andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1000 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here . I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably on the order of 1-2%, not the 4% that has been posited by some. Among other things, ideological differences between candidates of the same party might seem big in the primaries, but then when the general election comes along, party ID becomes more important. I also disagree with the model in which presidential elections are like votes for high school prom king .
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here . [sent-1, score-0.125]
2 I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. [sent-2, score-0.354]
3 In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably on the order of 1-2%, not the 4% that has been posited by some. [sent-3, score-1.081]
4 Among other things, ideological differences between candidates of the same party might seem big in the primaries, but then when the general election comes along, party ID becomes more important. [sent-4, score-1.22]
5 I also disagree with the model in which presidential elections are like votes for high school prom king . [sent-5, score-1.235]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('montgomery', 0.393), ('nyhan', 0.316), ('presidential', 0.242), ('elections', 0.222), ('candidate', 0.221), ('prom', 0.218), ('party', 0.203), ('primaries', 0.197), ('rosenstone', 0.19), ('centrist', 0.184), ('posited', 0.175), ('id', 0.168), ('brendan', 0.156), ('jacob', 0.156), ('influenced', 0.152), ('ideological', 0.147), ('king', 0.133), ('forecasting', 0.127), ('votes', 0.125), ('candidates', 0.121), ('becomes', 0.119), ('steven', 0.115), ('extreme', 0.106), ('disagree', 0.103), ('comparing', 0.103), ('election', 0.098), ('vote', 0.096), ('differences', 0.086), ('order', 0.084), ('school', 0.084), ('difference', 0.075), ('among', 0.075), ('talk', 0.073), ('along', 0.072), ('comes', 0.072), ('probably', 0.069), ('high', 0.065), ('agree', 0.064), ('big', 0.058), ('book', 0.057), ('seem', 0.057), ('read', 0.056), ('general', 0.056), ('perhaps', 0.055), ('sense', 0.052), ('thing', 0.049), ('things', 0.049), ('case', 0.047), ('model', 0.043), ('first', 0.042)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999994 1000 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-10-Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter?
Introduction: Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here . I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably on the order of 1-2%, not the 4% that has been posited by some. Among other things, ideological differences between candidates of the same party might seem big in the primaries, but then when the general election comes along, party ID becomes more important. I also disagree with the model in which presidential elections are like votes for high school prom king .
Introduction: Johathan Chait writes : Parties and candidates will kill themselves to move the needle a percentage point or two in a presidential race. And again, the fundamentals determine the bigger picture, but within that big picture political tactics and candidate quality still matters around the margins. I agree completely. This is the central message of Steven Rosenstone’s excellent 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections. So, given that Chait and I agree 100%, why was I so upset at his recent column on “The G.O.P.’s Dukakis Problem”? I’ll put the reasons for my displeasure below the fold because my main point is that I’m happy with Chait’s quote above. For completeness I want to explain where I’m coming from but my take-home point is that we’re mostly in agreement. — OK, so what upset me about Chait’s article? 1. The title. I’m pretty sure that Mike Dukakis, David Mamet, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Lee Atwater will disagree with me on this one, but Duka
Introduction: Jonathan Chait writes that the most important aspect of a presidential candidate is “political talent”: Republicans have generally understood that an agenda tilted toward the desires of the powerful requires a skilled frontman who can pitch Middle America. Favorite character types include jocks, movie stars, folksy Texans and war heroes. . . . [But the frontrunners for the 2012 Republican nomination] make Michael Dukakis look like John F. Kennedy. They are qualified enough to serve as president, but wildly unqualified to run for president. . . . [Mitch] Daniels’s drawbacks begin — but by no means end — with his lack of height, hair and charisma. . . . [Jeb Bush] suffers from an inherent branding challenge [because of his last name]. . . . [Chris] Christie . . . doesn’t cut a trim figure and who specializes in verbally abusing his constituents. . . . [Haley] Barbour is the comic embodiment of his party’s most negative stereotypes. A Barbour nomination would be the rough equivalent
4 0.15537989 1823 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-24-The Tweets-Votes Curve
Introduction: Fabio Rojas points me to this excellently-titled working paper by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, and himself: Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this ques- tion using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composi- tion. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit. One charming thing
5 0.13758838 389 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Why it can be rational to vote
Introduction: I think I can best do my civic duty by running this one every Election Day, just like Art Buchwald on Thanksgiving. . . . With a national election coming up, and with the publicity at its maximum, now is a good time to ask, is it rational for you to vote? And, by extension, wass it worth your while to pay attention to whatever the candidates and party leaders have been saying for the year or so? With a chance of casting a decisive vote that is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery, what is the gain from being a good citizen and casting your vote? The short answer is, quite a lot. First the bad news. With 100 million voters, your chance that your vote will be decisive–even if the national election is predicted to be reasonably close–is, at best, 1 in a million in a battleground district and much less in a noncompetitive district such as where I live. (The calculation is based on the chance that your district’s vote will be exactly tied, along with the chance that your di
6 0.13758838 1565 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-06-Why it can be rational to vote
7 0.12407662 1027 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-25-Note to student journalists: Google is your friend
8 0.11615153 1566 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-A question about voting systems—unrelated to U.S. elections!
9 0.11509018 43 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-19-What do Tuesday’s elections tell us about November?
10 0.11451355 292 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-23-Doug Hibbs on the fundamentals in 2010
11 0.11450726 920 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-22-Top 10 blog obsessions
12 0.11313429 1512 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-27-A Non-random Walk Down Campaign Street
14 0.10468916 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
15 0.10468113 1570 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-08-Poll aggregation and election forecasting
16 0.10071122 1273 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-20-Proposals for alternative review systems for scientific work
17 0.10032657 1395 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Cross-validation (What is it good for?)
19 0.093577601 1199 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-05-Any available cookbooks on Bayesian designs?
20 0.091184579 100 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Unsurprisingly, people are more worried about the economy and jobs than about deficits
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.098), (1, -0.039), (2, 0.115), (3, 0.084), (4, -0.071), (5, 0.031), (6, -0.056), (7, -0.025), (8, 0.001), (9, -0.018), (10, 0.08), (11, 0.055), (12, 0.038), (13, -0.096), (14, -0.028), (15, -0.015), (16, -0.013), (17, 0.011), (18, 0.016), (19, 0.013), (20, -0.053), (21, 0.021), (22, 0.044), (23, 0.009), (24, 0.009), (25, -0.016), (26, 0.038), (27, -0.004), (28, -0.023), (29, 0.036), (30, -0.055), (31, 0.027), (32, 0.013), (33, 0.011), (34, 0.015), (35, 0.026), (36, 0.018), (37, -0.014), (38, -0.012), (39, -0.002), (40, -0.031), (41, -0.009), (42, -0.001), (43, 0.018), (44, -0.031), (45, -0.01), (46, 0.014), (47, -0.026), (48, 0.007), (49, 0.019)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96325928 1000 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-10-Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter?
Introduction: Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here . I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably on the order of 1-2%, not the 4% that has been posited by some. Among other things, ideological differences between candidates of the same party might seem big in the primaries, but then when the general election comes along, party ID becomes more important. I also disagree with the model in which presidential elections are like votes for high school prom king .
2 0.88682359 292 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-23-Doug Hibbs on the fundamentals in 2010
Introduction: Hibbs, one of the original economy-and-elections guys, writes : The number of House seats won by the presidents party at midterm elections is well explained by three pre-determined or exogenous variables: (1) the number of House seats won by the in-party at the previous on-year election, (2) the vote margin of the in-partys candidate at the previous presidential election, and (3) the average growth rate of per capita real disposable personal income during the congressional term. Given the partisan division of House seats following the 2008 on-year election, President Obamas margin of victory in 2008, and the weak growth of per capita real income during the rst 6 quarters of the 111th Congress, the Democrats chances of holding on to a House majority by winning at least 218 seats at the 2010 midterm election will depend on real income growth in the 3rd quarter of 2010. The data available at this writing indicate the that Democrats will win 211 seats, a loss of 45 from the 2008 o
3 0.84987402 237 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-27-Bafumi-Erikson-Wlezien predict a 50-seat loss for Democrats in November
Introduction: They write : How many House seats will the Republicans gain in 2010? . . . Our methodology replicates that for our ultimately successful forecast of the 2006 midterm. Two weeks before Election Day in 2006, we posted a prediction that the Democrats would gain 32 seats and recapture the House majority. The Democrats gained 30 seats in 2006. Our current forecast for 2010 shows that the Republicans are likely to regain the House majority. . . . the most likely scenario is a Republican majority in the neighborhood of 229 seats versus 206 for the Democrats for a 50-seat loss for the Democrats . How do they do it? First, they predict the national two-party vote using the generic polls (asking voters which party they plan to vote for in the November congressional elections). Then they apply the national vote swing on a district-by-district level to predict the outcome in each district. They account for uncertainty in their predictions (I assume by using a model similar to what Gar
4 0.82965904 934 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-30-Nooooooooooooooooooo!
Introduction: Michael Axelrod writes: Quantitative historian Allan Lichtman claims to have discovered 13 predictors that determine who will win the popular vote in presidential elections. He predicts Obama will win in 2012. Writing in his New York Times column, “538,” Nate Silver attempted a critique Lichtman’s prediction. Soon afterward Lichtman wrote a rejoinder. Evidently Lichtman has correctly and publicly predicted the popular vote winners in the last 7 presidential elections. I think he predicted Gore would win in 2000. He got the popular vote winner right, but not electoral college vote winner. Lichtman presents his methods in his early 1980s book, “The Keys to the White House.” Lichtman consulted with Volodia Keilis-Borok, and used a kernel discriminant analysis approach on election results from 1860-1980 as the training set. I think there is some argument as to scoring because Lichtman claims more than 7 successes. I guess he divided the data into a training and validation sets and w
5 0.81050676 1512 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-27-A Non-random Walk Down Campaign Street
Introduction: Political campaigns are commonly understood as random walks, during which, at any point in time, the level of support for any party or candidate is equally likely to go up or down. Each shift in the polls is then interpreted as the result of some combination of news and campaign strategies. A completely different story of campaigns is the mean reversion model in which the elections are determined by fundamental factors of the economy and partisanship; the role of the campaign is to give voters a chance to reach their predetermined positions. The popularity of the random walk model for polls may be partially explained via analogy to the widespread idea that stock prices reflect all available information, as popularized in Burton Malkiel’s book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Once the idea has sunk in that short-term changes in the stock market are inherently unpredictable, it is natural for journalists to think the same of polls. For example, political analyst Nate Silver wrote
6 0.78855592 369 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-25-Misunderstanding of divided government
7 0.78181893 270 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-12-Comparison of forecasts for the 2010 congressional elections
8 0.77688986 1566 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-A question about voting systems—unrelated to U.S. elections!
9 0.76523942 1027 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-25-Note to student journalists: Google is your friend
10 0.74394149 389 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Why it can be rational to vote
11 0.74394149 1565 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-06-Why it can be rational to vote
12 0.73455542 210 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-16-What I learned from those tough 538 commenters
13 0.73265857 43 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-19-What do Tuesday’s elections tell us about November?
15 0.72387415 1570 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-08-Poll aggregation and election forecasting
16 0.71798903 377 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-28-The incoming moderate Republican congressmembers
18 0.69458646 123 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-01-Truth in headlines
20 0.68856579 162 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-25-Darn that Lindsey Graham! (or, “Mr. P Predicts the Kagan vote”)
topicId topicWeight
[(5, 0.05), (9, 0.088), (16, 0.055), (21, 0.018), (24, 0.043), (34, 0.041), (43, 0.025), (59, 0.237), (99, 0.316)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9428736 1000 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-10-Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter?
Introduction: Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here . I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably on the order of 1-2%, not the 4% that has been posited by some. Among other things, ideological differences between candidates of the same party might seem big in the primaries, but then when the general election comes along, party ID becomes more important. I also disagree with the model in which presidential elections are like votes for high school prom king .
2 0.93489575 853 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-14-Preferential admissions for children of elite colleges
Introduction: Jenny Anderson reports on a discussion of the practice of colleges preferential admission of children of alumni: [Richard] Kahlenberg citing research from his book “Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions” made the case that getting into good schools matters — 12 institutions making up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population produced 42 percent of government leaders and 54 percent of corporate leaders. And being a legacy helps improve an applicant’s chances of getting in, with one study finding that being a primary legacy — the son or daughter of an undergraduate alumnus or alumna — increases one’s chance of admission by 45.1 percent. I’d call that 45 percent but I get the basic idea. But then Jeffrey Brenzel of the Yale admissions office replied: “We turn away 80 percent of our legacies, and we feel it every day,” Mr. Brenzel said, adding that he rejected more offspring of the school’s Sterling donors than he accepted this year (
Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
4 0.90310562 214 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Probability-processing hardware
Introduction: Lyric Semiconductor posted: For over 60 years, computers have been based on digital computing principles. Data is represented as bits (0s and 1s). Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. A processor steps through many of these operations serially in order to perform a function. However, today’s most interesting problems are not at all suited to this approach. Here at Lyric Semiconductor, we are redesigning information processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities: from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. As a result, many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000x efficiencies in cost, power, and size. Om Malik has some more information, also relating to the team and the business. The fundamental idea is that computing architectures work deterministically, even though the world is fundamentally stochastic.
5 0.88172728 229 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Bizarre twisty argument about medical diagnostic tests
Introduction: My cobloggers sometimes write about “Politics Everywhere.” Here’s an example of a political writer taking something that’s not particularly political and trying to twist it into a political context. Perhaps the title should be “political journalism everywhere”. Michael Kinsley writes : Scientists have discovered a spinal fluid test that can predict with 100 percent accuracy whether people who already have memory loss are going to develop full-fledged Alzheimer’s disease. They apparently don’t know whether this test works for people with no memory problems yet, but reading between the lines of the report in the New York Times August 10, it sounds as if they believe it will. . . . This is truly the apple of knowledge: a test that can be given to physically and mentally healthy people in the prime of life, which can identify with perfect accuracy which ones are slowly going to lose their mental capabilities. If your first instinct is, “We should outlaw this test” or at lea
6 0.87741709 199 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-11-Note to semi-spammers
7 0.87615931 580 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-19-Weather visualization with WeatherSpark
8 0.87610596 763 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-13-Inventor of Connect Four dies at 91
9 0.87586081 34 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Non-academic writings on literature
10 0.87310332 1716 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-09-iPython Notebook
11 0.87113428 965 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-19-Web-friendly visualizations in R
12 0.8666743 771 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-16-30 days of statistics
13 0.86527324 1408 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-07-Not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others
14 0.86238408 403 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-09-Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics startup-math meetup
15 0.8559773 1380 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-15-Coaching, teaching, and writing
17 0.84767514 1764 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-15-How do I make my graphs?
18 0.84449816 1190 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-29-Why “Why”?
19 0.84039533 1377 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-13-A question about AIC
20 0.83116412 517 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-14-Bayes in China update