andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1266 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. [sent-3, score-0.299]
2 Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. [sent-4, score-0.197]
3 The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [sent-6, score-0.201]
4 [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lost the original article containing Holub’s poem and I was not even sure where I had read the story . [sent-7, score-0.413]
5 Frank Fischer is a different story as his case is pretty boring (he’s a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond), so there I see it as a boring case of people defending their friends and defending their institution. [sent-37, score-0.277]
6 ” Several cases of plagiarism by Wegman have been convincingly demonstrated. [sent-44, score-0.201]
7 ” When Frank Fischer’s plagiarisms were revealed, several of his colleagues wrote a letter incorrectly stating, “The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as your own, and Mr. [sent-46, score-0.364]
8 When Basbøll’s first article came out, in 1996, blogger Teppo Felin dismissed the story in favor of “Karl Weick’s very sensible response,” while Omar Lizardo implicitly acknowledged the plagiarism but characterizes it as “obscure” and goes on to mock Basbøll and Graham. [sent-55, score-0.316]
9 My guess is that after four years, the reality of the plagiarism had sunk in, and a defense of Weick on that point would just seem silly. [sent-57, score-0.201]
10 The relevance of findings of plagiarism (or research fraud more generally) As Basbøll argues, learning that part of a corpus of work is plagiarized can degrade one’s trust in the rest of the work. [sent-59, score-0.255]
11 Basbøll is saying more than that; his point (argued in detial) is that once you accept that Weick represented a story in a poem as if it were a historical event, it casts doubt on his rules of evidence. [sent-61, score-0.3]
12 I think it’s no coincidence that the revelation of plagiarism can discredit a publication. [sent-67, score-0.201]
13 I’ve argued before that a big motivation for plagiarism is laziness. [sent-70, score-0.201]
14 ) Once people found single cases of plagiarism from Frank Fischer and Ed Wegman, others pulled the string and found many many cases. [sent-80, score-0.201]
15 Bandwidth The other thing I wanted to note is how unusual plagiarism is. [sent-102, score-0.201]
16 The lieutenant suffered: he had dispatched his own people to death. [sent-124, score-0.234]
17 The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. [sent-133, score-0.234]
18 The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit out into the icy wilderness. [sent-137, score-0.341]
19 The lieutenant suffered, fearing that he had dispatched his own people to death. [sent-139, score-0.275]
20 The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. [sent-148, score-0.234]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('weick', 0.713), ('holub', 0.245), ('basb', 0.206), ('plagiarism', 0.201), ('lieutenant', 0.151), ('poem', 0.143), ('story', 0.115), ('wegman', 0.108), ('alps', 0.094), ('fischer', 0.092), ('dispatched', 0.083), ('plagiarisms', 0.083), ('map', 0.083), ('ll', 0.082), ('sensemaking', 0.075), ('orgtheory', 0.071), ('unit', 0.07), ('gould', 0.066), ('plagiarize', 0.057), ('frank', 0.057), ('defenses', 0.057), ('suffered', 0.055), ('plagiarized', 0.054), ('karl', 0.053), ('copy', 0.052), ('graham', 0.047), ('organizational', 0.045), ('stephen', 0.044), ('discovered', 0.043), ('doubt', 0.042), ('stories', 0.042), ('calmed', 0.041), ('copier', 0.041), ('fearing', 0.041), ('felin', 0.041), ('icy', 0.041), ('lizardo', 0.041), ('maneuvers', 0.041), ('reconnaissance', 0.041), ('snowstorm', 0.041), ('several', 0.041), ('case', 0.041), ('defending', 0.04), ('lost', 0.04), ('copies', 0.039), ('colleagues', 0.039), ('copying', 0.039), ('detachment', 0.038), ('lifted', 0.038), ('snowed', 0.038)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
2 0.6143437 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been
Introduction: Two news items. 1. A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel . It’s hard to keep these guys straight—they all pretty much have the same names and do the same things. Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the same postmodernist/business-school nexus: left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough. In the comments to the Retraction Watch post, Richard Gill writes , “it looks to me [Gill] like Smeesters was subjected to medieval torture and confessed.” Medieval torture, huh? I haven’t seen Holy Grail in many years but I recall that’s pretty rough stuff, of the sort that even John Yoo might think twice about. I followed the links and didn’t see what the torture was, but I have to admit I didn’t even try to read the Dutch documents. On the upside, Gill follow
4 0.24939445 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
Introduction: Part 1. The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” of writing in the world of scholarship. The cardinal rule is: don’t use other people’s words or ideas without attributing those words or ideas to the people you got them from. What to do when the plagiarism (or, perhaps, sloppy quotation, to use a less loaded word) comes to light? Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make one you have to correct it. Don’t explain why your mistake isn’t very serious or “set things right” by pointing to the “obvious” signs of your good intentions. . . . Don’t say you’ve cleared it with the original author. The real victim of your crime is not the other writer; it’s your reader. That’s whose trust you’ve be
5 0.18223861 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 0.17648846 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime
8 0.16240537 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)
9 0.1605991 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
10 0.15710661 901 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-12-Some thoughts on academic cheating, inspired by Frey, Wegman, Fischer, Hauser, Stapel
11 0.14784573 400 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-08-Poli sci plagiarism update, and a note about the benefits of not caring
12 0.14070295 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
13 0.12736601 345 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-15-Things we do on sabbatical instead of actually working
14 0.12516399 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
15 0.11664704 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
17 0.11488771 1812 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously
18 0.10790409 1863 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-19-Prose is paragraphs, prose is sentences
19 0.10519992 722 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-20-Why no Wegmania?
20 0.10344322 1435 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-30-Retracted articles and unethical behavior in economics journals?
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.166), (1, -0.092), (2, -0.061), (3, -0.011), (4, -0.027), (5, -0.033), (6, 0.064), (7, -0.038), (8, 0.032), (9, -0.006), (10, 0.011), (11, -0.011), (12, -0.016), (13, 0.027), (14, -0.047), (15, -0.036), (16, 0.022), (17, -0.043), (18, 0.077), (19, -0.032), (20, -0.054), (21, -0.048), (22, -0.031), (23, -0.025), (24, 0.025), (25, 0.002), (26, -0.005), (27, 0.003), (28, -0.053), (29, 0.042), (30, 0.153), (31, 0.081), (32, -0.061), (33, 0.124), (34, 0.132), (35, 0.054), (36, -0.092), (37, -0.134), (38, 0.092), (39, 0.025), (40, -0.056), (41, -0.002), (42, 0.009), (43, -0.087), (44, -0.022), (45, -0.027), (46, -0.067), (47, 0.005), (48, -0.05), (49, 0.001)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.94727194 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
2 0.85442138 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
3 0.82897264 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime
Introduction: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work. In statisti
4 0.82822877 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
5 0.80617762 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 0.79171288 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
7 0.77906322 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
8 0.7727524 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
9 0.76922828 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
10 0.76708174 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
11 0.74470353 722 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-20-Why no Wegmania?
12 0.72897869 345 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-15-Things we do on sabbatical instead of actually working
13 0.70441556 1442 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-03-Double standard? Plagiarizing journos get slammed, plagiarizing profs just shrug it off
15 0.69724494 1324 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman
16 0.68406039 901 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-12-Some thoughts on academic cheating, inspired by Frey, Wegman, Fischer, Hauser, Stapel
17 0.67388302 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)
18 0.66967517 755 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-09-Recently in the award-winning sister blog
19 0.65639865 2184 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-24-Parables vs. stories
20 0.65460068 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
topicId topicWeight
[(12, 0.025), (13, 0.02), (15, 0.022), (16, 0.088), (21, 0.037), (24, 0.097), (27, 0.01), (45, 0.047), (55, 0.011), (59, 0.014), (63, 0.015), (70, 0.059), (86, 0.132), (93, 0.016), (99, 0.206)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9355523 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
Introduction: This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. Weick plagiarized Holub in that he republished the poem (with some minor differences, including removing line breaks and making small changes in a few words) without quotation or attribution. Some of Weick’s articles included the material with no reference to Holub; others referred to Holub but without indicating that Weick had essentially done a direct copy of Holub’s writing. The plagiarism was detailed in an article by Thomas Basbøll and Henrik Graham. [5] In a response, Weick disputed the claim of plagiarism, writing, “By the time I began to see the Alps story as an example of cognition in the path of the action, I had lo
2 0.93375468 253 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-03-Gladwell vs Pinker
Introduction: I just happened to notice this from last year. Eric Loken writes : Steven Pinker reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book and criticized him rather harshly for several shortcomings. Gladwell appears to have made things worse for himself in a letter to the editor of the NYT by defending a manifestly weak claim from one of his essays – the claim that NFL quarterback performance is unrelated to the order they were drafted out of college. The reason w [Loken and his colleagues] are implicated is that Pinker identified an earlier blog post of ours as one of three sources he used to challenge Gladwell (yay us!). But Gladwell either misrepresented or misunderstood our post in his response, and admonishes Pinker by saying “we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.” Well, here’s what you can find on Google. Follow this link to request the data for NFL quarterbacks drafted between 1980 and
3 0.93325984 1547 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-College football, voting, and the law of large numbers
Introduction: In an article provocatively entitled, “Will Ohio State’s football team decide who wins the White House?”, Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier report : It is statistically possible that the outcome of a handful of college football games in the right battleground states could determine the race for the White House. Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in a fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. T
4 0.92906284 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been
5 0.92891955 873 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Luck or knowledge?
Introduction: Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. More at Daily Mail. [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired .
6 0.92750478 1718 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-11-Toward a framework for automatic model building
9 0.91430598 904 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-13-My wikipedia edit
10 0.91388667 2082 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-30-Berri Gladwell Loken football update
11 0.91167355 759 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-11-“2 level logit with 2 REs & large sample. computational nightmare – please help”
12 0.91036838 777 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-23-Combining survey data obtained using different modes of sampling
13 0.91011459 276 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-14-Don’t look at just one poll number–unless you really know what you’re doing!
14 0.90851337 1971 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-07-I doubt they cheated
15 0.90755737 1777 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-26-Data Science for Social Good summer fellowship program
16 0.90607935 866 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-23-Participate in a research project on combining information for prediction
17 0.90521586 76 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-09-Both R and Stata
18 0.90507221 2260 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-22-Postdoc at Rennes on multilevel missing data imputation
19 0.90436316 2058 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-11-Gladwell and Chabris, David and Goliath, and science writing as stone soup
20 0.90368456 116 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-29-How to grab power in a democracy – in 5 easy non-violent steps