andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-821 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: At Picnic Cafe, Broadway at 101 St, 6-7pm today. Should we vote even though it probably won’t make a difference? Why is the question “Are we better off now than four years ago?” not an appeal to selfishness? Are Americans as polarized as we think? Come explore these and other questions about voting in America today. It’s the usual stuff but close-up so lots of opportunity to argue and heckle. No slides or graphs. My plan is to hand out 30-50 index cards, each with a phrase (for example, “Moderation in the pursuit of moderation is no vice” or “Gerrymandering is good for you” or “How to predict elections”), then participants can call out topics and I’ll yap on them (with discussion) till we run out of time. It’ll be weird to talk without graphs. We’ll see how it goes.
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same-blog 1 1.0 821 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-25-See me talk in the Upper West Side (without graphs) today
Introduction: At Picnic Cafe, Broadway at 101 St, 6-7pm today. Should we vote even though it probably won’t make a difference? Why is the question “Are we better off now than four years ago?” not an appeal to selfishness? Are Americans as polarized as we think? Come explore these and other questions about voting in America today. It’s the usual stuff but close-up so lots of opportunity to argue and heckle. No slides or graphs. My plan is to hand out 30-50 index cards, each with a phrase (for example, “Moderation in the pursuit of moderation is no vice” or “Gerrymandering is good for you” or “How to predict elections”), then participants can call out topics and I’ll yap on them (with discussion) till we run out of time. It’ll be weird to talk without graphs. We’ll see how it goes.
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Introduction: I think I can best do my civic duty by running this one every Election Day, just like Art Buchwald on Thanksgiving. . . . With a national election coming up, and with the publicity at its maximum, now is a good time to ask, is it rational for you to vote? And, by extension, wass it worth your while to pay attention to whatever the candidates and party leaders have been saying for the year or so? With a chance of casting a decisive vote that is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery, what is the gain from being a good citizen and casting your vote? The short answer is, quite a lot. First the bad news. With 100 million voters, your chance that your vote will be decisive–even if the national election is predicted to be reasonably close–is, at best, 1 in a million in a battleground district and much less in a noncompetitive district such as where I live. (The calculation is based on the chance that your district’s vote will be exactly tied, along with the chance that your di
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Introduction: I think I can best do my civic duty by running this one every Election Day, just like Art Buchwald on Thanksgiving. . . . With a national election coming up, and with the publicity at its maximum, now is a good time to ask, is it rational for you to vote? And, by extension, wass it worth your while to pay attention to whatever the candidates and party leaders have been saying for the year or so? With a chance of casting a decisive vote that is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery, what is the gain from being a good citizen and casting your vote? The short answer is, quite a lot. First the bad news. With 100 million voters, your chance that your vote will be decisive–even if the national election is predicted to be reasonably close–is, at best, 1 in a million in a battleground district and much less in a noncompetitive district such as where I live. (The calculation is based on the chance that your district’s vote will be exactly tied, along with the chance that you
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Introduction: At Picnic Cafe, Broadway at 101 St, 6-7pm today. Should we vote even though it probably won’t make a difference? Why is the question “Are we better off now than four years ago?” not an appeal to selfishness? Are Americans as polarized as we think? Come explore these and other questions about voting in America today. It’s the usual stuff but close-up so lots of opportunity to argue and heckle. No slides or graphs. My plan is to hand out 30-50 index cards, each with a phrase (for example, “Moderation in the pursuit of moderation is no vice” or “Gerrymandering is good for you” or “How to predict elections”), then participants can call out topics and I’ll yap on them (with discussion) till we run out of time. It’ll be weird to talk without graphs. We’ll see how it goes.
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Introduction: Red State Blue State: How Will the U.S. Vote? It’s the “annual Halloween and pre-election extravaganza” of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and they suggested I could talk on the zombies paper (of course), but I thought the material on voting might be of more general interest. The “How will the U.S. vote?” subtitle was not of my choosing, but I suppose I can add a few slides about the forthcoming election. Fri 29 Oct 2010, 7pm in Ward I, in the basement of the Ward Circle building. Should be fun. I haven’t been to AU since taking a class there, over 30 years ago. P.S. It was indeed fun. Here’s the talk. I did end up briefly describing my zombie research but it didn’t make it into any of the slides.
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Introduction: A student journalist called me with some questions about when the U.S. would have a female president. At one point she asked if there were any surveys of whether people would vote for a woman. I suggested she try Google. I was by my computer anyway so typed “what percentage of americans would vote for a woman president” (without the quotation marks), and the very first hit was this from Gallup, from 2007: The Feb. 9-11, 2007, poll asked Americans whether they would vote for “a generally well-qualified” presidential candidate nominated by their party with each of the following characteristics: Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, an atheist, a woman, black, Hispanic, homosexual, 72 years of age, and someone married for the third time. Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happene
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Introduction: At Picnic Cafe, Broadway at 101 St, 6-7pm today. Should we vote even though it probably won’t make a difference? Why is the question “Are we better off now than four years ago?” not an appeal to selfishness? Are Americans as polarized as we think? Come explore these and other questions about voting in America today. It’s the usual stuff but close-up so lots of opportunity to argue and heckle. No slides or graphs. My plan is to hand out 30-50 index cards, each with a phrase (for example, “Moderation in the pursuit of moderation is no vice” or “Gerrymandering is good for you” or “How to predict elections”), then participants can call out topics and I’ll yap on them (with discussion) till we run out of time. It’ll be weird to talk without graphs. We’ll see how it goes.
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Introduction: What we did in our Stan meeting yesterday: Some discussion of revision of the Nuts paper, some conversations about parameterizations of categorical-data models, plans for the R interface, blah blah blah. But also, I had two exciting new ideas! Google Translate for code Wouldn’t it be great if Google Translate could work on computer languages? I suggested this and somebody said that it might be a problem because code isn’t always translatable. But that doesn’t worry so much. Google Translate for human languages isn’t perfect either but it’s a useful guide. If I want to write a message to someone in French or Spanish or Dutch, I wouldn’t just write it in English and run it through Translate. What I do is try my best to write it in the desired language, but I can try out some tricky words or phrases in the translator. Or, if I start by translating, I go back and forth to make sure it all makes sense. An R help-list bot We were talking about how to build a Stan commun
Introduction: From a commenter on the web, 21 May 2010: Tampa Bay: Playing .732 ball in the toughest division in baseball, wiped their feet on NY twice. If they sweep Houston, which seems pretty likely, they will be at .750, which I [the commenter] have never heard of. At the time of that posting, the Rays were 30-11. Quick calculation: if a team is good enough to be expected to win 100 games, that is, Pr(win) = 100/162 = .617, then there’s a 5% chance that they’ll have won at least 30 of their first 41 games. That’s a calculation based on simple probability theory of independent events, which isn’t quite right here but will get you close and is a good way to train one’s intuition , I think. Having a .732 record after 41 games is not unheard-of. The Detroit Tigers won 35 of their first 40 games in 1984: that’s .875. (I happen to remember that fast start, having been an Orioles fan at the time.) Now on to the key ideas The passage quoted above illustrates three statistical fa
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