andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1010 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: By “free energy” I don’t mean perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water and get 200 mpg, or the latest cold-fusion hype. No, I’m referring to the term from physics. The free energy of a system is, roughly, the amount of energy that can be directly extracted from it. For example, a rock at room temperature is just full of energy—not just the energy locked in its nuclei, but basic thermal energy—but at room temperature you can’t extract any of it. To the physicists in the audience: Yes, I realize that free energy has a technical meaning in statistical mechanics and that my above definition is sloppy. Please bear with me. And, to the non-physicists: feel free to head to Wikipedia or a physics textbook for a more careful treatment. I was thinking about free energy the other day when hearing someone on the radio say something about China bailing out the E.U. I did a double-take. Huh? The E.U. is rich, China’s not so rich. How can a middle-income country bail out a
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 By “free energy” I don’t mean perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water and get 200 mpg, or the latest cold-fusion hype. [sent-1, score-0.227]
2 The free energy of a system is, roughly, the amount of energy that can be directly extracted from it. [sent-3, score-1.574]
3 For example, a rock at room temperature is just full of energy—not just the energy locked in its nuclei, but basic thermal energy—but at room temperature you can’t extract any of it. [sent-4, score-1.255]
4 To the physicists in the audience: Yes, I realize that free energy has a technical meaning in statistical mechanics and that my above definition is sloppy. [sent-5, score-0.949]
5 And, to the non-physicists: feel free to head to Wikipedia or a physics textbook for a more careful treatment. [sent-7, score-0.332]
6 I was thinking about free energy the other day when hearing someone on the radio say something about China bailing out the E. [sent-8, score-0.944]
7 How can a middle-income country bail out a bunch of rich countries? [sent-15, score-0.273]
8 Portugal, the poorest country in western Europe, has a GDP of $23,000. [sent-17, score-0.209]
9 Some countries in eastern Europe are poorer; the EU as a whole is a GDP of $30,000 per capita. [sent-18, score-0.152]
10 But they have more stuff than just about anybody else. [sent-22, score-0.064]
11 In theory, Europeans and Americans could create all sorts of free energy just by consuming less for awhile: no more fancy vacations, new cars, i-pods, smart bombs, jet fighters, etc. [sent-25, score-1.093]
12 (Galbraith was discussing the belief that a high GDP—even if it’s all being spent on civilian goods—is good for national defense because it represents economic capacity that could be transformed to military use if necessary. [sent-27, score-0.408]
13 It happened in WW2, but then the economy was starting with a lot of underuse. [sent-29, score-0.082]
14 If anything, one could argue that a depression is good for military capacity in that the unused resources can be directly shifted. [sent-30, score-0.429]
15 ) So, China’s got that free energy—or at least some people thing they do. [sent-31, score-0.332]
16 The idea of “free energy” and economic resources seems simple enough but I don’t know what it’s called by economists. [sent-35, score-0.154]
17 I googled “free energy economics” and got things like this which really weren’t what I was looking for. [sent-36, score-0.607]
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same-blog 1 0.99999952 1010 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-14-“Free energy” and economic resources
Introduction: By “free energy” I don’t mean perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water and get 200 mpg, or the latest cold-fusion hype. No, I’m referring to the term from physics. The free energy of a system is, roughly, the amount of energy that can be directly extracted from it. For example, a rock at room temperature is just full of energy—not just the energy locked in its nuclei, but basic thermal energy—but at room temperature you can’t extract any of it. To the physicists in the audience: Yes, I realize that free energy has a technical meaning in statistical mechanics and that my above definition is sloppy. Please bear with me. And, to the non-physicists: feel free to head to Wikipedia or a physics textbook for a more careful treatment. I was thinking about free energy the other day when hearing someone on the radio say something about China bailing out the E.U. I did a double-take. Huh? The E.U. is rich, China’s not so rich. How can a middle-income country bail out a
Introduction: I received the following in email from our publisher: I write with regards to the project to publish a China Edition of your book “Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models” (ISBN-13: 9780521686891) for the mainland Chinese market. I regret to inform you that we have been notified by our partner in China, Posts & Telecommunications Press (PTP), that due to various politically sensitive materials in the text, the China Edition has not met with the approval of the publishing authorities in China, and as such PTP will not be able to proceed with the publication of this edition. We will therefore have to cancel plans for the China Edition of your book. Please accept my apologies for this unforeseen development. If you have any queries regarding this, do feel free to let me know. Oooh, it makes me feel so . . . subversive. It reminds me how, in Sunday school, they told us that if we were ever visiting Russia, we should smuggle Bibles in our luggage because the
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Introduction: Bill Harris wrote in with a question: David Hogg points out in one of his general articles on data modeling that regression assumptions require one to put the variable with the highest variance in the ‘y’ position and the variable you know best (lowest variance) in the ‘x’ position. As he points out, others speak of independent and dependent variables, as if causality determined the form of a regression formula. In a quick scan of ARM and BDA, I don’t see clear advice, but I do see the use of ‘independent’ and ‘dependent.’ I recently did a model over data in which we know the ‘effect’ pretty well (we measure it), while we know the ’cause’ less well (it’s estimated by people who only need to get it approximately correct). A model of the form ’cause ~ effect’ fit visually much better than one of the form ‘effect ~ cause’, but interpreting it seems challenging. For a simplistic example, let the effect be energy use in a building for cooling (E), and let the cause be outdoor ai
Introduction: I hate to keep bumping our scheduled posts but this is just too important and too exciting to wait. So it’s time to jump the queue. The news is a paper from Michael Betancourt that presents a super-cool new way to compute normalizing constants: A common strategy for inference in complex models is the relaxation of a simple model into the more complex target model, for example the prior into the posterior in Bayesian inference. Existing approaches that attempt to generate such transformations, however, are sensitive to the pathologies of complex distributions and can be difficult to implement in practice. Leveraging the geometry of thermodynamic processes I introduce a principled and robust approach to deforming measures that presents a powerful new tool for inference. The idea is to generalize Hamiltonian Monte Carlo so that it moves through a family of distributions (that is, it transitions through an “inverse temperature” variable called beta that indexes the family) a
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Introduction: I recently came across a data visualization that perfectly demonstrates the difference between the “infovis” and “statgraphics” perspectives. Here’s the image ( link from Tyler Cowen): That’s the infovis. The statgraphic version would simply be a dotplot, something like this: (I purposely used the default settings in R with only minor modifications here to demonstrate what happens if you just want to plot the data with minimal effort.) Let’s compare the two graphs: From a statistical graphics perspective, the second graph dominates. The countries are directly comparable and the numbers are indicated by positions rather than area. The first graph is full of distracting color and gives the misleading visual impression that the total GDP of countries 5-10 is about equal to that of countries 1-4. If the goal is to get attention , though, it’s another story. There’s nothing special about the top graph above except how it looks. It represents neither a dat
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Introduction: By “free energy” I don’t mean perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water and get 200 mpg, or the latest cold-fusion hype. No, I’m referring to the term from physics. The free energy of a system is, roughly, the amount of energy that can be directly extracted from it. For example, a rock at room temperature is just full of energy—not just the energy locked in its nuclei, but basic thermal energy—but at room temperature you can’t extract any of it. To the physicists in the audience: Yes, I realize that free energy has a technical meaning in statistical mechanics and that my above definition is sloppy. Please bear with me. And, to the non-physicists: feel free to head to Wikipedia or a physics textbook for a more careful treatment. I was thinking about free energy the other day when hearing someone on the radio say something about China bailing out the E.U. I did a double-take. Huh? The E.U. is rich, China’s not so rich. How can a middle-income country bail out a
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Introduction: Economist David Backus writes : A casual reader of economic news can’t help but get the impression that the way to get the economy moving is to have people spend more — consume more, in the language of macroeconomics. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? At the risk of making the obvious complicated, I’d say it’s not so obvious. It’s also not obvious that consumption has gone down since the crisis, or that saving has gone up. So what’s going on with the labor market? I’ll get to the rest of the explanation, but first some background. The other day, I posted posted this remark from Backus: This is from my area of work, macroeconomics. The suggestion here is that the economy is growing slowly because consumers aren’t spending money. But how do we know it’s not the reverse: that consumers are spending less because the economy isn’t doing well. As a teacher, I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to get students to understand that the first statement isn’t obviously true
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Introduction: A year or so ago I discussed the reasoning of zillionaire financier Peter Thiel, who seems to believe his own hype and, worse, seems to be able to convince reporters of his infallibility as well. Apparently he “possesses a preternatural ability to spot patterns that others miss.” More recently, Felix Salmon commented on Thiel’s financial misadventures: Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, ain’t doing so well. Its assets under management are down 90% from their peak, and total returns from the high point are -65%. Thiel is smart, successful, rich, well-connected, and on top of all that his calls have actually been right . . . None of that, clearly, was enough for Clarium to make money on its trades: the fund was undone by volatility and weakness in risk management. There are a few lessons to learn here. Firstly, just because someone is a Silicon Valley gazillionaire, or any kind of successful entrepreneur for that matter, doesn’t mean they should be trusted with oth
Introduction: Sandeep Baliga writes : [In a recent study , Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner write:] For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we [Duranton and Turner] find that VKT (vehicle kilometers traveled) increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the fundamental law of highway congestion.’ Provision of public transit also simply leads to the people taking public transport being replaced by drivers on the road. Therefore: These findings suggest that both road capacity expansions and extensions to public transit are not appropriate policies with which to combat traffic congestion. This leaves congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion. To which I reply: Sure, if your goal is to curb traffic congestion . But what sort of goal is that? Thinking like a microeconomist, my policy goal is to increase people’s utility. Sure, traffic congestion is annoying, but there must be some advantages to driving on that crowded road or pe
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Introduction: I received the following unsolicited email, subject line “Chance Magazine – Comedy Showcase”: Hi Andrew, Hope you’re doing well. I’m writing to let you know that we will be putting on an industry showcase at the brand new Laughing Devil Comedy Club (4738 Vernon Blvd. Long Island City) on Thursday, February 9th at 8:00 PM. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s one stop on the 7 train from Grand Central. Following the showcase, the club will stay open for an industry mingle/happy hour with drink specials and all the business card exchanging you can hope for. This showcase will feature 9 of our best: Steve Hofstetter’s latest album hit #1 in the world. He’ll be hosting Collin Moulton (Showtime Half Hour Special), Tony Deyo (Aspen Comedy Festival), Tom Simmons (Winner of the SF International Comedy Festival), Marc Ryan (Host of Mudslingers), Mike Trainor (TruTV), Jessi Campbell (CMT), Danny Browning (Bob & Tom), and Joe Zimmerman (Sirius/XM). I would love for you (and anyone you’d like to
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Introduction: I used this convenient site to create some images for a talk I’m preparing. (The competing headlines: “Beautiful parents have more daughters” vs. “No compelling evidence that beautiful parents are more or less likely to have daughters.” The latter gets cut off at “No compelling evidence that,” which actually works pretty well to demonstrate the sort of dull headline that would result if newspapers were to publish null results.)
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Introduction: Something on Applied Bayesian Statistics April 27, 4:10-5 p.m., 1011 Evans Hall I will deliver one of the following three talks: 1. Of beauty, sex, and power: Statistical challenges in estimating small effects 2. Why we (usually) don’t worry about multiple comparisons 3. Parameterization and Bayesian modeling Whoever shows up on time to the seminar gets to vote, and I’ll give the talk that gets the most votes.
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Introduction: Matthew Yglesias discusses how West Virginia used to be a Democratic state but is now solidly Republican. I thought it would be helpful to expand this to look at trends since 1948 (rather than just 1988) and all 50 states (rather than just one). This would represent a bit of work, except that I already did it a couple years ago, so here it is (right-click on the image to see the whole thing): I cheated a bit to get reasonable-looking groupings, for example putting Indiana in the Border South rather than Midwest, and putting Alaska in Mountain West and Hawaii in West Coast. Also, it would help to distinguish states by color (to be able to disentangle New Jersey and Delaware, for example) but we didn’t do this because the book is mostly black and white. In any case, the picture makes it clear that there have been strong regional trends all over during the past sixty years. P.S. My graph comes from Red State Blue State so no 2008 data, but 2008 was pretty much a shift
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