andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1186 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app
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1 When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0. [sent-1, score-0.667]
2 03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. [sent-2, score-0.921]
3 Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. [sent-3, score-0.6]
4 I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? [sent-5, score-1.412]
5 I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. [sent-6, score-0.448]
6 I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an apple. [sent-7, score-1.68]
7 In any case, I doubt Lomborg is entirely serious in his column; he also writes that cutting CO2 emissions would save “less than one-tenth of a polar bear” yearly, which again seems to imply an implausible (to me) precision. [sent-13, score-0.652]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1186 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-Confusion from illusory precision
Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app
2 0.13704832 1187 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-“Apple confronts the law of large numbers” . . . huh?
Introduction: I was reading this news article by famed business reporter James Stewart: Measured by market capitalization, Apple is the world’s biggest public company. . . . Sales for the quarter that ended Dec. 31 . . . totaled $46.33 billion, up 73 percent from the year before. Earnings more than doubled. . . . Here is the rub: Apple is so big, it’s running up against the law of large numbers. Huh? At this point I sat up, curious. Stewart continued: Also known as the golden theorem, with a proof attributed to the 17th-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the law states that a variable will revert to a mean over a large sample of results. In the case of the largest companies, it suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow as those companies grow ever larger. If Apple’s share price grew even 20 percent a year for the next decade, which is far below its current blistering pace, its $500 billion market capitalization would be more than $3 tri
3 0.13065651 2114 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-26-“Please make fun of this claim”
Introduction: Jeff sent me an email with the above title and a link to a press release, “Nut consumption reduces risk of death,” which begins: According to the largest study of its kind, people who ate a daily handful of nuts were 20 percent less likely to die from any cause over a 30-year period than those who didn’t consume nuts . . . Their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, contains further good news: The regular nut-eaters were found to be more slender than those who didn’t eat nuts, a finding that should alleviate fears that eating a lot of nuts will lead to overweight. . . . For the new research, the scientists were able to tap databases from two well-known, ongoing observational studies that collect data on diet and other lifestyle factors and various health outcomes. The Nurses’ Health Study provided data on 76,464 women between 1980 and 2010, and the Health Professionals’ Follow-Up Study yielded data on 42,498 men from 1986 to 2010. . . . Sophisticated data a
4 0.11553179 21 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Environmentally induced cancer “grossly underestimated”? Doubtful.
Introduction: The (U.S.) “President’s Cancer Panel” has released its 2008-2009 annual report, which includes a cover letter that says “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.” The report itself discusses exposures to various types of industrial chemicals, some of which are known carcinogens, in some detail, but gives nearly no data or analysis to suggest that these exposures are contributing to significant numbers of cancers. In fact, there is pretty good evidence that they are not. The plot above shows age-adjusted cancer mortality for men, by cancer type, in the U.S. The plot below shows the same for women. In both cases, the cancers with the highest mortality rates are shown, but not all cancers (e.g. brain cancer is not shown). For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how trustworthy the rates are from the 1930s — it seems possible that reporting, autopsies, or both, were less careful during the Great Depression — so I suggest focusing on the r
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Introduction: Not from me, from Dean Foster , who maybe was in the same stochastic processes course with me, thirty years ago.
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same-blog 1 0.95652837 1186 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-Confusion from illusory precision
Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app
Introduction: I know we have some readers in the L.A. area and you might be interested in a comment on our recent post regarding the beneficial (in a Jane Jacobs sense) effects of selective devastation of micro-neighborhoods in a city. I gave the example of London after the fractal effects of bombing in WW2, and BMGM wrote : I have another case study for you. The Northridge earthquake knocked out a great many apartment buildings in the San Fernando Valley (SFV part of LA) in 1994. Destruction was uneven for several reasons. “Soft story” buildings were particularly vulnerable and that type of design was common in small apartment complexes. The waves reflected off the nearby granite mountain ranges and formed an interference pattern across the alluvial plain/valley. This caused scattered destruction over a wide area. The SFV has enjoyed a renaissance after the quake. It’s residents enjoy some of the highest Walkscores in California–comparable to San Francisco. I would really like to see a s
Introduction: I read this front-page New York Times article and was immediately suspicious. Here’s the story (from reporter Gina Kolata): Could exercise actually be bad for some healthy people? A well-known group of researchers, including one who helped write the scientific paper justifying national guidelines that promote exercise for all, say the answer may be a qualified yes. By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why. “It is bizarre,” said Claude Bouchard, lead author of the paper , published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS One . . . Dr. Michael Lauer, director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the lead federal
4 0.75551933 963 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-18-Question on Type M errors
Introduction: Inti Pedroso writes: Today during the group meeting at my new job we were revising a paper whose main conclusions were sustained by an ANOVA. One of the first observations is that the experiment had a small sample size. Interestingly (may not so), some of the reported effects (most of them interactions) were quite large. One of the experience group members said that “there is a common wisdom that one should not believe effects from small sample sizes but [he thinks] if they [the effects] are large enough to be picked on a small study they must be real large effects”. I argued that if the sample size is small one could incur on a M-type error in which the magnitude of the effect is being over-estimated and that if larger samples are evaluated the magnitude may become smaller and also the confidence intervals. The concept of M-type error is completely new to all other members of the group (on which I am in my second week) and I was given the job of finding a suitable ref to explain
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
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Introduction: Word count stats from the Google books database prove that Bayesianism is expanding faster than the universe. A n-gram is a tuple of n words.
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Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app
3 0.87700379 637 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-Unfinished business
Introduction: This blog by J. Robert Lennon on abandoned novels made me think of the more general topic of abandoned projects. I seem to recall George V. Higgins writing that he’d written and discarded 14 novels or so before publishing The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I haven’t abandoned any novels but I’ve abandoned lots of research projects (and also have started various projects that there’s no way I’ll finish). If you think about the decisions involved, it really has to be that way. You learn while you’re working on a project whether it’s worth continuing. Sometimes I’ve put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc.
4 0.85619986 920 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-22-Top 10 blog obsessions
Introduction: I was just thinking about this because we seem to be circling around the same few topics over and over (while occasionally slipping in some new statistical ideas): 10. Wegman 9. Hipmunk 8. Dennis the dentist 7. Freakonomics 6. The difference between significant and non-significant is not itself statistically significant 5. Just use a hierarchical model already! 4. Innumerate journalists who think that presidential elections are just like high school 3. A graph can be pretty but convey essentially no information 2. Stan is coming 1. Clippy! Did I miss anything important?
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Introduction: Stan: open-source Bayesian inference Speaker: Andrew Gelman, Columbia University Date: Thursday, October 11 2012 Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM Location: 32-D507 Host: Polina Golland, CSAIL Contact: Polina Golland, 6172538005, polina@csail.mit.edu Stan ( mc-stan.org ) is an open-source package for obtaining Bayesian inference using the No-U-Turn sampler, a variant of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We discuss how Stan works and what it can do, the problems that motivated us to write Stan, current challenges, and areas of planned development, including tools for improved generality and usability, more efficient sampling algorithms, and fuller integration of model building, model checking, and model understanding in Bayesian data analysis. P.S. Here’s the talk .
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