andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-633 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
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1 This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. [sent-1, score-0.79]
2 A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! [sent-2, score-0.718]
3 There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. [sent-3, score-0.781]
4 A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. [sent-4, score-1.791]
5 It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. [sent-5, score-0.535]
6 I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. [sent-6, score-0.626]
7 I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away. [sent-10, score-0.988]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 633 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-“The New Tyranny: Carbon Monoxide Detectors?”
Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
2 0.10099275 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
3 0.092785493 1488 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-08-Annals of spam
Introduction: I have to go through the inbox to approve new comments. When I set to auto-approve, I get overwhelmed with spam. As is, I still get spam but it’s manageable. Usually the spam is uninteresting but this one caught my eye: At first this seemed reasonable enough: law firm is desperate for business, spams blogs to raise its Google ranking. But what’s with the writing in the actual comment? It’s incoherent but it doesn’t look computer-generated. My guess is that the law firm in Massachusetts hired a company that promised to raise their Google rankings, and that this company hired some non-English-speaking foreigners to search through the web and write some spam comments. If anyone actually reads the comments, they might get the impression that this law firm is staffed by illiterates . . . but, as we all know, nobody reads blog comments! P.S. I followed the link (sorry!) and came across this: I guess if they’re going to use a tragedy as an excuse to troll for Faceb
4 0.090298191 1693 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-25-Subsidized driving
Introduction: This post is by Phil. This DC Streets Blog post gives a concise summary of a report by “The Tax Foundation”. The money shot is here , a table that shows what fraction spending on roads in each state in the U.S. is covered by local, state, and federal gas taxes, tolls, registration fees, etc. (Click on the ‘rank’ table heading to put it in useful order). The national average is 51%, and in no state do drivers directly pay more than 80% of the cost of the roads and highways. That means that, nationwide, half the cost of the roads is paid out of general government funds. Even if it were 100% this still wouldn’t cover additional government costs of driving (such as military spending to protect the oil supply, and law enforcement costs, etc.) but I’ll ignore those in this post. Of course, most of the general funds that make up the difference are themselves paid by people who drive, so this isn’t as grossly unfair as it seems. But it’s still pretty unfair, and it is a huge “market di
5 0.089897409 2125 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-05-What predicts whether a school district will participate in a large-scale evaluation?
Introduction: Liz Stuart writes: I am writing to solicit ideas for how we might measure a particular type of political environment, relevant to school districts’ likelihood of participating in federal evaluations (funded by the US Department of Education) of education programs. This is part of a larger project investigating external validity and the generalizability of results from randomized trials to target populations that I am doing with Rob Olsen, Steve Bell, and Larry Orr. In this piece of the work we are trying to model the factors that may impact whether a school district is likely to participate in one of these large-scale evaluations. One factor that occurred to us was the political environment in the state, and how likely a school district might be to want to “go along with” and participate in a federal evaluation. (And that, for example, this might depend on the party alignment between the state politics and the federal government.). We were wondering if you or your readers might
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18 0.068344355 267 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-09-This Friday afternoon: Applied Statistics Center mini-conference on risk perception
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same-blog 1 0.96914214 633 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-“The New Tyranny: Carbon Monoxide Detectors?”
Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
2 0.75431341 1621 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-13-Puzzles of criminal justice
Introduction: Four recent news stories about crime and punishment made me realize, yet again, how little I understand all this. 1. “HSBC to Pay $1.92 Billion to Settle Charges of Money Laundering” : State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system. Instead, HSBC announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to a record $1.92 billion settlement with authorities. . . . I don’t understand this idea of punishing the institution. I have the same problem when the NCAA punishes a college football program. These are individual people breaking the law (or the rules), right? So why not punish them directly? Giving 40 lashes to a bunch of HSBC executives and garnisheeing their salaries for life, say, that wouldn’t destabilize the global financial system would it? From the article: “A money-laundering indictment, or a guilt
3 0.74565679 1370 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-07-Duncan Watts and the Titanic
Introduction: Daniel Mendelsohn recently asked , “Why do we love the Titanic?”, seeking to understand how it has happened that: It may not be true that ‘the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,’ as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. . . . The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. . . . If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, yo
4 0.74387783 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
5 0.72164673 1325 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-17-More on the difficulty of “preaching what you practice”
Introduction: A couple months ago, in discussing Charles Murray’s argument that America’s social leaders should “preach what they practice” (Murray argues that they—we!—tend to lead good lives of hard work and moderation but are all too tolerant of antisocial and unproductive behavior among the lower classes), I wrote : Murray does not consider the case of Joe Paterno, but in many ways the Penn State football coach fits his story well. Paterno was said to live an exemplary personal and professional life, combining traditional morality with football success—but, by his actions, he showed little concern about the morality of his players and coaches. At a professional level, Paterno rose higher and higher, and in his personal life he was a responsible adult. But he had an increasing disconnect with the real world, to the extent that horrible crimes were occurring nearby (in the physical and social senses) but he was completely insulated from the consequences for many years. Paterno’s story is s
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same-blog 1 0.91967559 633 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-“The New Tyranny: Carbon Monoxide Detectors?”
Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
2 0.91483271 64 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-Estimates of war deaths: Darfur edition
Introduction: Perhaps because of these discussions , I was pointed toward an article on “Rethinking Darfur” by Marc Gustafson, which was written up in a news story here . From the publicity email: This paper is intended to challenge the conventional wisdom about the causes and levels of violence in Darfur during the conflict there. Gustafson, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, draws on historical analysis, explores mortality surveys, and dissects six years of American budgetary allocations in Sudan, contending that while the war in Darfur has had horrific results, it has been mischaracterized persistently in terms of the scale and causes of the conflict. Gustafson argues that these mischaracterizations had negative effects on elite and public understanding of the conflict, and consequently had a rather dubious effect on policy choices. I don’t have time to look at this and so offer no comment one way or the other, but I thought it might be of interest to some of you, so I’m posting it her
3 0.89733088 813 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Scrabble!
Introduction: AT writes : Sitting on my [AT's] to-do list for a while now has been an exploration of Scrabble from an experimental design point of view; how to better design a tournament to make the variance as small as possible while still preserving the appearance of the home game to its players. . . . I’m proud (relieved?) to say that I’ve finally finished the first draft of this work for two-player head-to-head games, with a duplication method that ensures that if the game were repeated, each player would receive tiles from the reserve in the same sequence: think of the tiles being laid out in order (but unseen to the players), so that one player draws from the front and the other draws from the back. . . . One goal of this was to figure out how much of the variance in score comes from the tile order and how much comes from the board, given that a tile order would be expected. It turns out to be about half-bag, half-board . . . Some other findings from the simulations: The blank
4 0.87754744 139 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Life in New York, Then and Now
Introduction: Interesting mini-memoir from John Podhoretz about the Upper West Side, in his words, “the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen.” The only part I can’t quite follow is his offhand remark, “It is an expensive place to live, but then it always was.” I always thought that, before 1985 or so, the Upper West Side wasn’t so upscale. People at Columbia tell all sorts of stories about how things used to be in the bad old days. I have one other comment. Before giving it, let me emphasize that enjoyed reading Podhoretz’s article and, by making the comment below, I’m not trying to shoot Podhoretz down; rather, I’m trying to help out by pointing out a habit in his writing that might be getting in the way of his larger messages. Podhoretz writes the following about slum clearance: Over the course of the next four years, 20 houses on the block would be demolished and replaced with a high school named for Louis Brandeis and a relocated elementary school. Of the 35 brownstones t
Introduction: My talks at Cambridge this Wed and Thurs in the department of Machine Learning . Powerpoints are here and here . Also some videos are here (but no videos of the “Nothing is Linear, Nothing is Additive” talk).
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