andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-737 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
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1 When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. [sent-1, score-0.934]
2 (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. [sent-2, score-1.029]
3 But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. [sent-3, score-0.275]
4 I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. [sent-5, score-0.403]
5 My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it? [sent-6, score-0.445]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 737 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Memorial Day question
Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
2 0.155746 1167 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-14-Extra babies on Valentine’s Day, fewer on Halloween?
Introduction: Just in time for the holiday, X pointed me to an article by Becca Levy, Pil Chung, and Martin Slade reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. The data are publicly available, so maybe someone could make those graphs? If the Valentine’s/Halloween data are worth publishing, I think more comprehensive graphs should be publishable as well. I’d post them here, that’s for sure.
3 0.13968018 1376 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-12-Simple graph WIN: the example of birthday frequencies
Introduction: From Chris Mulligan: The data come from the Center for Disease Control and cover the years 1969-1988. Chris also gives instructions for how to download the data and plot them in R from scratch (in 30 lines of R code)! And now, the background A few months ago I heard about a study reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: I wrote , What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. I was pointed to some tables: and a graph from Matt Stiles: The heatmap is cute but I wanted to se
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Introduction: They didn’t have room for all four graphs of the time-series decomposition so they just displayed the date-of-year graph: They rotated so the graph fit better on the page. The rotation worked for me, but I was a bit bummed that that they put the title and heading of the graph (“The birthrate tends to drop on holidays . . .”) on the left in the Mar-Apr slot, leaving no room to label Leap Day and April Fool’s. I suggested to the graphics people that they put the label at the very top and just shrink the rest of the graph by 5 or 10% so as to not take up any more total space. Then there’d be plenty of space to label Leap Day and April Fool’s. But they didn’t do it, maybe they felt that it wouldn’t look good to have the label right at the top, I dunno.
5 0.082679726 752 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Traffic Prediction
Introduction: I always thought predicting traffic for a particular day and time would be something easily predicted from historic data with regression. Google Maps now has this feature: It would be good to actually include season, holiday and similar information: the predictions would be better. I wonder if one can find this data easily, or if others have done this work before.
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same-blog 1 0.93304265 737 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Memorial Day question
Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
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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: Aki updates : Here is my plot using the full time series data to make the model. Data analysis could be made in many different ways, but my hammer is Gaussian process, and so I modeled the data with a Gaussian process with six components 1) slowly changing trend 2) 7 day periodical component capturing day of week effect 3) 365.25 day periodical component capturing day of year effect 4) component to take into account the special days and interaction with weekends 5) small time scale correlating noise 6) independent Gaussian noise - Day of the week effect has been increasing in 80′s - Day of year effect has changed only a little during years - 22nd to 31st December is strange time I [Aki] will make the code available this week, but we have to first make new release of our GPstuff toolbox, as I used our development code to do this. I have no idea what’s going on with 29 Feb; I wouldn’t see why births would be less likely on that day. Also, the above graphs are g
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Introduction: This post is by Phil. A little over three years ago I wrote a post about exercise and weight loss in which I described losing a fair amount of weight due to (I believe) an exercise regime, with no effort to change my diet; this contradicted the prediction of studies that had recently been released. The comment thread on that post is quite interesting: a lot of people had had similar experiences — losing weight, or keeping it off, with an exercise program that includes very short periods of exercise at maximal intensity — while other people expressed some skepticism about my claims. Some commenters said that I risked injury; others said it was too early to judge anything because my weight loss might not last. The people who predicted injury were right: running the curve during a 200m sprint a month or two after that post, I strained my Achilles tendon. Nothing really serious, but it did keep me off the track for a couple of months, and rather than go back to sprinting I switched t
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Introduction: On a day with four blog posts (and followed by a day with two more), econblogger Mark Thoma wrote : Every once in awhile I [Thoma] kind of need a bit of a break . . . I ran out of energy a few weeks ago . . . I’ll do my best until then, daily links at least somehow and short “echo” posts as usual, but I doubt I’ll have time to say much myself . . . [There's a reason I haven't missed a day posting to the blog in over eight years. When I first started, I was afraid that if I missed a day new readers would bail out . . . I realize a missed day won't kill the blog at this point, but it's still important to me to keep posting every day.] What I do is post once a day; when I write new posts, I schedule them for the future. I currently have approx 2-month lag. Sometimes I post 2 or 3 times in one day, if I have something topical or just something I feel like posting on. Overall, though, I find a benefit to the lag. Posts that are less topical (not tied to the news or to a current o
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1 0.91671681 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
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Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
3 0.81305921 919 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-21-Least surprising headline of the year
Introduction: “ Poker Web Site Cheated Users, U.S. Suit Says “ Shocking. Who’d have thought the developers of an online poker site would cheat??
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Introduction: In her essay on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes: The much remarked “readability” of the book must have played a part in this smooth passage from the page to the screen, since “readability” has to do not only with freedom from obscurity but, paradoxically, with freedom from the actual sensation of reading [emphasis added]—of the tug and traction of words as they move thoughts into place in the mind. Requiring, in fact, the least reading, the most “readable” book allows its characters to slip easily through nets of words and into other forms. Popular art has been well defined by just this effortless movement from medium to medium, which is carried out, as Leslie Fiedler observed in relation to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “without loss of intensity or alteration of meaning.” Isabel Archer rises from the page only in the hanging garments of Henry James’s prose, but Scarlett O’Hara is a free woman. Well put. I wish Pierpoint would come out with ano
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Introduction: Siobhan Mattison pointed me to this . I’m just disappointed they didn’t use my Fenimore Cooper line. Although I guess that reference wouldn’t resonate much outside the U.S. P.S. My guess was correct See comments below. Actually, the reference probably wouldn’t resonate so well among under-50-year-olds in the U.S. either. Sort of like the Jaycees story.
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