andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1161 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover some technical material that he was too lazy to rewrite; rather, he put together an entire novel out of others’ material. Rowan writes (as part of a longer passage that itself appears to be dishonest; see the November 15, 2011 5:36 AM comment later on in the thread): I [Rowan] sat there with the books [by others] on my kitchen table and typed the passages up word for word. I had a plot in mind, initially, and looked for passages that would work within that context. People told me the initial plot was dull (spies being killed all over Europe – no one knows why), so I changed it to be more like the premise of McCarry’s “Second Sight” which was a whole lot
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic. [sent-1, score-0.793]
2 ” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover some technical material that he was too lazy to rewrite; rather, he put together an entire novel out of others’ material. [sent-2, score-0.709]
3 Rowan writes (as part of a longer passage that itself appears to be dishonest; see the November 15, 2011 5:36 AM comment later on in the thread): I [Rowan] sat there with the books [by others] on my kitchen table and typed the passages up word for word. [sent-3, score-0.46]
4 I had a plot in mind, initially, and looked for passages that would work within that context. [sent-4, score-0.365]
5 People told me the initial plot was dull (spies being killed all over Europe – no one knows why), so I changed it to be more like the premise of McCarry’s “Second Sight” which was a whole lot more interesting. [sent-5, score-0.299]
6 Eventually I found passages that adhered to these kinds of scenes that only meant changing the plot a little bit here and there. [sent-7, score-0.365]
7 Every new passage added has its own peculiar set of edges that had to find a way in. [sent-9, score-0.156]
8 A commenter writes: The whole thing about this that is so sad is that, yes, writing is hard work, and sending your words into the world to be read and judged is hard. [sent-12, score-0.157]
9 Putting together an entire novel out of existing scraps and pieces—that’s pretty impressive to me. [sent-16, score-0.453]
10 Quilting may be less technically impressive than weaving but it’s a skill all its own. [sent-17, score-0.234]
11 Similarly, rappers have stolen lots of 70s riffs but they’ve added something of their own. [sent-18, score-0.21]
12 academic theft The commenters also discuss other literary plagiarists such as Jacob Epstein, Patricia Waddell, Richard Condon, and Jerzy Kosinski. [sent-20, score-0.343]
13 Based on all these examples, literary plagiarism seems a bit different than academic plagiarism. [sent-21, score-0.23]
14 ) Goodwin, Fischer, Wegman, Tribe, Ayres, Dershowitz, etc etc etc are doing just fine in their careers. [sent-23, score-0.276]
15 In contrast, for literary plagiarists there is skill involved in patching together complementary material from others’ published work, seeking passages that are obscure enough or bland enough to escape notice. [sent-27, score-1.144]
16 But I think you can admire the skill (if not the dishonesty) of a literary copyist who can put together a whole novel out of others’ material. [sent-29, score-0.812]
17 Getting energy from the reader I also liked this comment, later on in the thread: Books contain energy, and when you purposefully use words found in other books, you pull that energy into your own work. [sent-30, score-0.548]
18 I [the commenter] think the energy comes from the author, and all her experiences and deliberations, but also it comes from the people working on the book: editors, artists, marketing, etc. [sent-31, score-0.201]
19 I’d go so far as to say that people reading and responding to books can contribute to their energy as well. [sent-32, score-0.344]
20 I believe the reader can supply a lot, and some books stimulate this by having lots of hooks, as it were, to connect to the readers’ thoughts and experiences. [sent-34, score-0.217]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('rowan', 0.251), ('literary', 0.23), ('passages', 0.227), ('energy', 0.201), ('skill', 0.155), ('patching', 0.144), ('duns', 0.144), ('together', 0.144), ('books', 0.143), ('plot', 0.138), ('novel', 0.132), ('material', 0.131), ('quentin', 0.122), ('rewrite', 0.119), ('plagiarists', 0.113), ('joy', 0.111), ('plagiarize', 0.109), ('entire', 0.098), ('lazy', 0.095), ('wegman', 0.092), ('etc', 0.092), ('passage', 0.09), ('thread', 0.09), ('others', 0.082), ('initial', 0.082), ('whole', 0.079), ('impressive', 0.079), ('commenter', 0.078), ('reader', 0.074), ('purposefully', 0.072), ('deliberations', 0.072), ('pen', 0.072), ('wit', 0.072), ('rappers', 0.072), ('copyist', 0.072), ('jerzy', 0.072), ('quilting', 0.072), ('raid', 0.072), ('riffs', 0.072), ('ripoffs', 0.072), ('uncredited', 0.072), ('putting', 0.07), ('pasted', 0.068), ('memoirs', 0.068), ('infringement', 0.068), ('culminating', 0.068), ('patchwork', 0.068), ('dishonesty', 0.068), ('novelist', 0.068), ('added', 0.066)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999976 1161 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-10-If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?
Introduction: Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover some technical material that he was too lazy to rewrite; rather, he put together an entire novel out of others’ material. Rowan writes (as part of a longer passage that itself appears to be dishonest; see the November 15, 2011 5:36 AM comment later on in the thread): I [Rowan] sat there with the books [by others] on my kitchen table and typed the passages up word for word. I had a plot in mind, initially, and looked for passages that would work within that context. People told me the initial plot was dull (spies being killed all over Europe – no one knows why), so I changed it to be more like the premise of McCarry’s “Second Sight” which was a whole lot
2 0.20798448 1210 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-12-Plagiarists are in the habit of lying
Introduction: Amy Hundley writes in the New Yorker about a notorious recent case of unacknowledged literary quilting : I [Hundley] was the editor at Grove/Atlantic to whom Quentin Rowan’s novel “Appearance and the Park” was submitted (“The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, February 13th & 20th). Widdicombe writes that the editor in question thought that “its plot was too close to that of another of the house’s books, ‘My Idea of Fun,’ by Will Self,” and I can only assume that this explanation came from Rowan. In fact, Rowan had lifted a passage nearly verbatim from Will Self’s novella “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis.” It was an especially delicious one, in which Self describes the media denizens of a particular bar. I recognized it immediately and informed his agent that he’d plagiarized it. Writing a plot similar to a successful novelist’s—something that can arise innocently—is very different from plagiarizing. Appropriating and remixing someone else’s work while acknowledging sources is
3 0.13562262 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: Dan Kahan writes on what seems to be the topic of the week : In reflecting on Lehrer , I [Kahan] have to wonder why the sanction is so much more severe — basically career “death penalty” subject to parole [I think he means "life imprisonment" --- ed.], I suppose, if he manages decades of “good behavior” — for this science journalist when scholars who stick plagiarized material in their “popular science” writing don’t even get slap on wrist — more like shrug of the shoulders. I do think the behavior is comparable; if anything, it’s probably “less wrong” to make up innocuous filler quotes (the Dylan one is, for sure), then to stick paragraphs of someone else’s writing into a book. But the cause is the same: laziness. (The plagarism I’m talking about is not the sort done by Wegman; its sort done by scholars who use factory production techniques to write popular press books — teams of research assistants who write memos, which the “author” then knits together & passes off as learne
5 0.11954716 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
6 0.11515076 400 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-08-Poli sci plagiarism update, and a note about the benefits of not caring
8 0.10704903 2297 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-20-Fooled by randomness
9 0.10424842 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime
10 0.10233026 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
11 0.10030677 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
12 0.098637722 2023 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-14-On blogging
13 0.098405451 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
14 0.096013613 168 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-28-Colorless green, and clueless
15 0.095536023 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
16 0.095194951 682 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-27-“The ultimate left-wing novel”
17 0.094113767 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
18 0.092477798 1484 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-05-Two exciting movie ideas: “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen”
19 0.0923215 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
20 0.091781244 886 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-02-The new Helen DeWitt novel
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.169), (1, -0.088), (2, -0.061), (3, 0.033), (4, 0.017), (5, -0.019), (6, 0.082), (7, -0.017), (8, 0.052), (9, 0.006), (10, 0.037), (11, -0.02), (12, -0.012), (13, -0.007), (14, 0.043), (15, -0.037), (16, 0.028), (17, 0.004), (18, 0.08), (19, -0.046), (20, 0.006), (21, -0.006), (22, -0.006), (23, 0.032), (24, 0.022), (25, -0.042), (26, 0.032), (27, 0.023), (28, -0.025), (29, 0.059), (30, 0.034), (31, 0.032), (32, -0.03), (33, 0.05), (34, 0.024), (35, 0.021), (36, -0.02), (37, -0.038), (38, 0.038), (39, -0.037), (40, -0.044), (41, -0.009), (42, 0.01), (43, 0.001), (44, -0.013), (45, -0.042), (46, -0.015), (47, 0.003), (48, -0.029), (49, 0.031)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95359725 1161 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-10-If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?
Introduction: Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover some technical material that he was too lazy to rewrite; rather, he put together an entire novel out of others’ material. Rowan writes (as part of a longer passage that itself appears to be dishonest; see the November 15, 2011 5:36 AM comment later on in the thread): I [Rowan] sat there with the books [by others] on my kitchen table and typed the passages up word for word. I had a plot in mind, initially, and looked for passages that would work within that context. People told me the initial plot was dull (spies being killed all over Europe – no one knows why), so I changed it to be more like the premise of McCarry’s “Second Sight” which was a whole lot
2 0.88503003 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
Introduction: Today’s item mixes two of my favorite themes in a horrible way, sort of like a Reese’s Cup but combining brussels sprouts and liver instead of peanut butter and chocolate. In this case, the disturbing flavors that go together are plagiarism (you know what that is) and the publication filter (the idea that there should be very stringent standards for criticizing something, once it happens to be published somewhere). The copyist The first ingredient comes from Matthew Whitaker, an Arizona State University Foundation Professor of History who has a deplorable record of copying material from other writers without attribution . For convenience, I’ll reproduce an example here: On the plus side; Whitaker removed the cliche’d phrase, “undisputed rulers of the roost” when copying from the online encyclopedia; on the downside, I don’t know what he was thinking when he rendered “Conservatives” with a capital letter. And in case you were wondering what the policy on t
3 0.86263776 400 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-08-Poli sci plagiarism update, and a note about the benefits of not caring
Introduction: A recent story about academic plagiarism spurred me to some more general thoughts about the intellectual benefits of not giving a damn. I’ll briefly summarize the plagiarism story and then get to my larger point. Copying big blocks of text from others’ writings without attribution Last month I linked to the story of Frank Fischer, an elderly professor of political science who was caught copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. Apparently there’s some dispute about whether this constitutes plagiarism. On one hand, Harvard’s policy is that “in academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.” On the other hand, several of Fischer’s colleagues defend him by saying, “Mr. Fischer sometimes used the words of other authors. . . ” They also write: The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as
4 0.85524452 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
Introduction: Last month a history professor sent me a note regarding plagiarism at Arizona State University: Matthew Whitaker, who had received an expedited promotion to full professor and was made Director of a new Center for the Study of Race and Democracy by Provost Elizabeth Capaldi and President Michael Crow, was charged by most of the full professors in the History Faculty with having plagiarized throughout his corpus of work, copying from regular works of scholarship and from web sources. Indeed, in his response, which claimed that the petitioners were racist, Whitaker admitted to plagiarism in his work, defending himself in part by stating that he had not reviewed carefully the research and writing he had hired others to do. . . . What bothered my correspondent was that Whitaker remains an ASU Foundation Professor of History despite all the plaig. According to Whitaker’s webpage , he “is also a highly sought after speaker, having offered commentaries on NPR, PBS, . . . and other medi
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes on what seems to be the topic of the week : In reflecting on Lehrer , I [Kahan] have to wonder why the sanction is so much more severe — basically career “death penalty” subject to parole [I think he means "life imprisonment" --- ed.], I suppose, if he manages decades of “good behavior” — for this science journalist when scholars who stick plagiarized material in their “popular science” writing don’t even get slap on wrist — more like shrug of the shoulders. I do think the behavior is comparable; if anything, it’s probably “less wrong” to make up innocuous filler quotes (the Dylan one is, for sure), then to stick paragraphs of someone else’s writing into a book. But the cause is the same: laziness. (The plagarism I’m talking about is not the sort done by Wegman; its sort done by scholars who use factory production techniques to write popular press books — teams of research assistants who write memos, which the “author” then knits together & passes off as learne
6 0.83564746 1210 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-12-Plagiarists are in the habit of lying
7 0.80547762 886 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-02-The new Helen DeWitt novel
8 0.79767525 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
9 0.79506809 4 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-26-Prolefeed
10 0.79330683 2168 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-12-Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in
11 0.79094541 1641 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-27-The Möbius strip, or, marketing that is impervious to criticism
12 0.78663963 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
13 0.78135031 258 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-05-A review of a review of a review of a decade
14 0.78079218 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
15 0.77414703 1483 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-04-“Bestselling Author Caught Posting Positive Reviews of His Own Work on Amazon”
16 0.77253592 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
17 0.76945168 16 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-04-Burgess on Kipling
18 0.76804024 285 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Fiction is not for tirades? Tell that to Saul Bellow!
19 0.76590937 115 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-Whassup with those crappy thrillers?
20 0.76574206 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.022), (2, 0.011), (9, 0.016), (13, 0.018), (15, 0.048), (16, 0.056), (21, 0.02), (22, 0.154), (24, 0.106), (55, 0.041), (59, 0.013), (72, 0.021), (86, 0.025), (93, 0.015), (98, 0.013), (99, 0.242)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.96810079 448 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-03-This is a footnote in one of my papers
Introduction: In the annals of hack literature, it is sometimes said that if you aim to write best-selling crap, all you’ll end up with is crap. To truly produce best-selling crap, you have to have a conviction, perhaps misplaced, that your writing has integrity. Whether or not this is a good generalization about writing, I have seen an analogous phenomenon in statistics: If you try to do nothing but model the data, you can be in for a wild and unpleasant ride: real data always seem to have one more twist beyond our ability to model (von Neumann’s elephant’s trunk notwithstanding). But if you model the underlying process, sometimes your model can fit surprisingly well as well as inviting openings for future research progress.
2 0.96313405 1037 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-01-Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy
Introduction: Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy. That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary : 1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement 2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous”
3 0.94987643 1700 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-31-Snotty reviewers
Introduction: I had a submission a couple years ago that was rejected by a journal. One of the reviewers began with the following snotty aside: In this manuscript Gelman and Shalizi (there’s no anonymity here; this thing has been floating around the web for some time) . . . Actually, we posted it on the same day we submitted it to the journal. But double-blindness allowed the reviewer to act as if we had done something wrong! And, even if it had been “floating around the web for some time,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it just meant that the article had previously been rejected by a bad-attitude reviewer!
4 0.94229507 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
5 0.94175881 145 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-13-Statistical controversy regarding human rights violations in Colomnbia
Introduction: Megan Price wrote in that she and Daniel Guzmán of the Benetech Human Rights Program released a paper today entitled “Comments to the article ‘Is Violence Against Union Members in Colombia Systematic and Targeted?’” (o aqui en español), which examines an article written by Colombian academics Daniel Mejía and María José Uribe. Price writes [in the third person]: The paper reviewed by Price and Guzmán concluded that “. . . on average, violence against unionists in Colombia is neither systematic nor targeted.” However, in their response, Price and Guzmán present – in technical and methodological detail – the reasons they find the conclusions in Mejía and Uribe’s study to be overstated. Price and Guzmán believe that weaknesses in the data, in the choice of the statistical model, and the interpretation of the model used in Mejía and Uribe’s study, all raise serious questions about the authors’ strong causal conclusions. Price and Guzmán point out that unchecked, those conclusio
6 0.93658179 385 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-31-Wacky surveys where they don’t tell you the questions they asked
same-blog 7 0.93655515 1161 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-10-If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?
8 0.93119121 477 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-Costless false beliefs
10 0.92318571 879 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-New journal on causal inference
11 0.92252636 1216 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-17-Modeling group-level predictors in a multilevel regression
12 0.92112434 92 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-Drug testing for recipents of NSF and NIH grants?
13 0.9207164 2123 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-04-Tesla fires!
14 0.90605295 1964 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-01-Non-topical blogging
15 0.90201306 1804 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-15-How effective are football coaches?
16 0.89398247 2317 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-04-Honored oldsters write about statistics
17 0.89018655 2167 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-Do you believe that “humans and other living things have evolved over time”?
18 0.88986874 1413 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-11-News flash: Probability and statistics are hard to understand
19 0.88943231 2001 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-29-Edgar Allan Poe was a statistician
20 0.88834268 1545 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-23-Two postdoc opportunities to work with our research group!! (apply by 15 Nov 2012)