andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1222 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? What do you call these things generically?) in that special room. But then again, maybe you already do! P.S. You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books.
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1 Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. [sent-1, score-0.373]
2 Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . [sent-2, score-0.457]
3 Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. [sent-3, score-0.739]
4 I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? [sent-4, score-0.715]
5 You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). [sent-10, score-0.227]
6 Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books. [sent-11, score-1.525]
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Introduction: Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? What do you call these things generically?) in that special room. But then again, maybe you already do! P.S. You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books.
2 0.16390468 1993 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-22-Improvements to Kindle Version of BDA3
Introduction: I let Andrew know about the comments about the defective Kindle version of BDA2 and he wrote to his editor at Chapman and Hall, Rob Calver, who wrote back with this info: I can guarantee that the Kindle version of the third edition will be a substantial improvement. We publish all of our mathematics and statistics books through Kindle now as Print Replica. This means that we send the printer pdf to Amazon and they convert into their Print Replica format, which is essentially just a pdf viewer. We have not experienced very many issues at all with this setup. Unfortunately, there was a period before Amazon launched Print Replica when they converted math/stat books into their Kindle format, and converted them very badly in some cases. Equations were held as images, making them very difficult to read. It appears this was the case with Andrew’s second edition, judging by some of the comments. The third edition [of BDA] will be available through Kindle with a short delay (for Amazo
3 0.15130644 499 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-03-5 books
Introduction: I was asked by Sophie Roell, an editor at The Browser , where every day they ask an expert in a field to recommend the top five books, not by them, in their subject. I was asked to recommend five books on how Americans vote. The trouble is that I’m really pretty unfamiliar with the academic literature of political science, but it seemed sort of inappropriate for a political scientist such as myself to recommend non-scholarly books that I like (for example, “Style vs. Substance” by George V. Higgins, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” by James Loewen, “The Rascal King” by Jack Beatty, “Republican Party Reptile” by P. J. O’Rourke, and, of course, “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren). I mean, what’s the point of that? Nobody needs me to recommend books like that. Instead, I moved sideways and asked if I could discuss five books on statistics instead. Roell said that would be fine, so I sent her a quick description, which appears below. The actual interview turned out much bett
4 0.077547461 1709 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-06-The fractal nature of scientific revolutions
Introduction: Phil Earnhardt writes: I stumbled across your blog entry after googling on those terms. If I could comment on the closed entry [We had to shut off comments on old blog entries for reasons of spam --- ed.], I’d note: scientific revolutions are fractal; they’re also chaotic in their dynamics. Predictability when a particular scientific revolution will take hold—or be rejected—is problematic. I find myself wishing that Chaos Theory had been established when Kuhn wrote his essay.
5 0.075842433 1170 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-16-A previous discussion with Charles Murray about liberals, conservatives, and social class
Introduction: From 2.5 years ago . Read all the comments; the discussion is helpful.
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same-blog 1 0.97724509 1222 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-20-5 books book
Introduction: Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? What do you call these things generically?) in that special room. But then again, maybe you already do! P.S. You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books.
2 0.88271695 432 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-27-Neumann update
Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
3 0.84596676 831 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-30-A Wikipedia riddle!
Introduction: I was distinguished for over three years and now am renowned. For most of the past year and a half, though, I was neither. Who am I? First person who guesses the right answer in comments gets a free copy of Jenny Davidson’s book, “Breeding”–as soon as she sends it to me, as she promised a couple years ago! You’ll get an extra prize if you can express the answer in an indirect way, without using the person’s name or being too obvious about it but making the identification clear enough that I know you know the answer. P.S. Reading Wikipedia edits . . . that’s a new low in time-wasting!
4 0.83038348 1843 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-05-The New York Times Book of Mathematics
Introduction: This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the ideal reader for this sort of book, but it seems like an excellent gift for a non-technical reader who nonetheless enjoys math. (I assume that such people are out there, just as there are people like me who can’t read music but still enjoy reading about the subject.) The book is organized by topic. My own preference would have been chronological and with more old stuff. I particularly enjoyed the material from many decades ago, such as the news report on one of the early computers. This must have been a fun book to compile.
5 0.81949013 240 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-29-ARM solutions
Introduction: People sometimes email asking if a solution set is available for the exercises in ARM. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Many years ago, I wrote up 50 solutions for BDA and it was a lot of work–really, it was like writing a small book in itself. The trouble is that, once I started writing them up, I wanted to do it right, to set a good example. That’s a lot more effort than simply scrawling down some quick answers.
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Introduction: I just want to share with you the best comment we’ve every had in the nearly ten-year history of this blog. Also it has statistical content! Here’s the story. After seeing an amusing article by Tom Scocca relating how reporter John Lee Anderson called someone as a “little twerp” on twitter: I conjectured that Anderson suffered from “tall person syndrome,” that problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them. But I had no idea of Anderson’s actual height. Commenter Gary responded with this impressive bit of investigative reporting: Based on this picture: he appears to be fairly tall. But the perspective makes it hard to judge. Based on this picture: he appears to be about 9-10 inches taller than Catalina Garcia. But how tall is Catalina Garcia? Not that tall – she’s shorter than the high-wire artist Phillipe Petit: And he doesn’t appear
2 0.96393168 915 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-17-(Worst) graph of the year
Introduction: This (forwarded to me from Jeff, from a powerpoint by Willam Gawthrop) wins not on form but on content: Really this graph should stand alone but it’s so wonderful that I can’t resist pointing out a few things: - The gap between 610 and 622 A.D. seems to be about the same as the previous 600 years, and only a little less than the 1400 years before that. - “Pious and devout” Jews are portrayed as having steadily increased in nonviolence up to the present day. Been to Israel lately? - I assume the line labeled “Bible” is referring to Christians? I’m sort of amazed to see pious and devout Christians listed as being maximally violent at the beginning. Huh? I thought Christ was supposed to be a nonviolent, mellow dude. The line starts at 3 B.C., implying that baby Jesus was at the extreme of violence. Gong forward, we can learn from the graph that pious and devout Christians in 1492 or 1618, say, were much more peaceful than Jesus and his crew. - Most amusingly g
3 0.94960093 552 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-03-Model Makers’ Hippocratic Oath
Introduction: Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott wonder how to get their fellow modelers to give up their fantasy of perfection. In a Business Week article they proposed, not entirely in jest, a model makers’ Hippocratic Oath: I will remember that I didn’t make the world and that it doesn’t satisfy my equations. Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics. I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights. I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension. Found via Abductive Intelligence .
4 0.93719518 1632 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-20-Who exactly are those silly academics who aren’t as smart as a Vegas bookie?
Introduction: I get suspicious when I hear unsourced claims that unnamed experts somewhere are making foolish statements. For example, I recently came across this, from a Super Bowl-themed article from 2006 by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: As it happens, there is one betting strategy that will routinely beat a bookie, and you don’t even have to be smart to use it. One of the most undervalued N.F.L. bets is the home underdog — a team favored to lose but playing in its home stadium. If you had bet $5,000 on the home underdog in every N.F.L. game over the past two decades, you would be up about $150,000 by now (a winning rate of roughly 53 percent). So far, so good. I wonder if this pattern still holds. But then Dubner and Levitt continue: This fact has led some academics to conclude that bookmakers simply aren’t very smart. If an academic researcher can find this loophole, shouldn’t a professional bookie be able to? But the fact is most bookies are doing just fine. So could it be
Introduction: This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. . . . Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any
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