andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-913 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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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5 It’s not even like Doris Kearns Goodwin who reportedly produced a well-written book out of it! [sent-7, score-0.27]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 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!
2 0.2005839 52 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-26-Intellectual property
Introduction: Somebody should warn Doris Kearns Goodwin not to take any of this guy’s material. . . .
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
4 0.12947483 548 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-01-What goes around . . .
Introduction: A few weeks ago I delivered a 10-minute talk on statistical graphics that went so well, it was the best-received talk I’ve ever given. The crowd was raucous. Then some poor sap had to go on after me. He started by saying that my talk was a hard act to follow. And, indeed, the audience politely listened but did not really get involved in his presentation. Boy did I feel smug. More recently I gave a talk on Stan, at an entirely different venue. And this time the story was the exact opposite. Jim Demmel spoke first and gave a wonderful talk on optimization for linear algebra (it was an applied math conference). Then I followed, and I never really grabbed the crowd. My talk was not a disaster but it didn’t really work. This was particularly frustrating because I’m really excited about Stan and this was a group of researchers I wouldn’t usually have a chance to reach. It was the plenary session at the conference. Anyway, now I know how that guy felt from last month. My talk
5 0.12788358 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime
Introduction: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work. In statisti
6 0.11559246 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
7 0.11130046 1111 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-10-The blog of the Cultural Cognition Project
8 0.10693063 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
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10 0.098718397 2275 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-31-Just gave a talk
11 0.09824378 613 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-15-Gay-married state senator shot down gay marriage
12 0.097685851 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
13 0.093599662 276 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-14-Don’t look at just one poll number–unless you really know what you’re doing!
14 0.090743586 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
15 0.090228677 1143 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-29-G+ > Skype
16 0.085975796 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
17 0.083550178 1324 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman
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same-blog 1 0.95352465 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!
2 0.7499153 1073 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-20-Not quite getting the point
Introduction: I gave this talk the other day and afterwards, a white guy came up to me and said he thought it was no coincidence that the researcher who made the mistake was “Oriental.” He then went on for about 5 minutes explaining his theory. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing—I had to start coughing into a napkin to hide it.
3 0.71835643 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
Introduction: At the time of our last discussion , Edward Wegman, a statistics professor who has also worked for government research agencies, had been involved in three cases of plagiarism: a report for the U.S. Congress on climate models, a paper on social networks, a paper on color graphics. Each of the plagiarism stories was slightly different: the congressional report involved the distorted copying of research by a scientist (Raymond Bradley) whose conclusions Wegman disagreed with, the social networks paper included copied material in its background section, and the color graphics paper included various bits and pieces by others that had been used in old lecture notes. Since then, blogger Deep Climate has uncovered another plagiarized article by Wegman, this time an article in a 2005 volume on data mining and data visualization. Deep Climate writes, “certain sections of Statistical Data Mining rely heavily on lightly edited portions on lectures from Wegman’s statistical data mining c
4 0.71709329 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
5 0.70258611 2039 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-25-Harmonic convergence
Introduction: Diederik Stapel gives a Ted talk . Sometimes, reality truly is a parody of reality.
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11 0.65611869 901 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-12-Some thoughts on academic cheating, inspired by Frey, Wegman, Fischer, Hauser, Stapel
12 0.64606518 722 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-20-Why no Wegmania?
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20 0.6036281 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
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same-blog 1 0.91924775 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!
2 0.89135623 1674 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-15-Prior Selection for Vector Autoregressions
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
3 0.8744297 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 0.86841285 689 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-01-Is that what she said?
Introduction: Eric Booth cozies up to this article by Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun (software here ). I think they make their point in a gentle yet forceful manner.
5 0.85932469 877 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-Applying quantum probability to political science
Introduction: As we’ve discussed on occasion, conditional probability (“Boltzmann statistics,” in physics jargon) is false at the atomic level. (It’s false at the macroscopic level too, but with discrepancies too small to be detected directly most of the time.) Occasionally I’ve speculated on how quantum probability (that is, the laws of uncertainty that hold in the real world) might be applied to social science research. I’ve made no progress but remain intrigued by the idea. Chris Zorn told me he recently went to a meeting on applications of non-Kolmogorovian / quantum probability to social & human phenomena. Here’s his paper (with Charles Smith), “Some Quantum-Like Features of Mass Politics in Two-Party Systems,” which begins: We [Smith and Zorn] expand the substantive terrain of QI’s reach by illuminating a body of political theory that to date has been elaborated in strictly classical language and formalisms but has complex features that seem to merit generalizations of the prob
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19 0.76716614 659 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-13-Jim Campbell argues that Larry Bartels’s “Unequal Democracy” findings are not robust