andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-995 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A statistician friend reports the following conversation at a dinner party: My friend: “So what do you do?” A good looking fellow: “I do modeling. What about you?” My friend: “Actually, I do modeling too…” Which reminds me . . . on Halloween I went out trick-or-treating straight from work. I decided to tell people I was dressed as a “dork.” Everyone was amused. But next year I want to do a real costume.
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4 I decided to tell people I was dressed as a “dork. [sent-8, score-0.696]
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same-blog 1 1.0 995 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-06-Statistical models and actual models
Introduction: A statistician friend reports the following conversation at a dinner party: My friend: “So what do you do?” A good looking fellow: “I do modeling. What about you?” My friend: “Actually, I do modeling too…” Which reminds me . . . on Halloween I went out trick-or-treating straight from work. I decided to tell people I was dressed as a “dork.” Everyone was amused. But next year I want to do a real costume.
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Introduction: The other day, a friend of mine who is an untenured professor (not in statistics or political science) was telling me about a class where many of the students seemed to be resubmitting papers that they had already written for previous classes. (The supposition was based on internal evidence of the topics of the submitted papers.) It would be possible to check this and then kick the cheating students out of the program—but why do it? It would be a lot of work, also some of the students who are caught might complain, then word would get around that my friend is a troublemaker. And nobody likes a troublemaker. Once my friend has tenure it would be possible to do the right thing. But . . . here’s the hitch: most college instructors do not have tenure, and one result, I suspect, is a decline in ethical standards. This is something I hadn’t thought of in our earlier discussion of job security for teachers: tenure gives you the freedom to kick out cheating students.
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Introduction: From a few years ago : Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch , using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the literature review
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Introduction: A friend writes to me: You will be amused to know that students in our Bayesian Inference paper at 4th year found solutions to exercises from your book on-line. The amazing thing was that some of them were dumb enough to copy out solutions verbatim. However, I thought you might like to know you have done well in this class! I’m happy to hear this. I worked hard on those solutions!
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Introduction: A statistician friend reports the following conversation at a dinner party: My friend: “So what do you do?” A good looking fellow: “I do modeling. What about you?” My friend: “Actually, I do modeling too…” Which reminds me . . . on Halloween I went out trick-or-treating straight from work. I decided to tell people I was dressed as a “dork.” Everyone was amused. But next year I want to do a real costume.
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Introduction: I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around.” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar. But maybe I’m wrong on this. Jay Livingston argues that black and white are colors whereas Black and White are races (or, as I would prefer to say, ethnic categories) and illustrates with this picture of a white person and a White person: In conversation, I sometimes talk about pink people, brown people, and tan people, but that won’t work in a research paper. P.S. I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose h
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