andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1183 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I went to this place a few months ago after it was reviewed in the Times and I was not impressed at all. Not that I’m any kind of authority on barbecue, this just makes me aware of variation in assessments. Food criticism is like personality profiling in psychometrics: there is no objective truth to measure; any meaningful evaluation is inherently statistical.
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same-blog 1 1.0 1183 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-25-Calibration!
Introduction: I went to this place a few months ago after it was reviewed in the Times and I was not impressed at all. Not that I’m any kind of authority on barbecue, this just makes me aware of variation in assessments. Food criticism is like personality profiling in psychometrics: there is no objective truth to measure; any meaningful evaluation is inherently statistical.
2 0.10322601 1369 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-06-Your conclusion is only as good as your data
Introduction: Jay Livingston points to an excellent rant from Peter Moskos, trashing a study about “food deserts” (which I kept reading as “food desserts”) in inner-city neighborhoods. Here’s Moskos: From the Times: There is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents. Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said. Sure thing, Sturm. But I suspect you wouldn’t think certain neighborhoods are swamped with good food if you actually got out of your office and went to one of the neighborhoods. After all, what are going to believe: A nice data set or your lying eyes? “Food outlet data … are classifıed using the North American Industry Classifıcation System (NAICS)” (p. 130). Assuming validity and reliability of NAICS
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Introduction: A few years ago we went to a nearby fried chicken place that the Village Voice had raved about. While we were waiting to place our order, someone from the local Chinese takeout place came in with a delivery, which the employees of the chicken place proceeded to eat. This should’ve been our signal to leave. Instead, we bought some chicken. It was terrible.
4 0.086820938 183 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-04-Bayesian models for simultaneous equation systems?
Introduction: A neuroeconomist asks:: Is there any literature on the Bayesian approach to simultaneous equation systems that you could suggest? (Think demand/supply in econ). My reply: I’m not up-to-date on the Bayesian econometrics literature. TTony Lancaster came out with a book a few years ago that might have some of these models. Maybe you, the commenters, have some suggestions? Measurement-error models are inherently Bayesian, seeing as they have all these latent parameters, so it seems like there should be a lot out there.
Introduction: Scott “Dilbert” Adams has met Charlie Sheen and thinks he really is a superbeing. This perhaps relates to some well-known cognitive biases. I’m not sure what this one’s called, but the idea is that Adams is probably overweighting his direct impressions: he saw Sheen-on-the-set, not Sheen-beating-his-wife. Also, everybody else hates Sheen, so Adams can distinguish himself by being tolerant, etc. I’m not sure what this latter phenomenon is called, but I’ve noticed it before. When I come into a new situation and meet some person X, who everybody says is a jerk, and then person X happens to act in a civilized way that day, then there’s a real temptation to say, Hey, X isn’t so bad after all. It makes me feel so tolerant and above-it-all. Perhaps that’s partly what’s going on with Scott Adams here: he can view himself as the objective outsider who can be impressed by Sheen, not like all those silly emotional people who get hung up on the headlines. From here, though, it just ma
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Introduction: I went to this place a few months ago after it was reviewed in the Times and I was not impressed at all. Not that I’m any kind of authority on barbecue, this just makes me aware of variation in assessments. Food criticism is like personality profiling in psychometrics: there is no objective truth to measure; any meaningful evaluation is inherently statistical.
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Introduction: A link from Tyler Cowen led me to this long blog article by Razib Khan, discussing some recent genetic findings on human origins in the context of the past twenty-five years of research and popularization of science. I don’t know much about human origins (beyond my ooh-that’s-cool reactions to exhibits at the Natural History Museum, my general statistician’s skepticism at various over-the-top claims I’ve heard over the years about “mitochondrial Eve” and the like, and various bits I’ve read over the years regarding when people came over to Australia, America, etc.), but what particularly interested me about Khan’s article was his discussion about the various controversies among scientists, his own reactions when reading and thinking about these issues as they were happening (Khan was a student at the time), and the interaction between science and political ideology. There’s a limit to how far you can go with this sort of cultural criticism of science, and Khan realizes this
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Introduction: Bill Harris writes: I was re-reading your and Shalizi’s “Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics” [see also the rejoinder ] and noticed a statement near the end of section 6 about paradigm shifts coming in different magnitudes over different time spans. That reminded me of the almost-mystical ideas surrounding 1/f (f being frequency”) noise in some areas — the notion that almost everything exhibits that effect, and that effect extends to arbitrarily low f. (I sense the idea only gets mystical when f gets low enough so that the event that may happen stochastically is really big—say, you model the height of waves in the Atlantic as 1/f and discover that, at some low frequency, Bermuda becomes submerged. In other words, does the same mechanism that accounts for physical vibrations in the range of Hertz also account for the creation and destruction of islands that may occur in the range of reciprocal centuries?) When I first encountered 1/f noise in the area of electr
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Introduction: I was flipping through the paper and noticed an opinion piece by linguist and science writer Rik Smits, “Lefties aren’t special after all”: Few truly insignificant traits receive as much attention as left-handedness. In just the last couple of generations, an orientation once associated with menace has become associated with leadership, creativity, even athletic prowess. Presidents Gerald R. Ford, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were born left-handed (as was Ronald Reagan, though he learned to write with his right hand). Folklore has it that southpaws are unusually common in art and architecture schools. Left-handed athletes like Tim Tebow and Randy Johnson are celebrated. Sounds interesting so far. Then we get several paragraphs of history of how people got things wrong (authoritarians of past generations who forced lefties to use their right hands, silly “blank slate” ideologues, etc.). What about the science? Smits writes: Left-handers have been redefined a
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Introduction: You know that expression, “Not from the Onion”? How did we say that, all those years before the Onion existed? I was thinking about this after encountering (amidst a Google search for something else) this article on a website called “College News”: DANVILLE, KY., March 8, 2007–Two Centre College professors spent the past six years reading and analyzing 200 children’s books to discover a disturbing trend: gender bias still exists in much of modern children’s literature. Dr. David Anderson, professor of economics, and Dr. Mykol Hamilton, professor of psychology, have documented that gender bias is common today in many children’s books in their research published recently in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research titled “Gender Stereotyping and Under-Representation of Female Characters in 200 Popular Children’s Picture Books: A 21st Century Update.” . . . “Centre College,” huh? That’s where Area Man is studying, right? According to the materials on its website, Centre College is
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same-blog 1 0.97467041 1183 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-25-Calibration!
Introduction: I went to this place a few months ago after it was reviewed in the Times and I was not impressed at all. Not that I’m any kind of authority on barbecue, this just makes me aware of variation in assessments. Food criticism is like personality profiling in psychometrics: there is no objective truth to measure; any meaningful evaluation is inherently statistical.
2 0.79318142 969 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-22-Researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations
Introduction: Sally Murray from Giving What We Can writes: We are an organisation that assesses different charitable (/fundable) interventions, to estimate which are the most cost-effective (measured in terms of the improvement of life for people in developing countries gained for every dollar invested). Our research guides and encourages greater donations to the most cost-effective charities we thus identify, and our members have so far pledged a total of $14m to these causes, with many hundreds more relying on our advice in a less formal way. I am specifically researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations. We are initially focusing on organisations that lobby for ‘big win’ outcomes such as increased funding of the most cost-effective NTD treatments/ vaccine research, changes to global trade rules (potentially) and more obscure lobbies such as “Keep Antibiotics Working”. We’ve a great deal of respect for your work and the superbly rational way you go about it, and
3 0.77389669 718 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-18-Should kids be able to bring their own lunches to school?
Introduction: I encountered this news article , “Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home”: At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. . . . students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. . . . Such discussions over school lunches and healthy eating echo a larger national debate about the role government should play in individual food choices. “This is such a fundamental infringement on parental responsibility,” said J. Justin Wilson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, which is partially funded by the food industry. . . . For many CPS parents, the idea of forbidding home-packed lunches would be unthinkable. . . . If I had read this two years ago, I’d be at one with J. Justin Wilson and the outraged kids and parents. But last year we spent a sabbatical in Paris, where . . . kids aren’t allowed to bring
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Introduction: Much-honored playwright Tony Kushner was set to receive one more honor–a degree from John Jay College–but it was suddenly taken away from him on an 11-1 vote of the trustees of the City University of New York. This was the first rejection of an honorary degree nomination since 1961. The news article focuses on one trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime political aide, who opposed Kushner’s honorary degree, but to me the relevant point is that the committee as a whole voted 11-1 to ding him. Kusnher said, “I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.” I can see why he’s shocked, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s happening in NYC. Recall the famous incident from 1940 in which Bertrand Russell was invited and then uninvited to teach at City College. The problem that time was Russell’s views on free love (as they called it back then). There seems to be a long tradition of city college officials being will
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Introduction: Since we’re on the topic of publishers asking me for money . . . The other day I received the following email: Mimi Liljeholm has sent you a message. Please click ‘Reply’ to send a direct response. Dear Prof Gelman, In collaboration with Frontiers in Psychology, we are organizing a Research Topic titled “Causal discovery and generalization”, hosted by Mimi Liljeholm and Marc Buehner. As host editor, I would like to encourage you to contribute to this topic. A brief description of the topic is provided on our homepage on the Frontiers website (section “Frontiers in Cognition”). This is also where all articles will appear after peer-review and where participants in the topic will be able to hold relevant discussions: http://www.frontiersin.org/Cognition/researchtopics/Causal_discovery_and_generaliz/1906 Frontiers, a Swiss open-access publisher, recently partnered with Nature Publishing Group to expand its researcher-driven Open Science platform. Frontiers articles are rig
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