andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1007 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was at a work-related event today [actually, last month; these non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay], but not connected to the statistics or political science departments. There were a few people there I knew well, and they were introducing me to others. Then at some point when I was talking with one of the more important people in the room, a sixtyish guy comes by and stands next to us. I put out my hand and introduce myself. He looks at me in puzzlement, spits out his first name, and without a pause starts talking to the person I’d been speaking with. After about a minute of talk, he walks away, and the important person and I continued our conversation. No big deal . . . but, I have to admit, I haven’t had that experience very often recently. I’m often at events where I know everyone (or almost everyone) and they know me, and I’m also often at events where I know very few people and have to introduce myself. But it’s rare to be somewhere where I’m
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1 I was at a work-related event today [actually, last month; these non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay], but not connected to the statistics or political science departments. [sent-1, score-0.451]
2 There were a few people there I knew well, and they were introducing me to others. [sent-2, score-0.339]
3 Then at some point when I was talking with one of the more important people in the room, a sixtyish guy comes by and stands next to us. [sent-3, score-0.623]
4 He looks at me in puzzlement, spits out his first name, and without a pause starts talking to the person I’d been speaking with. [sent-5, score-0.87]
5 After about a minute of talk, he walks away, and the important person and I continued our conversation. [sent-6, score-0.684]
6 but, I have to admit, I haven’t had that experience very often recently. [sent-10, score-0.157]
7 I’m often at events where I know everyone (or almost everyone) and they know me, and I’m also often at events where I know very few people and have to introduce myself. [sent-11, score-1.519]
8 But it’s rare to be somewhere where I’m such an insignificant bug that someone sees me standing there and acts like I don’t exist! [sent-12, score-0.931]
9 It’s good to occasionally be treated like a real nobody. [sent-14, score-0.224]
10 I figured out who the guy was, looked him up, and found out that he hasn’t published anything technical since 1983, so I doubt I would’ve had anything useful to offer to him. [sent-17, score-0.866]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1007 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-13-At last, treated with the disrespect that I deserve
Introduction: I was at a work-related event today [actually, last month; these non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay], but not connected to the statistics or political science departments. There were a few people there I knew well, and they were introducing me to others. Then at some point when I was talking with one of the more important people in the room, a sixtyish guy comes by and stands next to us. I put out my hand and introduce myself. He looks at me in puzzlement, spits out his first name, and without a pause starts talking to the person I’d been speaking with. After about a minute of talk, he walks away, and the important person and I continued our conversation. No big deal . . . but, I have to admit, I haven’t had that experience very often recently. I’m often at events where I know everyone (or almost everyone) and they know me, and I’m also often at events where I know very few people and have to introduce myself. But it’s rare to be somewhere where I’m
2 0.17154613 1394 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-99!
Introduction: Those of you who know what I’m talking about, know what I’m talking about.
Introduction: Louis Mittel writes: The premise of the column this guy is starting is interesting: Noah Davis interviews a smart person and then interviews the smartest person that smart person knows and so on. It reminded me of you mentioning survey design strategy of asking people about other people, like “How many people do you know named Stuart?” or “How many people do you know that have had an abortion?” Ignoring the interview aspect of what this guy is doing, I think there’s some cool questions about the distribution/path behavior of smartest-person-I-know chains (say, seeded at random). Do they loop? If so, how long do they run before looping, how large are the loops? What parts of the population do the explore? Do you know of anything that’s been done on something like this? My reply: Interesting question. It could be asked of any referral chain, for example asking a sequence of people, “Who’s the tallest person you know?” or “Who’s the best piano player you know” or “Who’
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Introduction: In old books (and occasionally new books), you see the word “Why” used to indicate a pause or emphasis in dialogue. For example, from 1952: “Why, how perfectly simple!” she said to herself. “The way to save Wilbur’s life is to play a trick on Zuckerman. “If I can fool a bug,” thought Charlotte, “I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.” That line about people and bugs was cute, but what really jumped out at me was the “Why.” I don’t think I’ve ever ever heard anyone use “Why” in that way in conversation, but I see it all the time in books, and every time it’s jarring. What’s the deal? Is it that people used to talk that way? Or is a Wasp thing, some regional speech pattern that was captured in books because it was considered standard conversational speech? I suppose one way to learn more would be to watch a bunch of old movies. I could sort of imagine Jimmy Stewart beginning his sentences with “Why” all the time. Does anyone know more? P.S. I use
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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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Introduction: I was at a work-related event today [actually, last month; these non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay], but not connected to the statistics or political science departments. There were a few people there I knew well, and they were introducing me to others. Then at some point when I was talking with one of the more important people in the room, a sixtyish guy comes by and stands next to us. I put out my hand and introduce myself. He looks at me in puzzlement, spits out his first name, and without a pause starts talking to the person I’d been speaking with. After about a minute of talk, he walks away, and the important person and I continued our conversation. No big deal . . . but, I have to admit, I haven’t had that experience very often recently. I’m often at events where I know everyone (or almost everyone) and they know me, and I’m also often at events where I know very few people and have to introduce myself. But it’s rare to be somewhere where I’m
Introduction: Some asshole who has a bug up his ass about compressed sensing is spamming our comments with a bunch of sock puppets. All from the same IP address: “George Stoneriver,” Scott Wolfe,” and just plain “Paul,” all saying pretty much the same thing in the same sort of broken English (except for Paul, whose post was too short to do a dialect analysis). “Scott Wolfe” is a generic sort of name, but a quick google search reveals nothing related to this topic. “George Stoneriver” seems to have no internet presence at all (besides the comments at this blog). As for “Paul,” I don’t know, maybe the spammer was too lazy to invent a last name? Our spammer spends about half his time slamming the field of compressed sensing and the other half pumping up the work of someone named Xiteng Liu. There’s no excuse for this behavior. It’s horrible, a true abuse of our scholarly community. If Scott Adams wants to use a sock puppet, fine, the guy’s an artist and we should cut him some slack. If tha
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Introduction: I, like Steve Hsu , I too would love to read a definitive biography of John von Neumann (or, as we’d say in the U.S., “John Neumann”). I’ve read little things about him in various places such as Stanislaw Ulam’s classic autobiography, and two things I’ve repeatedly noticed are: 1. Neumann comes off as a obnoxious, self-satisfied jerk. He just seems like the kind of guy I wouldn’t like in real life. 2. All these great men seem to really have loved the guy. It’s hard for me to reconcile two impressions above. Of course, lots of people have a good side and a bad side, but what’s striking here is that my impressions of Neumann’s bad side come from the very stories that his friends use to demonstrate how lovable he was! So, yes, I’d like to see the biography–but only if it could resolve this paradox. Also, I don’t know how relevant this is, but Neumann shares one thing with the more-lovable Ulam and the less-lovable Mandelbrot: all had Jewish backgrounds but didn’t seem to
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Introduction: A blog commenter pointed me to this news article on Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology professor here: He was the subject last year of a grueling investigation into a quarter-million dollars of spending that Columbia auditors said was insufficiently documented, misappropriated or outright fabricated. According to internal documents from that investigation, which were obtained by The New York Times, the auditors said that Professor Venkatesh directed $52,328 to someone without any “documented evidence of work performed.” He listed a dinner for 25 people, relating to research on professional baseball players; auditors found that only 8 people had attended . . . All told, auditors questioned expenses amounting to $241,364.83. . . . Professor Venkatesh said in a brief phone conversation in October that he had repaid $13,000. . . . “I have never been accused of fraud or embezzlement.” One thing that frustrates me with newspaper articles is when they don’t follow up. Venkatesh was
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Introduction: I’ve been following with mild interest the recent news stories on the lawbreaking at the Steven A. Cohen hedge fund, for the silly reason that I gave a paid lecture for them a few years ago. I wasn’t thinking too hard about whether they would be using my wonderful statistical ideas to be more effective at insider trading . . . Recently Paul Alper sent me an email pointing out that one of the lawbreakers involved is named Gilman—perhaps he’s related to me? Everyone is related to everyone else but I don’t know my relation to this particular guy. I actually have an aunt whose last name is Gilman. Here’s how it happened. A few years after my father was born (but before the birth of his sister), my grandfather changed his name from Gelman to Gilman. The story was that he was tired of people always calling him Gilman so he just changed his name. I’d call that a true commitment to the descriptive approach to linguistics. On the minus side, he gave my father’s older sister Luther
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Introduction: David Schminovich points me to this paper by Yu Lu, H. Mo, Martin Weinberg, and Neal Katz: We believe that a wide range of physical processes conspire to shape the observed galaxy population but we remain unsure of their detailed interactions. The semi-analytic model (SAM) of galaxy formation uses multi-dimensional parameterisations of the physical processes of galaxy formation and provides a tool to constrain these underlying physical interactions. Because of the high dimensionality, the parametric problem of galaxy formation may be profitably tackled with a Bayesian-inference based approach, which allows one to constrain theory with data in a statistically rigorous way. In this paper we develop a SAM in the framework of Bayesian inference. . . . And here’s another from the same authors, this time on “Bayesian inference of galaxy formation from the K-band luminosity function of galaxies: tensions between theory and observation.” I haven’t actually looked at the papers but
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Introduction: I was at a work-related event today [actually, last month; these non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay], but not connected to the statistics or political science departments. There were a few people there I knew well, and they were introducing me to others. Then at some point when I was talking with one of the more important people in the room, a sixtyish guy comes by and stands next to us. I put out my hand and introduce myself. He looks at me in puzzlement, spits out his first name, and without a pause starts talking to the person I’d been speaking with. After about a minute of talk, he walks away, and the important person and I continued our conversation. No big deal . . . but, I have to admit, I haven’t had that experience very often recently. I’m often at events where I know everyone (or almost everyone) and they know me, and I’m also often at events where I know very few people and have to introduce myself. But it’s rare to be somewhere where I’m
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