andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-875 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase.
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1 Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. [sent-1, score-0.454]
2 This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase. [sent-2, score-1.673]
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same-blog 1 1.0 875 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-28-Better than Dennis the dentist or Laura the lawyer
Introduction: Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase.
2 0.2620486 157 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-21-Roller coasters, charity, profit, hmmm
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes: Here is a very interesting article form Science that reports result of experiment that looked at whether people bought a product (picture of themselves screaming or vomiting on roller coaster) or paid more for it when told “1/2 to charity.” Answer was “buy more” but “pay lots less” than when alternative was fixed price w/ or w/o charity; and “buy more” & “pay more” if consumer could name own price & 1/2 went to charity than if none went to charity. Pretty interesting. But . . . What’s odd, I [Kahan] think, is the measure used to report the result. The paper (written by some really amazingly good social psychologists; I know this from other studies) goes on & on, w/ figures & tables, about how the amusement park’s “revenue,” “revenue per ride” & “profit” went up by large amount when it used “name your own price & 1/2 to charity.” Yet that result is dominated by random effects — the marginal cost & volume of sales are peculiar to the product being sold &
3 0.14930053 1758 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-11-Yes, the decision to try (or not) to have a child can be made rationally
Introduction: Philosopher L. A. Paul and sociologist Kieran Healy write : Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice. When surprising results surface about the dissatisfaction many parents experience, telling yourself that you knew it wouldn’t be that way for you is simply a rationalization. The same is true if you tell yourself you know you’re happier not being a parent. The standard story of parenthood says it’s a deeply fulfilling event that is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced, and that you should carefully weigh what it will be like before choosing to do it. But in reality you can’t have it both ways. I disagree that you can’t have it both ways, for three reasons: 1. Many potential parents do have an idea of what it will be like to be a parent, having participated in child care as an older sibling, aunt, or uncle. 2. The decision of whether to have a child occurs many times: the decision of whether to have a second child
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Introduction: Coming back from Chicago we flew right over Manhattan. Very impressive as always, to see all those buildings so densely packed. But think of how impressive it must have seemed in 1950! The world had a lot less of everything back in 1950 (well, we had more oil in the ground, but that’s about it), so Manhattan must have just seemed amazing. I can see how American leaders of that period could’ve been pretty smug. Our #1 city was leading the world by so much, it was decades ahead of its time, still impressive even now after 60 years of decay.
Introduction: Jeff Helzner writes: A friend of mine and I cited your open data article in our attempts to persuade a professor at another institution [Brian Leiter] into releasing the raw data from his influential rankings of philosophy departments. He is now claiming the national security response: . . . disclosing the reputational data would violate the terms on which the evaluators agreed to complete the surveys (did they even bother to read the description of the methodology, one wonders?). I [Helzner] do not find this to be a compelling reply in this case. In fact, I would say that when such data cannot be disclosed it reveals a flaw in the design of the survey. Experimental designs must be open so that others can run the experiment. Mathematical proofs must be open so that they can be reviewed by others. Likewise, it seems to me that the details of statistical argument should be open to inspection. Do you have any thoughts on this? Or do you know of any other leading statistici
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same-blog 1 0.91042048 875 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-28-Better than Dennis the dentist or Laura the lawyer
Introduction: Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase.
2 0.74965209 1780 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-28-Racism!
Introduction: I was reading a book of Alfred Kazin’s letters—I don’t know if they’d be so interesting to someone who hadn’t already read a bunch of his stuff , but I found them pretty interesting—and came across this amazing bit, dated August 11, 1957: No, really, Al. Tell us what you really feel. This was in his private diary, so I can’t really criticize him for it. And all of us have private thoughts, sometimes publicly expressed, that are unworthy of our better self. For example, once I was crossing a street and a taxi driver came dangerously close, and I screamed at him, “Go back to your own country, you #&@#%*^&.” So I’m not claiming that I’m any better than Kazin. I just thought that quote was pretty amazing. I guess that’s how (some) people thought, back in the fifties. Also interesting that he wrote “ass-hole” in that context. The hyphen surprised me, also I don’t think people would use that word in this way anymore. Nowadays I think of an asshole as a person, not a place.
3 0.70905823 2197 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-04-Peabody here.
Introduction: I saw the trailer for the new Mr. Peabody movie and it looked terrible. They used that weird animation where everything looks round, also the voice had none of the intonations of the “real” Peabody (for some reason, the trailer had the original English voices, maybe they didn’t get their act together to make a dubbed trailer in time for the release here), also the scenes looked pretty stupid. I went back home and checked out Peabody on wikipedia and it turns out that they made 91 episodes! I had no idea. Anyway, here’s my real question: Why bother making a Mr. Peabody movie if you’re not going to do it well? I understand that lots of moviemakers are hacks and there will always be a huge audience for crap in any case, so I’m certainly not demanding that all movies be “good” (in whatever sense that means, from my perceptions). But there are lots and lots of opportunities to make crap movies, there are a million toys and video games and comic book characters and fairy tales and br
4 0.70379925 1457 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Retro ethnic slurs
Introduction: From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.
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Introduction: What can we learn about an author from his or her fiction? This is an old, old question, I know. But I still can’t help thinking about it when I read a book. John Updike ‘s stories are full of male characters whom women find irresistibly attractive. I can only assume that this reflects Updike’s own experiences, to some extent. If he had not been, in reality, catnip to women, I imagine he’d have made more of a big deal about the episodes in his books where women kept falling into his protagonists’ laps. Same for John D. Macdonald , although there I suppose it’s possible he was just throwing in the sex to sell books. And even more so for Richard Ford . This guy’s male characters are so smooth, there’s no way that Ford isn’t/wasn’t like that too. What about Lorrie Moore? I think she must have had a very frustrating life (so far). I say this because her stories always seem to be centered around a female character who is witty, thoughtful, and refined, and surrounded by re
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Introduction: Brendan Nyhan sends along this paper by Domenico Giannone, Michele Lenza, and Giorgio Primiceri: Vector autoregressions are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-of-sample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables. A solution to this problem is to use informative priors, in order to shrink the richly parameterized unrestricted model towards a parsimonious naive benchmark, and thus reduce estimation uncertainty. This paper studies the optimal choice of the informativeness of these priors, which we treat as additional parameters, in the spirit of hierarchical modeling. This approach is theoretically grounded, easy to implement, and greatly reduces the number and importance of subjective choices in the setting of the prior. Moreover, it performs very well both in terms of out-of-sample forecasting—as well as factor
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Introduction: Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase.
3 0.88650793 924 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-24-“Income can’t be used to predict political opinion”
Introduction: What really irritates me about this column (by John Steele Gordon) is not how stupid it is (an article about “millionaires” that switches within the very same paragraph between “a nest egg of $1 million” and “a $1 million annual income” without acknowledging the difference between these concepts) or the ignorance it displays (no, it’s not true that “McCain carried the middle class” in 2008—unless by “middle class” you mean “middle class whites”). No, what really ticks me off is that, when the Red State Blue State book was coming out, we pitched a “5 myths” article for the Washington Post, and they turned us down! Perhaps the rule is: if it’s in the Opinions section of the paper, it can’t contain any facts? Or, to be more precise, any facts it contains must be counterbalanced by an equal number of inanities? Grrrrr . . . I haven’t been so annoyed since reading that New York Times article that argued that electoral politics is just like high school. Who needs political scie
4 0.88029814 913 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-16-Groundhog day in August?
Introduction: A colleague writes: Due to my similar interest in plagiarism , I went to The Human Cultural and Social Landscape session. [The recipient of the American Statistical Association's Founders Award in 2002] gave the first talk in the session instead of Yasmin Said, which was modestly attended (20 or so people) and gave a sociology talk with no numbers — and no attribution to where these ideas (on Afghanistan culture) came from. Would it really have hurt to give the source of this? I’m on board with plain laziness for this one. I think he may have mentioned a number of his collaborators at the beginning, and all he talked about were cultural customs and backgrounds, no science to speak of. It’s kind of amazing to me that he actually showed up at JSM, but of course if he had any shame, he wouldn’t have repeatedly stolen copied without proper attribution in the first place. It’s not even like Doris Kearns Goodwin who reportedly produced a well-written book out of it!
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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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