andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-864 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Sharad explains : HIV/AIDS, like many other contagious diseases, exemplifies the common view of so-called viral propagation, growing from a few initial cases to millions through close person-to-person interactions. (Ironically, not all viruses in fact exhibit “viral” transmission patterns. For example, Hepatitis A often spreads through contaminated drinking water.[1]) By analogy to such biological epidemics, the diffusion of products and ideas is conventionally assumed to occur “virally” as well, as evidenced by prevailing theoretical frameworks (e.g., the cascade and threshold models) and an obsession in the marketing world for all things social. . . . Despite hundreds of papers written about diffusion, there is surprisingly little work addressing this fundamental empirical question. In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I [Goel] examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Face
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Sharad explains : HIV/AIDS, like many other contagious diseases, exemplifies the common view of so-called viral propagation, growing from a few initial cases to millions through close person-to-person interactions. [sent-1, score-0.569]
2 (Ironically, not all viruses in fact exhibit “viral” transmission patterns. [sent-2, score-0.17]
3 For example, Hepatitis A often spreads through contaminated drinking water. [sent-3, score-0.24]
4 [1]) By analogy to such biological epidemics, the diffusion of products and ideas is conventionally assumed to occur “virally” as well, as evidenced by prevailing theoretical frameworks (e. [sent-4, score-1.1]
5 , the cascade and threshold models) and an obsession in the marketing world for all things social. [sent-6, score-0.292]
6 Despite hundreds of papers written about diffusion, there is surprisingly little work addressing this fundamental empirical question. [sent-10, score-0.068]
7 In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I [Goel] examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Facebook, and the Yahoo! [sent-11, score-0.27]
8 In all six domains the dominant diffusion event, accounting for between 70% to 95% of cascades, is the trivial one: an individual adopts the product in question and doesn’t convert any of their contacts. [sent-16, score-1.071]
9 only 1%-4% of diffusion trees extend beyond one degree. [sent-20, score-0.621]
10 cross the six domains only 1%-6% of adoptions take place more than one degree from a seed node, meaning that the vast majority of adoptions occur either without peer-to-peer influence or within one step of such an independent adopter. [sent-24, score-1.026]
11 In all the examples we study, diffusion seems remarkably un-viral, rarely spreading far from an independent adopter. [sent-28, score-0.786]
12 Our results thus call into question the dominant, epidemic-like models of diffusion, and also the value of viral marketing campaigns. [sent-29, score-0.415]
13 Instead of needing to describe, predict, or trigger a complicated viral process, one can focus on the much easier case of adoptions that spread at most one hop before terminating. [sent-31, score-0.826]
14 It turns out that diffusion is not nearly as messy as you might think. [sent-32, score-0.621]
15 I have nothing to add, except that in my experience these dudes know what they’re doing. [sent-33, score-0.069]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('diffusion', 0.553), ('adoptions', 0.299), ('viral', 0.299), ('domains', 0.138), ('dominant', 0.138), ('marketing', 0.116), ('products', 0.115), ('occur', 0.108), ('millions', 0.103), ('six', 0.095), ('im', 0.091), ('cascade', 0.091), ('epidemics', 0.091), ('evidenced', 0.091), ('spreads', 0.091), ('viruses', 0.091), ('independent', 0.087), ('prevailing', 0.085), ('exemplifies', 0.085), ('obsession', 0.085), ('cascades', 0.085), ('platforms', 0.085), ('contagious', 0.082), ('node', 0.082), ('contaminated', 0.082), ('hop', 0.082), ('comprising', 0.079), ('trigger', 0.079), ('adopts', 0.079), ('transmission', 0.079), ('conventionally', 0.077), ('yahoo', 0.077), ('goel', 0.077), ('spreading', 0.075), ('remarkably', 0.071), ('frameworks', 0.071), ('propagation', 0.071), ('sharad', 0.071), ('adoption', 0.07), ('goldstein', 0.07), ('diseases', 0.07), ('dudes', 0.069), ('trees', 0.068), ('watts', 0.068), ('messy', 0.068), ('trivial', 0.068), ('addressing', 0.068), ('ironically', 0.068), ('drinking', 0.067), ('needing', 0.067)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 864 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-21-Going viral — not!
Introduction: Sharad explains : HIV/AIDS, like many other contagious diseases, exemplifies the common view of so-called viral propagation, growing from a few initial cases to millions through close person-to-person interactions. (Ironically, not all viruses in fact exhibit “viral” transmission patterns. For example, Hepatitis A often spreads through contaminated drinking water.[1]) By analogy to such biological epidemics, the diffusion of products and ideas is conventionally assumed to occur “virally” as well, as evidenced by prevailing theoretical frameworks (e.g., the cascade and threshold models) and an obsession in the marketing world for all things social. . . . Despite hundreds of papers written about diffusion, there is surprisingly little work addressing this fundamental empirical question. In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I [Goel] examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Face
Introduction: Ben Hyde sends along this : Stuck in the middle of the supplemental data, reporting the total workup for their compounds, was this gem: Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis . . . I’m reminded of our recent discussions of coauthorship, where I argued that I see real advantages to having multiple people taking responsibility for the result. Jay Verkuilen responded: “On the flipside of collaboration . . . is diffusion of responsibility, where everybody thinks someone else ‘has that problem’ and thus things don’t get solved.” That’s what seems to have happened (hilariously) here.
3 0.12598366 978 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-28-Cool job opening with brilliant researchers at Yahoo
Introduction: Duncan Watts writes: The Human Social Dynamics Group in Yahoo Research is seeking highly qualified candidates for a post-doctoral research scientist position. The Human and Social Dynamics group is devoted to understanding the interplay between individual-level behavior (e.g. how people make decisions about what music they like, which dates to go on, or which groups to join) and the social environment in which individual behavior necessarily plays itself out. In particular, we are interested in: * Structure and evolution of social groups and networks * Decision making, social influence, diffusion, and collective decisions * Networking and collaborative problem solving. The intrinsically multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting nature of the subject demands an eclectic range of researchers, both in terms of domain-expertise (e.g. decision sciences, social psychology, sociology) and technical skills (e.g. statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, computer simulations, design o
4 0.12156817 1257 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-10-Statisticians’ abbreviations are even less interesting than these!
Introduction: From AC, AI, and AIH to WAHM, WOHM, and WM. P.S. That was all pretty pointless, so I’ll throw in this viral Jim Henson link (from the same source) for free.
5 0.11193967 845 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-08-How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes
Introduction: Interesting article by Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens: Products, styles, and social movements often catch on and become popular, but little is known about why such identity-relevant cultural tastes and practices die out. We demonstrate that the velocity of adoption may affect abandonment: Analysis of over 100 years of data on first-name adoption in both France and the United States illustrates that cultural tastes that have been adopted quickly die faster (i.e., are less likely to persist). Mirroring this aggregate pattern, at the individual level, expecting parents are more hesitant to adopt names that recently experienced sharper increases in adoption. Further analysis indicate that these effects are driven by concerns about symbolic value: Fads are perceived negatively, so people avoid identity-relevant items with sharply increasing popularity because they believe that they will be short lived. Ancillary analyses also indicate that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, identity-r
6 0.094549499 674 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-21-Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo
7 0.093707949 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
8 0.070452586 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
9 0.057050213 1606 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-05-The Grinch Comes Back
10 0.05545637 305 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-29-Decision science vs. social psychology
11 0.053923402 1481 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-04-Cool one-day miniconference at Columbia Fri 12 Oct on computational and online social science
12 0.049653627 455 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-07-Some ideas on communicating risks to the general public
13 0.049585532 262 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-08-Here’s how rumors get started: Lineplots, dotplots, and nonfunctional modernist architecture
14 0.049574848 1690 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-23-When are complicated models helpful in psychology research and when are they overkill?
15 0.046990804 1823 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-24-The Tweets-Votes Curve
16 0.046669248 1098 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-04-Bayesian Page Rank?
17 0.045916911 1630 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-18-Postdoc positions at Microsoft Research – NYC
18 0.045012206 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
19 0.044793122 577 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-16-Annals of really really stupid spam
20 0.043940187 1897 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-13-When’s that next gamma-ray blast gonna come, already?
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.094), (1, -0.004), (2, 0.0), (3, -0.02), (4, 0.004), (5, 0.007), (6, -0.004), (7, -0.004), (8, -0.0), (9, 0.032), (10, -0.024), (11, -0.008), (12, -0.004), (13, -0.004), (14, -0.02), (15, 0.006), (16, 0.033), (17, -0.01), (18, 0.008), (19, -0.017), (20, -0.0), (21, 0.002), (22, -0.014), (23, 0.004), (24, -0.003), (25, 0.003), (26, 0.022), (27, 0.016), (28, 0.005), (29, -0.003), (30, -0.033), (31, -0.014), (32, 0.009), (33, -0.001), (34, 0.007), (35, -0.027), (36, 0.024), (37, -0.009), (38, -0.006), (39, 0.001), (40, 0.004), (41, -0.008), (42, -0.004), (43, 0.023), (44, -0.022), (45, 0.016), (46, -0.021), (47, 0.03), (48, 0.004), (49, -0.006)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9377563 864 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-21-Going viral — not!
Introduction: Sharad explains : HIV/AIDS, like many other contagious diseases, exemplifies the common view of so-called viral propagation, growing from a few initial cases to millions through close person-to-person interactions. (Ironically, not all viruses in fact exhibit “viral” transmission patterns. For example, Hepatitis A often spreads through contaminated drinking water.[1]) By analogy to such biological epidemics, the diffusion of products and ideas is conventionally assumed to occur “virally” as well, as evidenced by prevailing theoretical frameworks (e.g., the cascade and threshold models) and an obsession in the marketing world for all things social. . . . Despite hundreds of papers written about diffusion, there is surprisingly little work addressing this fundamental empirical question. In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I [Goel] examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Face
2 0.72972971 1058 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-14-Higgs bozos: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spinning in their graves
Introduction: David Hogg sends in this bizarre bit of news reporting by Robert Evans: Until now, in the four decades since it was first posited, no one has convincingly claimed to have glimpsed the Higgs Boson, let alone proved that it actually exists. At an eagerly awaited briefing on Tuesday at the CERN research centre near Geneva, two independent teams of “Higgs Hunters” – a term they themselves hate – were widely expected to suggest they were fairly confident they had spotted it. But not confident enough, in the physics world of ultra-precision where certainty has to be measured at nothing less than 100 percent, to announce “a discovery.” In the jargon, this level is described as 5 sigma . . . So far, so good. But then comes this doozy: As one scientist explained, that level of accuracy would equate to the 17th-century discoverer of gravity, Isaac Newton, sitting under his apple tree and a million apples one after another falling on his head without one missing. Huh? A free
3 0.71357542 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
Introduction: Duncan Watts gave his new book the above title, reflecting his irritation with those annoying people who, upon hearing of the latest social science research, reply with: Duh-I-knew-that. (I don’t know how to say Duh in Australian; maybe someone can translate that for me?) I, like Duncan, am easily irritated, and I looked forward to reading the book. I enjoyed it a lot, even though it has only one graph, and that graph has a problem with its y-axis. (OK, the book also has two diagrams and a graph of fake data, but that doesn’t count.) Before going on, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with Duncan’s central point: social science research findings are often surprising, but the best results cause us to rethink our world in such a way that they seem completely obvious, in retrospect. (Don Rubin used to tell us that there’s no such thing as a “paradox”: once you fully understand a phenomenon, it should not seem paradoxical any more. When learning science, we sometimes speak
4 0.69664288 765 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-How the ignorant idiots win, explained. Maybe.
Introduction: According to a New York Times article , cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have a new theory about rational argument: humans didn’t develop it in order to learn about the world, we developed it in order to win arguments with other people. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Based on the NYT article, it seems that Mercier and Sperber are basically flipping around the traditional argument, which is that humans learned to reason about the world, albeit imperfectly, and learned to use language to convey that reasoning to others. These guys would suggest that it’s the other way around: we learned to argue with others, and this has gradually led to the ability to actually make (and recognize) sound arguments, but only indirectly. The article says “”At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation o
5 0.68351746 732 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-What Do We Learn from Narrow Randomized Studies?
Introduction: Under the headline, “A Raise Won’t Make You Work Harder,” Ray Fisman writes : To understand why it might be a bad idea to cut wages in recessions, it’s useful to know how workers respond to changes in pay–both positive and negative changes. Discussion on the topic goes back at least as far as Henry Ford’s “5 dollars a day,” which he paid to assembly line workers in 1914. The policy was revolutionary at the time, as the wages were more than double what his competitors were paying. This wasn’t charity. Higher-paid workers were efficient workers–Ford attracted the best mechanics to his plant, and the high pay ensured that employees worked hard throughout their eight-hour shifts, knowing that if their pace slackened, they’d be out of a job. Raising salaries to boost productivity became known as “efficiency wages.” So far, so good. Fisman then moves from history and theory to recent research: How much gift exchange really matters to American bosses and workers remained largely a
6 0.68334055 157 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-21-Roller coasters, charity, profit, hmmm
7 0.68147773 1861 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-17-Where do theories come from?
8 0.68032748 1539 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-18-IRB nightmares
9 0.67784524 411 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-13-Ethical concerns in medical trials
10 0.67705297 819 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-24-Don’t idealize “risk aversion”
13 0.67348993 994 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-06-Josh Tenenbaum presents . . . a model of folk physics!
14 0.67051619 1414 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-12-Steven Pinker’s unconvincing debunking of group selection
15 0.67019492 1191 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-01-Hoe noem je?
16 0.66886562 969 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-22-Researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations
17 0.66823751 1076 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-21-Derman, Rodrik and the nature of statistical models
18 0.66703886 11 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-29-Auto-Gladwell, or Can fractals be used to predict human history?
19 0.66500932 1051 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-10-Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers
20 0.66300863 242 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-29-The Subtle Micro-Effects of Peacekeeping
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.027), (15, 0.015), (16, 0.048), (24, 0.081), (44, 0.238), (47, 0.022), (76, 0.013), (77, 0.028), (79, 0.016), (86, 0.023), (88, 0.026), (89, 0.046), (95, 0.036), (96, 0.01), (99, 0.17)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.90505648 559 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Bidding for the kickoff
Introduction: Steven Brams and James Jorash propose a system for reducing the advantage that comes from winning the coin flip in overtime: Dispensing with a coin toss, the teams would bid on where the ball is kicked from by the kicking team. In the NFL, it’s now the 30-yard line. Under Brams and Jorasch’s rule, the kicking team would be the team that bids the lower number, because it is willing to put itself at a disadvantage by kicking from farther back. However, it would not kick from the number it bids, but from the average of the two bids. To illustrate, assume team A bids to kick from the 38-yard line, while team B bids its 32-yard line. Team B would win the bidding and, therefore, be designated as the kick-off team. But B wouldn’t kick from 32, but instead from the average of 38 and 32–its 35-yard line. This is better for B by 3 yards than the 32-yard line that it proposed, because it’s closer to the end zone it is kicking towards. It’s also better for A by 3 yards to have B kick fr
same-blog 2 0.89361286 864 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-21-Going viral — not!
Introduction: Sharad explains : HIV/AIDS, like many other contagious diseases, exemplifies the common view of so-called viral propagation, growing from a few initial cases to millions through close person-to-person interactions. (Ironically, not all viruses in fact exhibit “viral” transmission patterns. For example, Hepatitis A often spreads through contaminated drinking water.[1]) By analogy to such biological epidemics, the diffusion of products and ideas is conventionally assumed to occur “virally” as well, as evidenced by prevailing theoretical frameworks (e.g., the cascade and threshold models) and an obsession in the marketing world for all things social. . . . Despite hundreds of papers written about diffusion, there is surprisingly little work addressing this fundamental empirical question. In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I [Goel] examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Face
3 0.86803615 1798 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-11-Continuing conflict over conflict statistics
Introduction: Mike Spagat sends along a serious presentation with an ironic title: 18.7 MILLION ANNIHILATED SAYS LEADING EXPERT IN PEER–REVIEWED JOURNAL: AN APPROVED, AUTHORITATIVE, SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION MADE BY AN EXPERT He’ll be speaking on it at tomorrow’s meeting of the Catastrophes and Conflict Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine in London. All I can say is, it’s a long time since I’ve seen a slide presentation in portrait form. It brings me back to the days of transparency sheets.
4 0.84049928 1627 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-17-Stan and RStan 1.1.0
Introduction: We’re happy to announce the availability of Stan and RStan versions 1.1.0, which are general tools for performing model-based Bayesian inference using the no-U-turn sampler, an adaptive form of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Information on downloading and installing and using them is available as always from Stan Home Page: http://mc-stan.org/ Let us know if you have any problems on the mailing lists or at the e-mails linked on the home page (please don’t use this web page). The full release notes follow. (R)Stan Version 1.1.0 Release Notes =================================== -- Backward Compatibility Issue * Categorical distribution recoded to match documentation; it now has support {1,...,K} rather than {0,...,K-1}. * (RStan) change default value of permuted flag from FALSE to TRUE for Stan fit S4 extract() method -- New Features * Conditional (if-then-else) statements * While statements -- New Functions * generalized multiply_lower_tri
5 0.80971628 2209 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-13-CmdStan, RStan, PyStan v2.2.0
Introduction: The Stan Development Team is happy to announce CmdStan, RStan, and PyStan v2.2.0. As usual, more info is available on the Stan Home Page . This is a minor release with a mix of bug fixes and features. For a full list of changes, please see the v2.2.0 milestone on stan-dev/stan’s issue tracker. Some of the bug fixes and issues are listed below. Bug Fixes increment_log_prob is now vectorized and compiles with vector arguments multinomial random number generator used the wrong size for the return value fixed memory leaks in auto-diff implementation variables can start with the prefix ‘inf’ fixed parameter output order for arrays when using optimization RStan compatibility issue with latest Rcpp 0.11.0 Features suppress command line output with refresh <= 0 added 1 to treedepth to match usual definition of treedepth added distance, squared_distance, diag_pre_multiply, diag_pre_multiply to Stan modeling lnaguage added a ‘fixed_param’ sampler for
6 0.7995286 954 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-12-Benford’s Law suggests lots of financial fraud
7 0.79391247 444 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-02-Rational addiction
8 0.79319501 748 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-06-Why your Klout score is meaningless
9 0.78963101 1837 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-03-NYC Data Skeptics Meetup
10 0.78843117 2150 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-27-(R-Py-Cmd)Stan 2.1.0
11 0.75550413 693 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-04-Don’t any statisticians work for the IRS?
12 0.74056876 1436 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-31-A book on presenting numbers from spreadsheets
13 0.74014908 1145 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-30-A tax on inequality, or a tax to keep inequality at the current level?
14 0.73857808 111 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-26-Tough love as a style of writing
15 0.73103386 617 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-17-“Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School”?
16 0.7275542 1879 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-01-Benford’s law and addresses
17 0.68911749 30 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-13-Trips to Cleveland
18 0.68479091 865 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-22-Blogging is “destroying the business model for quality”?
19 0.68146837 788 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-06-Early stopping and penalized likelihood
20 0.67439282 2210 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-13-Stopping rules and Bayesian analysis