andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-873 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. More at Daily Mail. [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired .
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1 Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. [sent-1, score-0.366]
2 4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. [sent-3, score-0.453]
3 The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. [sent-4, score-0.583]
4 According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. [sent-5, score-0.154]
5 The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. [sent-6, score-0.305]
6 Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. [sent-7, score-0.27]
7 First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. [sent-8, score-0.246]
8 [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired . [sent-10, score-0.114]
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same-blog 1 1.0 873 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Luck or knowledge?
Introduction: Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. More at Daily Mail. [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired .
2 0.092195764 530 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-22-MS-Bayes?
Introduction: I received the following email: Did you know that it looks like Microsoft is entering the modeling game? I mean, outside of Excel. I recently received an email at work from a MS research contractor looking for ppl that program in R, SAS, Matlab, Excel, and Mathematica. . . . So far I [the person who sent me this email] haven’t seen anything about applying any actual models. Only stuff about assigning variables, deleting rows, merging tables, etc. I don’t know how common knowledge this all is within the statistical community. I did a quick google search for the name of the programming language and didn’t come up with anything. That sounds cool. Working with anything from Microsoft sounds pretty horrible, but it would be useful to have another modeling language out there, just for checking our answers if nothing else.
Introduction: Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson , that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve interjected a “perhaps” into the title of this blog post to indicate that I don’t have the exact Murray quote here so I’m relying on David Frum’s interpretation.] Frum does me the favor of citing Red State Blue State as evidence, and I’d like to back this up with some graphs. Frum writes: Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. . . . To put it i
4 0.066643707 743 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-03-An argument that can’t possibly make sense
Introduction: Tyler Cowen writes : Texas has begun to enforce [a law regarding parallel parking] only recently . . . Up until now, of course, there has been strong net mobility into the state of Texas, so was the previous lack of enforcement so bad? I care not at all about the direction in which people park their cars and I have no opinion on this law, but I have to raise an alarm at Cowen’s argument here. Let me strip it down to its basic form: 1. Until recently, state X had policy A. 2. Up until now, there has been strong net mobility into state X 3. Therefore, the presumption is that policy A is ok. In this particular case, I think we can safely assume that parallel parking regulations have had close to zero impact on the population flows into and out of Texas. More generally, I think logicians could poke some holes into the argument that 1 and 2 above imply 3. For one thing, you could apply this argument to any policy in any state that’s had positive net migration. Hai
5 0.063409172 1242 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-03-Best lottery story ever
Introduction: Kansas Man Does Not Win Lottery, Is Struck By Lightning . Finally, a story that gets the probabilities right.
6 0.05851458 474 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-18-The kind of frustration we could all use more of
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8 0.055607844 201 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-Are all rich people now liberals?
9 0.053470515 2297 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-20-Fooled by randomness
10 0.053139284 1577 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-14-Richer people continue to vote Republican
12 0.049025141 477 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-Costless false beliefs
13 0.04887154 562 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Statistician cracks Toronto lottery
14 0.048356276 731 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-Lottery probability update
15 0.04800595 802 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-13-Super Sam Fuld Needs Your Help (with Foul Ball stats)
16 0.043945119 8 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-28-Advice to help the rich get richer
17 0.043764949 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
18 0.041452929 2280 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-03-As the boldest experiment in journalism history, you admit you made a mistake
20 0.040203098 1483 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-04-“Bestselling Author Caught Posting Positive Reviews of His Own Work on Amazon”
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same-blog 1 0.95621705 873 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Luck or knowledge?
Introduction: Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. More at Daily Mail. [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired .
2 0.66822571 1731 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-21-If a lottery is encouraging addictive gambling, don’t expand it!
Introduction: This story from Vivian Yee seems just horrible to me. First the background: Pronto Lotto’s real business takes place in the carpeted, hushed area where its most devoted customers watch video screens from a scattering of tall silver tables, hour after hour, day after day. The players — mostly men, about a dozen at any given time — come on their lunch breaks or after work to study the screens, which are programmed with the Quick Draw lottery game, and flash a new set of winning numbers every four minutes. They have helped make Pronto Lotto the top Quick Draw vendor in the state, selling $3.3 million worth of tickets last year, more than $1 million more than the second busiest location, a World Books shop in Penn Station. Some stay for just a few minutes. Others play for the length of a workday, repeatedly traversing the few yards between their seats and the cash register as they hand the next wager to a clerk with a dollar bill or two, and return to wait. “It’s like my job, 24
3 0.65504533 1153 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-04-More on the economic benefits of universities
Introduction: Last year my commenters and I discussed Ed Glaeser’s claim that the way to create a great city is to “create a great university and wait 200 years.” I passed this on to urbanist Richard Florida and received the following response: This is a tough one with lots of causality issues. Generally speaking universities make places stronger. But this is mainly the case for smaller, college towws. Boulder, Ann Arbor and so on, which also have very high human capital levels and high levels of creative, knowledge and professional workers. For big cities the issue is mixed. Take Pittsburgh with CMU and Pitt or Baltimore with Hopkins, or St Louis. The list goes on and on. Kevin Stolarick and I framed this very crudely as a transmitter reciever issue. The university in a city like this can generate a lot of signal, in terms of innovation or even human capital and the city may not receive it or push it away. A long ago paper by Mike Fogarty showed how innovations in Pittsburgh and Cl
4 0.65450984 731 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-Lottery probability update
Introduction: It was reported last year that the national lottery of Israel featured the exact same 6 numbers (out of 45) twice in the same month, and statistics professor Isaac Meilijson of Tel Aviv University was quoted as saying that “the incident of six numbers repeating themselves within a month is an event of once in 10,000 years.” I shouldn’t mock when it comes to mathematics–after all, I proved a false theorem once! (Or, to be precise, my collaborator and I published a false claim which we thought we’d proved, thus we thought was a theorem.) So let me retract the mockery and move, first to the mathematics and then to the statistics. First, how many possibilities are there in pick 6 out of 45? It’s (45*44*43*42*41*40)/6! = 8,145,060. Let’s call this number N. Second, what’s the probability that the same numbers repeat in a single calendar month? I’ve been told that the Israeli lottery has 2 draws per week, That’s 104/12=8.67 draws per month. Or maybe they skip some holiday
5 0.6536718 1623 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-14-GiveWell charity recommendations
Introduction: In a rare Christmas-themed post here, I pass along this note from Alexander Berger at GiveWell : We just published a blog post following up on the *other* famous piece of evidence for deworming, the Miguel and Kremer experiment from Kenya. They shared data and code from their working paper (!) follow-up finding that deworming increases incomes ten years later, and we came out of the re-analysis feeling more confident in, though not wholly convinced by, the results. We’ve also just released our new list of top charities for giving season this year, which I think might be a good fit for your audience. We wrote a blog post explaining our choices , and have also published extensive reviews of the top charities and the interventions on which they work. Perhaps the most interesting change since last year is the addition of GiveDirectly in the #2 spot; they do direct unconditional cash transfers to people living on less than a dollar a day in Kenya. We think it’s a remarkable mode
6 0.64122832 1187 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-“Apple confronts the law of large numbers” . . . huh?
7 0.63622677 452 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-06-Followup questions
8 0.63173848 1608 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-06-Confusing headline and capitalization leads to hopes raised, then dashed
9 0.62934655 1504 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-20-Could someone please lock this guy and Niall Ferguson in a room together?
10 0.62754554 647 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Irritating pseudo-populism, backed up by false statistics and implausible speculations
12 0.62270814 853 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-14-Preferential admissions for children of elite colleges
13 0.62200397 526 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-19-“If it saves the life of a single child…” and other nonsense
14 0.6208967 179 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-03-An Olympic size swimming pool full of lithium water
15 0.62041223 636 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-The Conservative States of America
16 0.61770445 1581 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-17-Horrible but harmless?
17 0.61342639 1822 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-24-Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop pharmaceutical statistician stops mugger
18 0.61217046 760 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-12-How To Party Your Way Into a Multi-Million Dollar Facebook Job
20 0.60881662 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
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1 0.94766259 1427 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-24-More from the sister blog
Introduction: Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding.
2 0.93550122 558 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-05-Fattening of the world and good use of the alpha channel
Introduction: In the spirit of Gapminder , Washington Post created an interactive scatterplot viewer that’s using alpha channel to tell apart overlapping fat dots better than sorting-by-circle-size Gapminder is using: Good news: the rate of fattening of the USA appears to be slowing down. Maybe because of high gas prices? But what’s happening with Oceania?
3 0.92073774 1530 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-11-Migrating your blog from Movable Type to WordPress
Introduction: Cord Blomquist, who did a great job moving us from horrible Movable Type to nice nice WordPress, writes: I [Cord] wanted to share a little news with you related to the original work we did for you last year. When ReadyMadeWeb converted your Movable Type blog to WordPress, we got a lot of other requestes for the same service, so we started thinking about a bigger market for such a product. After a bit of research, we started work on automating the data conversion, writing rules, and exceptions to the rules, on how Movable Type and TypePad data could be translated to WordPress. After many months of work, we’re getting ready to announce TP2WP.com , a service that converts Movable Type and TypePad export files to WordPress import files, so anyone who wants to migrate to WordPress can do so easily and without losing permalinks, comments, images, or other files. By automating our service, we’ve been able to drop the price to just $99. I recommend it (and, no, Cord is not paying m
Introduction: I was updating my Mac and noticed the following: Lots of obscure European languages there. That got me wondering: what’s the least obscure language not on the above list? Igbo? Swahili? Or maybe Tagalog? I did a quick google and found this list of languages by number of native speakers. Once you see the list, the answer is obvious: Hindi, first language of 295 million people, is not on Apple’s list. The next most popular languages not included: Bengali, Punjabi, Javanese, Wu, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu. Wow: most of these are Indian! Then comes Persian and a bunch of others. It turns out that Tagalog, Igbo, and Swahili, are way down on this list with 28 million, 24 million, and 26 million native speakers, respectively. Only 26 million for Swahili? This made me want to check the list of languages by total number of speakers . The ranking of most of the languages isn’t much different, but Swahili is now #10, at 140 million. Hindi and Bengali are still th
same-blog 5 0.90160763 873 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Luck or knowledge?
Introduction: Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. More at Daily Mail. [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired .
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18 0.72734904 185 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-04-Why does anyone support private macroeconomic forecasts?
19 0.71552157 1586 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-21-Readings for a two-week segment on Bayesian modeling?
20 0.71023059 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”