Lanchester: In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet.org . . . At the time he grew interested in sous vide, there was no book in English on the subject, and he resolved to write one. . . . broadened it further to include information about the basic physics of heating processes, then to include the physics and chemistry of traditional cooking techniques, and then to include the science and practical application of the highly inventive new techniq
2 0.41770893 626 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-23-Physics is hard
Introduction: Readers of this bizarre story (in which a dubious claim about reflectivity of food in cooking transmuted into a flat-out wrong claim about the relevance of reflectivity of solar panels) might wonder how genius Nathan Myhrvold (Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton at age 24, postdoc with Stephen Hawking for chrissake) could make such a basic mistake. In an earlier comment, I dismissed this with a flip allusion to Wile E. Coyote. But now I’m thinking there’s something more going on. In our blog discussion (see links above), Phil is surprised I didn’t take a stronger stance on the albedo issue after reading Pierrehumbert’s explanation. Phil asks: Why did I write “experts seem to think the albedo effect is a red herring” instead of something stronger such as, “as Pierrehumbert shows in detail, the albedo effect is a red herring”? I didn’t do this because my physics credentials are no better than Myhrvold’s. And, given that Myhrvold got it wrong, I don’t completely trus
3 0.24285528 625 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-23-My last post on albedo, I promise
Introduction: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes: It’s perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.php http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court Just about anyone’s that’s been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an “intellectual mine field” in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google’s PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in netw
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Introduction: I worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory for four summers during high school and college. I spent much of my time writing a computer program to do thermal analysis for an experiment that we put on the space shuttle. The facility I developed with the finite-element method came in handy in my job at Bell Labs the following summers. I was working for C. H. Tsao and Jim Adams in the Laboratory for Cosmic Ray Physics. We were estimating the distribution of isotopes in cosmic rays using a pile of track detectors. To get accurate measurements, you want these plastic disks to be as close as possible to a constant temperature, so we designed an elaborate wrapping of thermal blankets. My program computed the temperature of the detectors during the year that the Long Duration Exposure Facility (including our experiment and a bunch of others) was scheduled to be in orbit. The input is the heat from solar radiation (easy enough to compute given the trajectory). On the computer I tr
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Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
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Introduction: Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that “the problem with solar panels is that they’re black .” I’m not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that one? Well, I think I’ve found the answer in this article by John Lanchester: In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet.org . . . At the time he grew interested in sous vide, there was no book in English on the subject, and he resolved to write one. . . . broadened it further to include information about the basic physics of heating processes, then to include the physics and chemistry of traditional cooking techniques, and then to include the science and practical application of the highly inventive new techniq
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Introduction: Responding to journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s negative review of Freakonomics 2 in the New Yorker, Stephen Dubner writes , that, although they do not have any training in climate science, it’s also the case that: Neither of us [Levitt and Dubner] were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. But Levitt is a schoolteacher (at the University of Chicago)! And, of course, you don’t have to be a sumo wrestler to be (some kind of an) expert on sumo wrestling, nor do you have to teach in the K-12 system to be an expert in education, nor do you have to provide abortions to be an expert on abortion, etc. And Levitt has had quite a bit of horse dung thrown at him for the abortion research. The connection is that abortion and climate change matter to a lot of people, while sumo wrestling and pimps and
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Introduction: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes: It’s perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.php http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court Just about anyone’s that’s been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an “intellectual mine field” in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google’s PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in netw
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Introduction: I get suspicious when I hear unsourced claims that unnamed experts somewhere are making foolish statements. For example, I recently came across this, from a Super Bowl-themed article from 2006 by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: As it happens, there is one betting strategy that will routinely beat a bookie, and you don’t even have to be smart to use it. One of the most undervalued N.F.L. bets is the home underdog — a team favored to lose but playing in its home stadium. If you had bet $5,000 on the home underdog in every N.F.L. game over the past two decades, you would be up about $150,000 by now (a winning rate of roughly 53 percent). So far, so good. I wonder if this pattern still holds. But then Dubner and Levitt continue: This fact has led some academics to conclude that bookmakers simply aren’t very smart. If an academic researcher can find this loophole, shouldn’t a professional bookie be able to? But the fact is most bookies are doing just fine. So could it be
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Introduction: Stephen Dubner writes : Freakonomics Experiments is a set of simple experiments about complex issues—whether to break up with your significant other, quit your job, or start a diet, just to name a few. . . . a collaboration between researchers at the University of Chicago, Freakonomics, and—we hope!—you. Steve Levitt and John List, of the University of Chicago, run the experimental and statistical side of things. Stephen Dubner, Steve Levitt, and the Freakonomics staff have given these experiments the Freakonomics twist you’re used to. Once you flip the coin, you become a member of the most important part of the collaboration, the Freakonomics Experiments team. Without your participation, we couldn’t complete any of this research. . . . You’ll choose a question that you are facing today, such as whether to quit your job or buy a house. Then you’ll provide us some background information about yourself. After that, you’ll flip the coin to find out what you should do in your situati
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Introduction: Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that “the problem with solar panels is that they’re black .” I’m not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that one? Well, I think I’ve found the answer in this article by John Lanchester: In 2004, Nathan Myhrvold, who had, five years earlier, at the advanced age of forty, retired from his job as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, began to contribute to the culinary discussion board egullet.org . . . At the time he grew interested in sous vide, there was no book in English on the subject, and he resolved to write one. . . . broadened it further to include information about the basic physics of heating processes, then to include the physics and chemistry of traditional cooking techniques, and then to include the science and practical application of the highly inventive new techniq
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Introduction: A colleague writes: Due to my similar interest in plagiarism , I went to The Human Cultural and Social Landscape session. [The recipient of the American Statistical Association's Founders Award in 2002] gave the first talk in the session instead of Yasmin Said, which was modestly attended (20 or so people) and gave a sociology talk with no numbers — and no attribution to where these ideas (on Afghanistan culture) came from. Would it really have hurt to give the source of this? I’m on board with plain laziness for this one. I think he may have mentioned a number of his collaborators at the beginning, and all he talked about were cultural customs and backgrounds, no science to speak of. It’s kind of amazing to me that he actually showed up at JSM, but of course if he had any shame, he wouldn’t have repeatedly stolen copied without proper attribution in the first place. It’s not even like Doris Kearns Goodwin who reportedly produced a well-written book out of it!
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Introduction: See, for example, this report by Deborah Carr on changing attitudes about marital infidelity: Two great things about the General Social Survey are: (1) the data are freely available online , and (2) the same questions have been asked since 1972 so you get a nice long series.
4 0.89924628 877 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-Applying quantum probability to political science
Introduction: As we’ve discussed on occasion, conditional probability (“Boltzmann statistics,” in physics jargon) is false at the atomic level. (It’s false at the macroscopic level too, but with discrepancies too small to be detected directly most of the time.) Occasionally I’ve speculated on how quantum probability (that is, the laws of uncertainty that hold in the real world) might be applied to social science research. I’ve made no progress but remain intrigued by the idea. Chris Zorn told me he recently went to a meeting on applications of non-Kolmogorovian / quantum probability to social & human phenomena. Here’s his paper (with Charles Smith), “Some Quantum-Like Features of Mass Politics in Two-Party Systems,” which begins: We [Smith and Zorn] expand the substantive terrain of QI’s reach by illuminating a body of political theory that to date has been elaborated in strictly classical language and formalisms but has complex features that seem to merit generalizations of the prob
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Introduction: What really irritates me about this column (by John Steele Gordon) is not how stupid it is (an article about “millionaires” that switches within the very same paragraph between “a nest egg of $1 million” and “a $1 million annual income” without acknowledging the difference between these concepts) or the ignorance it displays (no, it’s not true that “McCain carried the middle class” in 2008—unless by “middle class” you mean “middle class whites”). No, what really ticks me off is that, when the Red State Blue State book was coming out, we pitched a “5 myths” article for the Washington Post, and they turned us down! Perhaps the rule is: if it’s in the Opinions section of the paper, it can’t contain any facts? Or, to be more precise, any facts it contains must be counterbalanced by an equal number of inanities? Grrrrr . . . I haven’t been so annoyed since reading that New York Times article that argued that electoral politics is just like high school. Who needs political scie
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