andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1147 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Image via Wikipedia Robert Zubrin writes in “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 ” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. [sent-2, score-0.1]
2 Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U. [sent-3, score-0.79]
3 government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. [sent-5, score-1.679]
4 The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. [sent-6, score-1.588]
5 Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. [sent-7, score-0.842]
6 To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3 million per life saved. [sent-8, score-1.59]
7 That ceiling therefore may be taken as a high-end estimate for the value of an American’s life as defined by the U. [sent-9, score-0.654]
8 This reminds me of my old article on Value of Life – where the hidden cost of the Iraq war for the US comes to 720,000 lives lost (based on the huge cost). [sent-12, score-0.645]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('life', 0.337), ('million', 0.274), ('transportation', 0.24), ('graham', 0.233), ('saved', 0.206), ('cost', 0.189), ('per', 0.174), ('costs', 0.154), ('lives', 0.147), ('lifesaving', 0.142), ('ceiling', 0.142), ('zubrin', 0.142), ('expenditure', 0.142), ('marked', 0.142), ('expenditures', 0.134), ('residential', 0.123), ('occupational', 0.12), ('colleagues', 0.118), ('health', 0.117), ('inefficiency', 0.117), ('deadly', 0.114), ('policy', 0.112), ('regulations', 0.112), ('feb', 0.112), ('rejecting', 0.112), ('ranges', 0.108), ('protection', 0.104), ('exception', 0.104), ('value', 0.104), ('iraq', 0.103), ('murder', 0.1), ('analyst', 0.1), ('median', 0.095), ('safety', 0.094), ('occurs', 0.092), ('environmental', 0.09), ('waste', 0.088), ('hidden', 0.088), ('image', 0.08), ('latter', 0.079), ('proposed', 0.077), ('wikipedia', 0.076), ('war', 0.076), ('thousands', 0.075), ('lost', 0.075), ('harvard', 0.075), ('therefore', 0.071), ('reminds', 0.07), ('spent', 0.069), ('robert', 0.069)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999994 1147 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-30-Statistical Murder
Introduction: Image via Wikipedia Robert Zubrin writes in “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3
2 0.14983237 474 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-18-The kind of frustration we could all use more of
Introduction: Nate writes : The Yankees have offered Jeter $45 million over three years — or $15 million per year. . . But that doesn’t mean that the process won’t be frustrating for Jeter, or that there won’t be a few hurt feelings along the way. . . . $45 million, huh? Even after taxes , that’s a lot of money!
Introduction: Yu Xie thought I’d have something to say about this recent paper , “Evidence on the impact of sustained exposure to air pollution on life expectancy from China’s Huai River policy,” by Yuyu Chen, Avraham Ebenstein, Michael Greenstone, and Hongbin Li, which begins: This paper’s findings suggest that an arbitrary Chinese policy that greatly increases total suspended particulates (TSPs) air pollution is causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. The quasi-experimental empirical approach is based on China’s Huai River policy, which provided free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in cities north of the Huai River but denied heat to the south. Using a regression discontinuity design based on distance from the Huai River, we find that ambient concentrations of TSPs are about 184 μg/m3 [95% confidence interval (CI): 61, 307] or 55% higher in the north. Further, the results indicate that life expectanci
4 0.13405591 68 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-…pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Introduction: A New York Times article reports the opening of a half-mile section of bike path, recently built along the west side of Manhattan at a cost of $16M, or roughly $30 million per mile. That’s about $5700 per linear foot. Kinda sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, $30 million per mile for about one car-lane mile is a lot, but it’s not out of line compared to other urban highway construction costs. The Doyle Drive project in San Francisco — a freeway to replace the current old and deteriorating freeway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge — is currently under way at $1 billion for 1.6 miles…but hey, it will have six lanes each way, so that isn’t so bad, at $50 million per lane-mile. And there are other components to the project, too, not just building the highway (there will also be bike paths, landscaping, on- and off-ramps, and so on). All in all it seems roughly in line with the New York bike lane project. Speaking of the Doyle Drive project, one expense was the cost of movin
5 0.12916297 1548 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-Health disparities are associated with low life expectancy
Introduction: Lee Seachrest points to an article , “Life expectancy and disparity: an international comparison of life table data,” by James Vaupel, Zhen Zhang, and Alyson van Raalte. This paper has killer graphs. Here are their results: In 89 of the 170 years from 1840 to 2009, the country with the highest male life expectancy also had the lowest male life disparity. This was true in 86 years for female life expectancy and disparity. In all years, the top several life expectancy leaders were also the top life disparity leaders. Although only 38% of deaths were premature, fully 84% of the increase in life expectancy resulted from averting premature deaths. The reduction in life disparity resulted from reductions in early-life disparity, that is, disparity caused by premature deaths; late-life disparity levels remained roughly constant. The authors also note: Reducing early-life disparities helps people plan their less-uncertain lifetimes. A higher likelihood of surviving to old age
6 0.10799582 38 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-18-Breastfeeding, infant hyperbilirubinemia, statistical graphics, and modern medicine
7 0.10412195 465 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-13-$3M health care prediction challenge
8 0.10168536 1356 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-31-Question 21 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
9 0.10056368 702 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-09-“Discovered: the genetic secret of a happy life”
10 0.09753371 98 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Further thoughts on happiness and life satisfaction research
11 0.094814584 1086 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-The most dangerous jobs in America
12 0.094160773 706 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-11-The happiness gene: My bottom line (for now)
13 0.093201242 1358 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-01-Question 22 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
15 0.084719032 1621 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-13-Puzzles of criminal justice
16 0.083574794 679 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-25-My talk at Stanford on Tuesday
17 0.083259627 711 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-14-Steven Rhoads’s book, “The Economist’s View of the World”
18 0.082587495 2181 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-21-The Commissar for Traffic presents the latest Five-Year Plan
19 0.081479006 1845 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-07-Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV?
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.102), (1, -0.057), (2, 0.043), (3, -0.007), (4, 0.001), (5, 0.028), (6, 0.012), (7, 0.013), (8, -0.013), (9, 0.016), (10, -0.084), (11, -0.035), (12, 0.012), (13, 0.086), (14, -0.0), (15, 0.031), (16, 0.078), (17, -0.005), (18, 0.06), (19, -0.016), (20, 0.004), (21, 0.052), (22, -0.019), (23, 0.012), (24, 0.004), (25, 0.025), (26, -0.036), (27, 0.007), (28, 0.024), (29, 0.01), (30, -0.05), (31, 0.015), (32, 0.001), (33, -0.043), (34, 0.036), (35, -0.039), (36, 0.033), (37, 0.028), (38, 0.028), (39, 0.02), (40, -0.074), (41, -0.08), (42, -0.112), (43, -0.004), (44, 0.019), (45, -0.038), (46, -0.007), (47, -0.009), (48, -0.043), (49, -0.042)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99387437 1147 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-30-Statistical Murder
Introduction: Image via Wikipedia Robert Zubrin writes in “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3
2 0.76055849 1548 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-Health disparities are associated with low life expectancy
Introduction: Lee Seachrest points to an article , “Life expectancy and disparity: an international comparison of life table data,” by James Vaupel, Zhen Zhang, and Alyson van Raalte. This paper has killer graphs. Here are their results: In 89 of the 170 years from 1840 to 2009, the country with the highest male life expectancy also had the lowest male life disparity. This was true in 86 years for female life expectancy and disparity. In all years, the top several life expectancy leaders were also the top life disparity leaders. Although only 38% of deaths were premature, fully 84% of the increase in life expectancy resulted from averting premature deaths. The reduction in life disparity resulted from reductions in early-life disparity, that is, disparity caused by premature deaths; late-life disparity levels remained roughly constant. The authors also note: Reducing early-life disparities helps people plan their less-uncertain lifetimes. A higher likelihood of surviving to old age
Introduction: Alexander at GiveWell writes : The Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP2), a major report funded by the Gates Foundation . . . provides an estimate of $3.41 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the cost-effectiveness of soil-transmitted-helminth (STH) treatment, implying that STH treatment is one of the most cost-effective interventions for global health. In investigating this figure, we have corresponded, over a period of months, with six scholars who had been directly or indirectly involved in the production of the estimate. Eventually, we were able to obtain the spreadsheet that was used to generate the $3.41/DALY estimate. That spreadsheet contains five separate errors that, when corrected, shift the estimated cost effectiveness of deworming from $3.41 to $326.43. [I think they mean to say $300 -- ed.] We came to this conclusion a year after learning that the DCP2’s published cost-effectiveness estimate for schistosomiasis treatment – another kind of
4 0.6875509 1086 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-The most dangerous jobs in America
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes: On the criteria of potential to help people avoid death, this would seem to be among the most important news I’ve ever heard. [In his recent Ph.D. thesis , Ken Lee finds that] death rates depend on job details more than on race, gender, marriage status, rural vs. urban, education, and income combined ! Now for the details. The US Department of Labor has described each of 807 occupations with over 200 detailed features on how jobs are done, skills required, etc.. Lee looked at seven domains of such features, each containing 16 to 57 features, and for each domain Lee did a factor analysis of those features to find the top 2-4 factors. This gave Lee a total of 22 domain factors. Lee also found four overall factors to describe his total set of 225 job and 9 demographic features. (These four factors explain 32%, 15%, 7%, and 4% of total variance.) Lee then tried to use these 26 job factors, along with his other standard predictors (age, race, gender, m
5 0.6492666 474 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-18-The kind of frustration we could all use more of
Introduction: Nate writes : The Yankees have offered Jeter $45 million over three years — or $15 million per year. . . But that doesn’t mean that the process won’t be frustrating for Jeter, or that there won’t be a few hurt feelings along the way. . . . $45 million, huh? Even after taxes , that’s a lot of money!
6 0.64351529 67 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-More on that Dartmouth health care study
7 0.63517177 465 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-13-$3M health care prediction challenge
8 0.6316781 179 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-03-An Olympic size swimming pool full of lithium water
9 0.6191563 21 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Environmentally induced cancer “grossly underestimated”? Doubtful.
10 0.60258049 645 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
11 0.60117352 68 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-…pretty soon you’re talking real money.
12 0.60034925 1501 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-18-More studies on the economic effects of climate change
13 0.58880609 2341 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-20-plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
14 0.58676577 1057 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-14-Hey—I didn’t know that!
15 0.58355027 1621 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-13-Puzzles of criminal justice
16 0.58128029 1906 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-19-“Behind a cancer-treatment firm’s rosy survival claims”
17 0.57718581 196 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The U.S. as welfare state
18 0.57685906 1789 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-05-Elites have alcohol problems too!
19 0.57440811 1546 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-24-Hey—has anybody done this study yet?
20 0.57308483 284 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Continuing efforts to justify false “death panels” claim
topicId topicWeight
[(1, 0.013), (9, 0.055), (15, 0.02), (16, 0.034), (18, 0.013), (21, 0.031), (24, 0.204), (26, 0.021), (43, 0.036), (51, 0.154), (56, 0.011), (81, 0.021), (95, 0.044), (99, 0.247)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9675234 1147 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-30-Statistical Murder
Introduction: Image via Wikipedia Robert Zubrin writes in “How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?” ( Reason , Feb 2012 ): …policy analyst John D. Graham and his colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found in 1997 that the median cost for lifesaving expenditures and regulations by the U.S. government in the health care, residential, transportation, and occupational areas ranges from about $1 million to $3 million spent per life saved in today’s dollars. The only marked exception to this pattern occurs in the area of environmental health protection (such as the Superfund program) which costs about $200 million per life saved. Graham and his colleagues call the latter kind of inefficiency “ statistical murder ,” since thousands of additional lives could be saved each year if the money were used more cost-effectively. To avoid such deadly waste, the Department of Transportation has a policy of rejecting any proposed safety expenditure that costs more than $3
2 0.95456386 1543 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-21-Model complexity as a function of sample size
Introduction: As we get more data, we can fit more model. But at some point we become so overwhelmed by data that, for computational reasons, we can barely do anything at all. Thus, the curve above could be thought of as the product of two curves: a steadily increasing curve showing the statistical ability to fit more complex models with more data, and a steadily decreasing curve showing the computational feasibility of doing so.
3 0.92223483 1594 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-28-My talk on statistical graphics at Mit this Thurs aft
Introduction: Infovis and Statistical Graphics: Different Goals, Different Looks (and here’s the article) Speaker: Andrew Gelman, Columbia University Date: Thursday, November 29 2012 Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM Location: 32-D463 (Star Conference Room) Host: Polina Golland, CSAIL Contact: Polina Golland, 6172538005, polina@csail.mit.edu The importance of graphical displays in statistical practice has been recognized sporadically in the statistical literature over the past century, with wider awareness following Tukey’s Exploratory Data Analysis (1977) and Tufte’s books in the succeeding decades. But statistical graphics still occupies an awkward in-between position: Within statistics, exploratory and graphical methods represent a minor subfield and are not well-integrated with larger themes of modeling and inference. Outside of statistics, infographics (also called information visualization or Infovis) is huge, but their purveyors and enthusiasts appear largely to be uninterested in statisti
4 0.89172518 744 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-03-Statistical methods for healthcare regulation: rating, screening and surveillance
Introduction: Here is my discussion of a recent article by David Spiegelhalter, Christopher Sherlaw-Johnson, Martin Bardsley, Ian Blunt, Christopher Wood and Olivia Grigg, that is scheduled to appear in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: I applaud the authors’ use of a mix of statistical methods to attack an important real-world problem. Policymakers need results right away, and I admire the authors’ ability and willingness to combine several different modeling and significance testing ideas for the purposes of rating and surveillance. That said, I am uncomfortable with the statistical ideas here, for three reasons. First, I feel that the proposed methods, centered as they are around data manipulation and corrections for uncertainty, has serious defects compared to a more model-based approach. My problem with methods based on p-values and z-scores–however they happen to be adjusted–is that they draw discussion toward error rates, sequential analysis, and other technical statistical
5 0.8834455 1584 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-19-Tradeoffs in information graphics
Introduction: The visual display of quantitative information (to use Edward Tufte’s wonderful term) is a diverse field or set of fields, and its practitioners have different goals. The goals of software designers, applied statisticians, biologists, graphic designers, and journalists (to list just a few of the important creators of data graphics) often overlap—but not completely. One of our aims in writing our article [on Infovis and Statistical Graphics] was to emphasize the diversity of graphical goals, as it seems to us that even experts tend to consider one aspect of a graph and not others. Our main practical suggestion was that, in the internet age, we should not have to choose between attractive graphs and informational graphs: it should be possible to display both, via interactive displays. But to follow this suggestion, one must first accept that not every beautiful graph is informative, and not every informative graph is beautiful. . . . Yes, it can sometimes be possible for a graph to
6 0.8809219 1176 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-19-Standardized writing styles and standardized graphing styles
7 0.87472689 1465 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-21-D. Buggin
8 0.87392545 1240 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-02-Blogads update
10 0.87299109 85 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-14-Prior distribution for design effects
11 0.87271488 1355 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-31-Lindley’s paradox
12 0.87254417 63 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-02-The problem of overestimation of group-level variance parameters
13 0.87235248 1080 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-24-Latest in blog advertising
14 0.87228405 511 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-11-One more time on that ESP study: The problem of overestimates and the shrinkage solution
15 0.8719672 1792 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-07-X on JLP
16 0.87180507 2109 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-21-Hidden dangers of noninformative priors
17 0.8715291 970 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-24-Bell Labs
18 0.87130773 639 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-31-Bayes: radical, liberal, or conservative?
19 0.87126201 896 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-09-My homework success