andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-766 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
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1 I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. [sent-2, score-0.364]
2 I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. [sent-3, score-0.364]
3 The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism. [sent-5, score-0.466]
4 ” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. [sent-6, score-0.092]
5 I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Brian Everitt. [sent-7, score-0.237]
6 But I can’t remember, I must have lost the files in an office move. [sent-14, score-0.161]
7 I’ve never met Edward Wegman and have nothing against him personally. [sent-21, score-0.192]
8 Yeah, I know Chris Rock says: when you’re caught, just deny everything. [sent-23, score-0.081]
9 The funny part is how clear the evidence is–that’s why I keep throwing in jokes . [sent-26, score-0.229]
10 The sad part is that Wegman, Goodwin, Fischer, etc etc don’t have the decency to say they’re sorry. [sent-27, score-0.269]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
2 0.3131206 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
Introduction: At the time of our last discussion , Edward Wegman, a statistics professor who has also worked for government research agencies, had been involved in three cases of plagiarism: a report for the U.S. Congress on climate models, a paper on social networks, a paper on color graphics. Each of the plagiarism stories was slightly different: the congressional report involved the distorted copying of research by a scientist (Raymond Bradley) whose conclusions Wegman disagreed with, the social networks paper included copied material in its background section, and the color graphics paper included various bits and pieces by others that had been used in old lecture notes. Since then, blogger Deep Climate has uncovered another plagiarized article by Wegman, this time an article in a 2005 volume on data mining and data visualization. Deep Climate writes, “certain sections of Statistical Data Mining rely heavily on lightly edited portions on lectures from Wegman’s statistical data mining c
3 0.30613816 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
5 0.19385755 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
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15 0.097115293 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
16 0.093873367 2065 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-17-Cool dynamic demographic maps provide beautiful illustration of Chris Rock effect
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20 0.075483672 2206 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-10-On deck this week
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Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
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Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
3 0.82407784 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
Introduction: At the time of our last discussion , Edward Wegman, a statistics professor who has also worked for government research agencies, had been involved in three cases of plagiarism: a report for the U.S. Congress on climate models, a paper on social networks, a paper on color graphics. Each of the plagiarism stories was slightly different: the congressional report involved the distorted copying of research by a scientist (Raymond Bradley) whose conclusions Wegman disagreed with, the social networks paper included copied material in its background section, and the color graphics paper included various bits and pieces by others that had been used in old lecture notes. Since then, blogger Deep Climate has uncovered another plagiarized article by Wegman, this time an article in a 2005 volume on data mining and data visualization. Deep Climate writes, “certain sections of Statistical Data Mining rely heavily on lightly edited portions on lectures from Wegman’s statistical data mining c
4 0.78810143 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
5 0.77650583 722 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-20-Why no Wegmania?
Introduction: A colleague asks: When I search the web, I find the story [of the article by Said, Wegman, et al. on social networks in climate research, which was recently bumped from the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis because of plagiarism] only on blogs, USA Today, and UPI. Why is that? Any idea why it isn’t reported by any of the major newspapers? Here’s my answer: 1. USA Today broke the story. Apparently this USA Today reporter put a lot of effort into it. The NYT doesn’t like to run a story that begins, “Yesterday, USA Today reported…” 2. To us it’s big news because we’re statisticians. [The main guy in the study, Edward Wegman, won the Founders Award from the American Statistical Association a few years ago.] To the rest of the world, the story is: “Obscure prof at an obscure college plagiarized an article in a journal that nobody’s ever heard of.” When a Harvard scientist paints black dots on white mice and says he’s curing cancer, that’s news. When P
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Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
2 0.92322648 1417 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-15-Some decision analysis problems are pretty easy, no?
Introduction: Cassie Murdoch reports : A 47-year-old woman in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, got behind the wheel of her car after having a bit too much to drink, but instead of wreaking havoc on the road, she ended up lodged in a sand trap at a local golf course. Why? Because her GPS made her do it—obviously! She said the GPS told her to turn left, and she did, right into a cornfield. That didn’t faze her, and she just kept on going until she ended up on the golf course and got stuck in the sand. There were people on the course at the time, but thankfully nobody was injured. Police found a cup full of alcohol in her car and arrested her for driving drunk. Here’s the punchline: This is the fourth time she’s been arrested for a DUI. Assuming this story is accurate, I guess they don’t have one of those “three strikes” laws in Massachusetts? Personally, I’m a lot more afraid of a dangerous driver than of some drug dealer. I’d think a simple cost-benefit calculation would recommend taking away
3 0.91427648 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
Introduction: My article with Daniel and Yair has recently appeared in The Forum: We use multilevel modeling to estimate support for health-care reform by age, income, and state. Opposition to reform is concentrated among higher-income voters and those over 65. Attitudes do not vary much by state. Unfortunately, our poll data only go to 2004, but we suspect that much can be learned from the relative positions of different demographic groups and different states, despite swings in national opinion. We speculate on the political implications of these findings. The article features some pretty graphs that originally appeared on the blog. It’s in a special issue on health care politics that has several interesting articles, among which I’d like to single out this one by Bob Shapiro and Lawrence Jacobs entitled, “Simulating Representation: Elite Mobilization and Political Power in Health Care Reform”: The public’s core policy preferences have, for some time, favored expanding access to heal
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
5 0.91363049 1655 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-05-The statistics software signal
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to a post by Sean Taylor, who writes the following about users of R: You are willing to invest in learning something difficult. You do not care about aesthetics, only availability of packages and getting results quickly. To me, R is easy and Sas is difficult. I once worked with some students who were running Sas and the output was unreadable! Pages and pages of numbers that made no sense. When it comes to ease or difficulty of use, I think it depends on what you’re used to! And I really don’t understand the bit about aesthetics. What about this ? One reason I use R is to make pretty graphs. That said, if I’d never learned R, I’d just be making pretty graphs in Fortran or whatever. My guess is, the way I program, R is actually hindering rather than helping my ability to make attractive graphs. Half the time I’m scrambling around, writing custom code to get around R’s defaults.
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