andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-892 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
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same-blog 1 1.0 892 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Info on patent trolls
Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
2 0.27484971 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
3 0.24827667 625 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-23-My last post on albedo, I promise
Introduction: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes: It’s perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.php http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court Just about anyone’s that’s been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an “intellectual mine field” in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google’s PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in netw
4 0.23470205 860 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-18-Trolls!
Introduction: Christian Robert points to this absurd patent of the Monte Carlo method (which, as Christian notes, was actually invented by Stanislaw Ulam and others in the 1940s). The whole thing is pretty unreadable. I wonder if they first wrote it as a journal article and then it got rejected everywhere, so they decided to submit it as a patent instead. What’s even worse is this bit: This invention was made with government support under Grant Numbers 0612170 and 0347408 awarded by the National Science Foundation. So our tax dollars are being given to IBM so they can try to bring statistics to a halt by patenting one of our most basic tools? I’d say this is just a waste of money, but given that our country is run by lawyers, there must be some outside chance that this patent could actually succeed? Perhaps there’s room for an improvement in the patent that involves albedo in some way?
5 0.1682338 1885 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-06-Leahy Versus Albedoman and the Moneygoround, Part One
Introduction: Edward Wyatt reports : Now the Obama administration is cracking down on what many call patent trolls , shell companies that exist merely for the purpose of asserting that they should be paid . . . “The United States patent system is vital for our economic growth, job creation, and technological advance,” [Senator] Leahy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system’s image.” There is some opposition: But some big software companies, including Microsoft, expressed dismay at some of the proposals, saying they could themselves stifle innovation. Microsoft . . . patent trolls . . . hmmm, where have we heard this connection before ? There is also some support for the bill: “These guys are terrorists,” said John Boswell, chief legal officer for SAS, a business software and services company, said at a panel discussion on Tuesday. SAS was cited in the White House report as an example of a company that has
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same-blog 1 0.93613648 892 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Info on patent trolls
Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
2 0.73146594 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
3 0.70792472 625 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-23-My last post on albedo, I promise
Introduction: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes: It’s perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.php http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court Just about anyone’s that’s been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an “intellectual mine field” in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google’s PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in netw
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Introduction: Edward Wyatt reports : Now the Obama administration is cracking down on what many call patent trolls , shell companies that exist merely for the purpose of asserting that they should be paid . . . “The United States patent system is vital for our economic growth, job creation, and technological advance,” [Senator] Leahy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system’s image.” There is some opposition: But some big software companies, including Microsoft, expressed dismay at some of the proposals, saying they could themselves stifle innovation. Microsoft . . . patent trolls . . . hmmm, where have we heard this connection before ? There is also some support for the bill: “These guys are terrorists,” said John Boswell, chief legal officer for SAS, a business software and services company, said at a panel discussion on Tuesday. SAS was cited in the White House report as an example of a company that has
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Introduction: Christian Robert points to this absurd patent of the Monte Carlo method (which, as Christian notes, was actually invented by Stanislaw Ulam and others in the 1940s). The whole thing is pretty unreadable. I wonder if they first wrote it as a journal article and then it got rejected everywhere, so they decided to submit it as a patent instead. What’s even worse is this bit: This invention was made with government support under Grant Numbers 0612170 and 0347408 awarded by the National Science Foundation. So our tax dollars are being given to IBM so they can try to bring statistics to a halt by patenting one of our most basic tools? I’d say this is just a waste of money, but given that our country is run by lawyers, there must be some outside chance that this patent could actually succeed? Perhaps there’s room for an improvement in the patent that involves albedo in some way?
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same-blog 1 0.97889727 892 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Info on patent trolls
Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
Introduction: While visiting the education school at the University of Pennsylvania a couple months ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Boruch, a prominent researcher in the field of evidence-based education. We shared Fred Mosteller stories and talked about a lot of other things too. Boruch sent me an article about teaching randomized controlled trials to education students, which gave me the following idea which connects to my longstanding embarrassment (and subject of my next column on ethics, forthcoming in Chance magazine) about the lack of systematic measurement, sampling, or experimentation in our own teaching efforts. Anyway, here’s my idea for experimentation in statistics teaching, an idea that I think could work particularly well in classes with education students. Each class could, as part of the course, design an educational experiment to be performed on next year’s class. Easier said than done, I know, but perhaps ed school students would be particularly motivated to do t
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Introduction: Rohin Dhar writes: The Priceonomics blog is doing a feature where we ask a few economists what they think of the the institution of tenure. If you’d be interested in participating, I’d love to get your response. As an economist, what do you think of tenure? Should it be abolished / kept / modified? My reply: Just to be clear, I’m assuming that when you say “tenure,” you’re talking about lifetime employment for college professors such as myself. I’m actually a political scientist, not an economist. So rather than giving my opinion, I’ll say what I think an economist might say. I think an economist could say one of two things: Economist as anthropologist would say: Tenure is decided by independent institutions acting freely. If they choose to offer tenure, they will have good reasons, and it is not part of an economist’s job to second-guess individual decisions. Economist as McKinsey consultant would say: Tenure can be evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis. How
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Introduction: This blog has roughly a month’s worth of items waiting to be posted. I post about once a day, sometimes rescheduling posts to make room for something topical. Anyway, it struck me that I know what’s coming up, but you don’t. So, here’s what we have for you during the next few days: Mon: More on US health care overkill Tues: My talks in Bristol this Wed and London this Thurs Wed: How to think about “identifiability” in Bayesian inference? Thurs: Stopping rules and Bayesian analysis Fri: The popularity of certain baby names is falling off the clifffffffffffff Plus anything our cobloggers might choose to post during these days. And, if Woody Allen or Ed Wegman or anyone else newsworthy asks us to publish an op-ed for them, we’ll consider it. Enjoy.
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Introduction: I just gave my first Skype presentation today, and it felt pretty strange. The technical difficulties mostly arose with the sound. There were heavy echoes and so we ended up just cutting off the sound from the audience. This made it more difficult for me because I couldn’t gauge audience reaction. It was a real challenge to give a talk without being able to hear the laughter of the audience. (I asked them to wave their hands every time they laughed, but they didn’t do so–or else they were never laughing, which would be even worse.) Next time I’ll use the telephone for at least one of the sound channels. The visuals were ok from my side–I just went thru my slides one by one, using the cursor to point to things. I prefer standing next to the screen and pointing with my hands. But doing it this way was ok, considering. The real visual problem went the other way: I couldn’t really see the audience. From the perspective of the little computer camera, everyone seemed far away
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