andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-980 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This is hilarious ( link from a completely deadpan Tyler Cowen). I’d call it “unintentionally hilarious” but I’m pretty sure that rms knew this was funny when he was writing it. It’s sort of like when you write a top 10 list—it’s hard to resist getting silly and going over the top. It’s only near the end that we get to the bit about the parrots. All joking aside, the most interesting part of the email was this: I [rms] have to spend 6 to 8 hours *every day* doing my usual work, which is responding to email about the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. I’d wondered for awhile what is it that Richard Stallman actually does, that is how does he spend his time (aside from giving lectures to promote his ideas and pay the bills). Emailing –> Blogging I too spend a lot of time on email, but a few years ago I consciously tried to shift a bunch of my email exchanges to the blog. I found that I was sending out a lot of information to an audience of one, information
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 This is hilarious ( link from a completely deadpan Tyler Cowen). [sent-1, score-0.188]
2 I’d call it “unintentionally hilarious” but I’m pretty sure that rms knew this was funny when he was writing it. [sent-2, score-0.378]
3 It’s sort of like when you write a top 10 list—it’s hard to resist getting silly and going over the top. [sent-3, score-0.182]
4 All joking aside, the most interesting part of the email was this: I [rms] have to spend 6 to 8 hours *every day* doing my usual work, which is responding to email about the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. [sent-5, score-0.818]
5 I’d wondered for awhile what is it that Richard Stallman actually does, that is how does he spend his time (aside from giving lectures to promote his ideas and pay the bills). [sent-6, score-0.149]
6 Emailing –> Blogging I too spend a lot of time on email, but a few years ago I consciously tried to shift a bunch of my email exchanges to the blog. [sent-7, score-0.507]
7 Reading and responding to email is like doing the laundry (in a modern, washer-and-dryer world): you feel like you’re getting something useful done, and it feels vaguely like work, but it’s not hard work. [sent-12, score-0.651]
8 Blogging feels that way too, but it probably takes some getting used to. [sent-13, score-0.153]
9 If any rms friends read this, please pass on my recommendation to him that he try replacing much of his emailing by blogging. [sent-14, score-0.556]
10 At a personal level Stallman’s no-brown-M&M;’s list amuses me so much partly because I can see so much of myself in it. [sent-15, score-0.154]
11 I never read email before 4pm, I don’t like to fly and offer to give talks by videolink, etc. [sent-16, score-0.468]
12 I think Stallman is a bit over the top when he specifically requests people not to offer him cheese with green fungus (I’m not kidding—just open the linked document in Emacs and do a ^S)—but, hey, who am I to say that this is more weird than snack on celery during research meetings? [sent-18, score-0.314]
13 I knew the guy was unusual but reading his list of demands made me curious enough to google for more information. [sent-19, score-0.224]
14 In particular, I found a fascinating short biography from Sam Williams and a charming email exchange in which Stallman asks out a woman online based on something he’d read that she’d written. [sent-20, score-0.633]
15 What impressed me about the email exchange was not its content—it was a fairly run-of-the-mill effort at being cute by email—but rather that Stallman posted this on his own webpage. [sent-21, score-0.455]
16 I’m happy to talk about my false theorem and to be open about various research setbacks but I can’t imagine posting this kind of personal item. [sent-23, score-0.199]
17 Stallman writes: “My bank gives very bad exchange rates. [sent-27, score-0.337]
18 ” That makes me wonder: why doesn’t he switch banks? [sent-28, score-0.095]
19 My bank probably gives very bad exchange rates too, but I have no idea. [sent-29, score-0.337]
20 If I cared enough to investigate the matter, maybe I’d switch, no? [sent-30, score-0.116]
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same-blog 1 0.99999982 980 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-29-When people meet this guy, can they resist the temptation to ask him what he’s doing for breakfast??
Introduction: This is hilarious ( link from a completely deadpan Tyler Cowen). I’d call it “unintentionally hilarious” but I’m pretty sure that rms knew this was funny when he was writing it. It’s sort of like when you write a top 10 list—it’s hard to resist getting silly and going over the top. It’s only near the end that we get to the bit about the parrots. All joking aside, the most interesting part of the email was this: I [rms] have to spend 6 to 8 hours *every day* doing my usual work, which is responding to email about the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. I’d wondered for awhile what is it that Richard Stallman actually does, that is how does he spend his time (aside from giving lectures to promote his ideas and pay the bills). Emailing –> Blogging I too spend a lot of time on email, but a few years ago I consciously tried to shift a bunch of my email exchanges to the blog. I found that I was sending out a lot of information to an audience of one, information
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Introduction: After blogging on quirky software pioneer Richard Stallman , I thought it appropriate to write something about recently deceased quirky software pioneer John McCarthy, who, with the exception of being bearded, seems like he was the personal and political opposite of Stallman. Here’s a page I found of Stallman McCarthy quotes (compiled by Neil Craig). It’s a mixture of the reasonable and the unreasonable (ok, I suppose the same could be said of this blog!). I wonder if he and Stallman ever met and, if so, whether they had an extended conversation. It would be like matter and anti-matter! P.S. I flipped through McCarthy’s pages and found one of my pet peeves. See item 3 here , which sounds so plausible but is in fact not true (at least, not according to the National Election Study). As McCarthy’s Stanford colleague Mo Fiorina can tell you, otherwise well-informed people believe all sorts of things about polarization that aren’t so. Labeling groups of Americans as “
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Introduction: A few days ago I reported on the spam email that I received from two business school professors (one at Columbia)! As noted on the blog, I sent an email directly to the study’s authors at the time of reading the email, but they have yet to respond. This surprises me a bit. Certainly if 6300 faculty each have time to respond to one email on this study, the two faculty have time to respond to 6300 email replies, no? I was actually polite enough to respond to both of their emails! If I do hear back, I’ll let youall know! P.S. Paul Basken interviewed me briefly for a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the now-notorious spam email study. Basken’s article is reasonable–he points out that (a) the study irritated a lot of people, but (b) is ultimately no big deal. One interesting thing about the article is that, although some people felt that the spam email study was ethical, nobody came forth with an argument that the study was actually worth doing. P.P.S. In
5 0.12898009 18 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-06-$63,000 worth of abusive research . . . or just a really stupid waste of time?
Introduction: As someone who relies strongly on survey research, it’s good for me to be reminded that some surveys are useful, some are useless, but one thing they almost all have in common is . . . they waste the respondents’ time. I thought of this after receiving the following email, which I shall reproduce here. My own comments appear after. Recently, you received an email from a student asking for 10 minutes of your time to discuss your Ph.D. program (the body of the email appears below). We are emailing you today to debrief you on the actual purpose of that email, as it was part of a research study. We sincerely hope our study did not cause you any disruption and we apologize if you were at all inconvenienced. Our hope is that this letter will provide a sufficient explanation of the purpose and design of our study to alleviate any concerns you may have about your involvement. We want to thank you for your time and for reading further if you are interested in understanding why you rece
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Introduction: This is hilarious ( link from a completely deadpan Tyler Cowen). I’d call it “unintentionally hilarious” but I’m pretty sure that rms knew this was funny when he was writing it. It’s sort of like when you write a top 10 list—it’s hard to resist getting silly and going over the top. It’s only near the end that we get to the bit about the parrots. All joking aside, the most interesting part of the email was this: I [rms] have to spend 6 to 8 hours *every day* doing my usual work, which is responding to email about the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. I’d wondered for awhile what is it that Richard Stallman actually does, that is how does he spend his time (aside from giving lectures to promote his ideas and pay the bills). Emailing –> Blogging I too spend a lot of time on email, but a few years ago I consciously tried to shift a bunch of my email exchanges to the blog. I found that I was sending out a lot of information to an audience of one, information
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Introduction: This one totally faked me out at first. It was an email from “Nick Bagnall” that began: Dear Dr. Gelman, I made contact last year regarding your work in the CMG: Reconstructing Climate from Tree Ring Data project. We are about to start producing the 2014 edition and I wanted to discuss this with you as we still remain keen to feature your work. Research Media are producing a special publication in February of 2014, within this report we will be working with a small selected number of PI’s with a focus on geosciences, atmospheric and geospace sciences and earth Sciences.. At this point, I’m thinking: Hmmm, I don’t remember this guy, is this some sort of collaborative project that I’d forgotten about? The message then continues: The publication is called International Innovation . . . Huh? This doesn’t sound so good. The email then goes on with some very long lists, and then finally the kicker: The total cost for each article produced in this report is fixed a
Introduction: John Sides points to this discussion (with over 200 comments!) by political scientist Charli Carpenter of her response to a student from another university who emailed with questions that look like they come from a homework assignment. Here’s the student’s original email : Hi Mr. Carpenter, I am a fourth year college student and I have the honor of reading one of your books and I just had a few questions… I am very fascinated by your work and I am just trying to understand everything. Can you please address some of my questions? I would greatly appreciate it. It certainly help me understand your wonderful article better. Thank you very much! :) 1. What is the fundamental purpose of your article? 2. What is your fundamental thesis? 3. What evidence do you use to support your thesis? 4. What is the overall conclusion? 5. Do you feel that you have a fair balance of opposing viewpoints? Sincerely, After a series of emails in which Carpenter explained why she thought
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Introduction: Just in time for the new semester: This time I’m sticking with the plan : 1. Don’t open a message until I’m ready to deal with it. 2. Don’t store anything–anything–in the inbox. 3. Put to-do items in the (physical) bookje rather than the (computer) “desktop.” 4. Never read email before 4pm. (This is the one rule I have been following. 5. Only one email session per day. (I’ll have to see how this one works.)
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Introduction: Mike McLaughlin writes: In general, is there any way to do MCMC with a fixed constraint? E.g., suppose I measure the three internal angles of a triangle with errors ~dnorm(0, tau) where tau might be different for the three measurements. This would be an easy BUGS/WinBUGS/JAGS exercise but suppose, in addition, I wanted to include prior information to the effect that the three angles had to total 180 degrees exactly. Is this feasible? Could you point me to any BUGS model in which a constraint of this type is implemented? Note: Even in my own (non-hierarchical) code which tends to be component-wise, random-walk Metropolis with tuned Laplacian proposals, I cannot see how I could incorporate such a constraint. My reply: See page 508 of Bayesian Data Analysis (2nd edition). We have an example of such a model there (from this paper with Bois and Jiang).
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Introduction: For awhile I’ve been curious (see also here ) about the U-shaped relation between happiness and age (with people least happy, on average, in their forties, and happier before and after). But when I tried to demonstrate it to me intro statistics course, using the General Social Survey, I couldn’t find the famed U, or anything like it. Using pooled GSS data mixes age, period, and cohort, so I tried throwing in some cohort effects (indicators for decades) and a couple other variables, but still couldn’t find that U. So I was intrigued when I came across this paper by Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton , who write: Whilst the majority of psychologists have concluded there is not much of a relationship at all, the economic literature has unearthed a possible U-shape relationship. In this paper we [Frijters and Beatton] replicate the U-shape for the German SocioEconomic Panel (GSOEP), and we investigate several possible explanations for it. They write: What is the relationship
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Introduction: Speaking of Tyler Cowen, I’m puzzled by this paragraph of his: Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner. In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else. I don’t know anything about guns so I’ll set that part aside. My bafflement is with the claim that “there is an elite which has absolutely no problem handling [alcohol].” Is he kidding? Unless Cowen is circularly defining “an elite” as the subset of elites who don’t have an alcohol problem, I don’t buy this claim. And I actually think it’s a serious problem, that various “elites” are so sure that they have “absolutely no problem” that they do dangerous, dangerous things. Consider the notorious incident when Dick Cheney shot a
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Introduction: Panos Ipeirotis writes in his blog post : Everyone who has attended a conference knows that the quality of the talks is very uneven. There are talks that are highly engaging, entertaining, and describe nicely the research challenges and solutions. And there are talks that are a waste of time. Either the presenter cannot present clearly, or the presented content is impossible to digest within the time frame of the presentation. We already have reviewing for the written part. The program committee examines the quality of the written paper and vouch for its technical content. However, by looking at a paper it is impossible to know how nicely it can be presented. Perhaps the seemingly solid but boring paper can be a very entertaining presentation. Or an excellent paper may be written by a horrible presenter. Why not having a second round of reviewing, where the authors of accepted papers submit their presentations (slides and a YouTube video) for presentation to the conference.
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