andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1167 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Just in time for the holiday, X pointed me to an article by Becca Levy, Pil Chung, and Martin Slade reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. The data are publicly available, so maybe someone could make those graphs? If the Valentine’s/Halloween data are worth publishing, I think more comprehensive graphs should be publishable as well. I’d post them here, that’s for sure.
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1 That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. [sent-3, score-0.363]
2 While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. [sent-4, score-1.005]
3 It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. [sent-5, score-0.322]
4 The data are publicly available, so maybe someone could make those graphs? [sent-6, score-0.432]
5 If the Valentine’s/Halloween data are worth publishing, I think more comprehensive graphs should be publishable as well. [sent-7, score-0.631]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 1167 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-14-Extra babies on Valentine’s Day, fewer on Halloween?
Introduction: Just in time for the holiday, X pointed me to an article by Becca Levy, Pil Chung, and Martin Slade reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. The data are publicly available, so maybe someone could make those graphs? If the Valentine’s/Halloween data are worth publishing, I think more comprehensive graphs should be publishable as well. I’d post them here, that’s for sure.
2 0.48398477 1376 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-12-Simple graph WIN: the example of birthday frequencies
Introduction: From Chris Mulligan: The data come from the Center for Disease Control and cover the years 1969-1988. Chris also gives instructions for how to download the data and plot them in R from scratch (in 30 lines of R code)! And now, the background A few months ago I heard about a study reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: I wrote , What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. I was pointed to some tables: and a graph from Matt Stiles: The heatmap is cute but I wanted to se
3 0.47017026 1357 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-01-Halloween-Valentine’s update
Introduction: A few months ago we reported on a claim that more babies are born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween. At the time, I wrote that I’d like to see a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. Joshua Gans sent along the following from an unpublished appendix to his paper. It’s not the graph I was asking for but it does supply additional information beyond those two holidays. Click to enlarge: I don’t know what all those digits are doing (do you really need to know that an estimate is “-70.856″ if its standard error is “10.640″? I’d think that “-71 +/- 10 would be just fine), but I suppose the careful reader can ignore the numbers and simply read the signs and the stars. In any case, it’s good to see more data.
4 0.155746 737 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Memorial Day question
Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
5 0.1361942 2367 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-10-Spring forward, fall back, drop dead?
Introduction: Antonio Rinaldi points me to a press release describing a recent paper by Amneet Sandhu, Milan Seth, and Hitinder Gurm, where I got the above graphs (sorry about the resolution, that’s the best I could do). Here’s the press release: Data from the largest study of its kind in the U.S. reveal a 25 percent jump in the number of heart attacks occurring the Monday after we “spring forward” compared to other Mondays during the year – a trend that remained even after accounting for seasonal variations in these events. But the study showed the opposite effect is also true. Researchers found a 21 percent drop in the number of heart attacks on the Tuesday after returning to standard time in the fall when we gain an hour back. Rinaldi thinks: “On Tuesday? No multiple comparisons here???” The press release continues: “What’s interesting is that the total number of heart attacks didn’t change the week after daylight saving time,” said Amneet Sandhu, M.D., cardiology fellow, Univer
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same-blog 1 0.95758885 1167 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-14-Extra babies on Valentine’s Day, fewer on Halloween?
Introduction: Just in time for the holiday, X pointed me to an article by Becca Levy, Pil Chung, and Martin Slade reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. The data are publicly available, so maybe someone could make those graphs? If the Valentine’s/Halloween data are worth publishing, I think more comprehensive graphs should be publishable as well. I’d post them here, that’s for sure.
2 0.9155786 1376 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-12-Simple graph WIN: the example of birthday frequencies
Introduction: From Chris Mulligan: The data come from the Center for Disease Control and cover the years 1969-1988. Chris also gives instructions for how to download the data and plot them in R from scratch (in 30 lines of R code)! And now, the background A few months ago I heard about a study reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: I wrote , What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. I was pointed to some tables: and a graph from Matt Stiles: The heatmap is cute but I wanted to se
3 0.85915112 1357 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-01-Halloween-Valentine’s update
Introduction: A few months ago we reported on a claim that more babies are born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween. At the time, I wrote that I’d like to see a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. Joshua Gans sent along the following from an unpublished appendix to his paper. It’s not the graph I was asking for but it does supply additional information beyond those two holidays. Click to enlarge: I don’t know what all those digits are doing (do you really need to know that an estimate is “-70.856″ if its standard error is “10.640″? I’d think that “-71 +/- 10 would be just fine), but I suppose the careful reader can ignore the numbers and simply read the signs and the stars. In any case, it’s good to see more data.
4 0.81522089 502 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-04-Cash in, cash out graph
Introduction: David Afshartous writes: I thought this graph [from Ed Easterling] might be good for your blog. The 71 outlined squares show the main story, and the regions of the graph present the information nicely. Looks like the bins for the color coding are not of equal size and of course the end bins are unbounded. Might be interesting to graph the distribution of the actual data for the 71 outlined squares. In addition, I assume that each period begins on Jan 1 so data size could be naturally increased by looking at intervals that start on June 1 as well (where the limit of this process would be to have it at the granularity of one day; while it most likely wouldn’t make much difference, I’ve seen some graphs before where 1 year returns can be quite sensitive to starting date, etc). I agree that (a) the graph could be improved in small ways–in particular, adding half-year data seems like a great idea–and (b) it’s a wonderful, wonderful graph as is. And the NYT graphics people ad
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Introduction: Evan Hensleigh sens me this redesign of the cross-national time use graph : Here was my version: And here was the original: Compared to my graph, Evan’s has better fonts, and that’s important–good fonts can make a display look professional. But I’m not sure about his other innovations. To me, the different colors for the different time-use categories are more of a distraction than a visual aid, and I also don’t like how he made the bars fatter. As I noted in my earlier entry, to me this draws unwanted attention to the negative space between the bars. His country labels are slightly misaligned (particularly Japan and USA), and I really don’t like his horizontal axis at all! He removed the units of hours and put + and – on the edges so that the axes run into each other. What was the point of that? It’s bad news. Also I don’t see any advantage at all to the prehensile tick marks. On the other hand, if Evgn and I were working together on such a graph, we w
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same-blog 1 0.92800659 1167 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-14-Extra babies on Valentine’s Day, fewer on Halloween?
Introduction: Just in time for the holiday, X pointed me to an article by Becca Levy, Pil Chung, and Martin Slade reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. The data are publicly available, so maybe someone could make those graphs? If the Valentine’s/Halloween data are worth publishing, I think more comprehensive graphs should be publishable as well. I’d post them here, that’s for sure.
2 0.90248322 1310 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-09-Varying treatment effects, again
Introduction: This time from Bernard Fraga and Eitan Hersh. Once you think about it, it’s hard to imagine any nonzero treatment effects that don’t vary. I’m glad to see this area of research becoming more prominent. ( Here ‘s a discussion of another political science example, also of voter turnout, from a few years ago, from Avi Feller and Chris Holmes.) Some of my fragmentary work on varying treatment effects is here (Treatment Effects in Before-After Data) and here (Estimating Incumbency Advantage and Its Variation, as an Example of a Before–After Study).
3 0.8957063 727 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-23-My new writing strategy
Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
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Introduction: From Chris Mulligan: The data come from the Center for Disease Control and cover the years 1969-1988. Chris also gives instructions for how to download the data and plot them in R from scratch (in 30 lines of R code)! And now, the background A few months ago I heard about a study reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: I wrote , What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. I was pointed to some tables: and a graph from Matt Stiles: The heatmap is cute but I wanted to se
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