andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1307 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Commenters here are occasionally bothered that I spend so much time attacking frauds and plagiarists. See, for example, here and here . Why go on and on about these losers, given that there are more important problems in the world such as war, pestilence, hunger, and graphs where the y-axis doesn’t go all the way down to zero? Part of the story is that I do research for a living so I resent people who devalue research through misattribution or fraud, in the same way that rich people don’t like counterfeiters. What really bugs me, though, is when cheaters get caught and still don’t admit it. People like Hauser, Wegman, Fischer, and Weick get under my skin because they have the chutzpah to just deny deny deny. The grainy time-stamped videotape with their hand in the cookie jar is right there, and they’ll still talk around the problem. Makes me want to scream. This happens all the time . All. Over. The. Place. Everybody makes mistakes, and just about everybody does thing
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 One day, a pineapple challenged a hare to a race. [sent-21, score-1.129]
2 “You, a pineapple have the nerve to challenge me, a hare, to a race,” the hare asked the pineapple. [sent-25, score-1.128]
3 ” “Well, you know what I mean,” the pineapple said. [sent-33, score-0.634]
4 “The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve,” a moose said. [sent-35, score-0.827]
5 “If a pineapple challenges a hare to a race, it must be that the pineapple knows some secret trick that will allow it to win. [sent-37, score-1.769]
6 ” “The pineapple probably expects us to root for the hare and then look like fools when it loses,” said a crow. [sent-38, score-1.087]
7 “Then the pineapple will win the race because the hare is overconfident and takes a nap, or gets lost, or something. [sent-39, score-1.319]
8 There was no reason a pineapple should challenge a hare unless it had a clever plan of some sort. [sent-41, score-1.177]
9 When the race began, the hare sprinted forward and was out of sight in less than a minute. [sent-43, score-0.603]
10 The pineapple just sat there, never moving an inch. [sent-44, score-0.634]
11 The animals crowded around watching to see how the pineapple was going to cleverly beat the hare. [sent-45, score-0.895]
12 Two hours later when the hare cross the finish line, the pineapple was still sitting still and hadn’t moved an inch. [sent-46, score-1.087]
13 MORAL: Pineapples don’t have sleeves Several questions follow, including: The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were A Hungry B Excited C Annoyed D Amused Which animal spoke the wisest words? [sent-48, score-1.291]
14 A The hare B The moose C The crow D The owl Nope, I don’t know how to answer these either. [sent-49, score-0.833]
15 The question regarding the animals’ possible motivation for eating the pineapple requires a reader to infer the correct answer from clues conveyed in the text. [sent-70, score-0.926]
16 Paragraph 13 indicates that the animals support the pineapple to win the race because they assume the pineapple has a clever plan. [sent-72, score-1.768]
17 The question regarding the wisest animal requires the reader to apply close analytic reading skills to determine which of the choices represents the wisest animal based on clues given in the text. [sent-77, score-0.587]
18 The moose and the crow are the two animals that present the incorrect idea that the pineapple has a clever plan to win the race. [sent-78, score-1.182]
19 The hare is presented as incredulous that a pineapple would challenge him to a race, but overconfidently agrees to race a pineapple. [sent-80, score-1.373]
20 The hare “ overconfidently agrees to race a pineapple”? [sent-82, score-0.698]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
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simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 1307 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-07-The hare, the pineapple, and Ed Wegman
Introduction: Commenters here are occasionally bothered that I spend so much time attacking frauds and plagiarists. See, for example, here and here . Why go on and on about these losers, given that there are more important problems in the world such as war, pestilence, hunger, and graphs where the y-axis doesn’t go all the way down to zero? Part of the story is that I do research for a living so I resent people who devalue research through misattribution or fraud, in the same way that rich people don’t like counterfeiters. What really bugs me, though, is when cheaters get caught and still don’t admit it. People like Hauser, Wegman, Fischer, and Weick get under my skin because they have the chutzpah to just deny deny deny. The grainy time-stamped videotape with their hand in the cookie jar is right there, and they’ll still talk around the problem. Makes me want to scream. This happens all the time . All. Over. The. Place. Everybody makes mistakes, and just about everybody does thing
2 0.35510302 1313 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-11-Question 1 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
Introduction: 1. Suppose that, in a survey of 1000 people in a state, 400 say they voted in a recent primary election. Actually, though, the voter turnout was only 30%. Give an estimate of the probability that a nonvoter will falsely state that he or she voted. (Assume that all voters honestly report that they voted.) P.S. The commenters are picking up some of the unintended “Hare and pineapple” ambiguity in my question!
3 0.17328887 582 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-20-Statisticians vs. everybody else
Introduction: Statisticians are literalists. When someone says that the U.K. boundary commission’s delay in redistricting gave the Tories an advantage equivalent to 10 percent of the vote, we’re the kind of person who looks it up and claims that the effect is less than 0.7 percent. When someone says, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm,” we’re like, Hey, really? And we go look that one up too. And when someone says that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters . . . well, let’s not go there. So, when I was pointed to this blog by Michael O’Hare making the following claim, in the context of K-12 education in the United States: My [O'Hare's] favorite examples of this junk [educational content with no workplace value] are spelling and pencil-and-paper algorithm arithmetic. These are absolutely critical for a clerk
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Introduction: Howard Wainer points us to a recent news article by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, who writes about the selection bias arising from the routine use of outcome criteria to exclude animals in medical trials. In statistics and econometrics, this is drilled into us: Selection on x is OK, selection on y is not OK. But apparently in biomedical research this principle is not so well known (or, perhaps, it is all too well known). Couzin-Frankel starts with an example of a drug trial in which 3 of the 10 mice in the treatment group were removed from the analysis because they had died from massive strokes. This sounds pretty bad, but it’s even worse than that: this was from a paper under review that “described how a new drug protected a rodent’s brain after a stroke.” Death isn’t a very good way to protect a rodent’s brain! The news article continues: “This isn’t fraud,” says Dirnagl [the outside reviewer who caught this particular problem], who often works with mice. Dropping animals f
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Introduction: In his new book, “What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans,” former Census Bureau director Ken Prewitt recommends taking the race question off the decennial census: He recommends gradual changes, integrating the race and national origin questions while improving both. In particular, he would replace the main “race” question by a “race or origin” question, with the instruction to “Mark one or more” of the following boxes: “White,” “Black, African Am., or Negro,” “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian”, “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” and “Some other race or origin.” Then the next question is to write in “specific race, origin, or enrolled or principal tribe.” Prewitt writes: His suggestion is to go with these questions in 2020 and 2030, then in 2040 “drop the race question and use only the national origin question.” He’s also relying on the American Community Survey to gather a lo
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simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
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Introduction: Commenters here are occasionally bothered that I spend so much time attacking frauds and plagiarists. See, for example, here and here . Why go on and on about these losers, given that there are more important problems in the world such as war, pestilence, hunger, and graphs where the y-axis doesn’t go all the way down to zero? Part of the story is that I do research for a living so I resent people who devalue research through misattribution or fraud, in the same way that rich people don’t like counterfeiters. What really bugs me, though, is when cheaters get caught and still don’t admit it. People like Hauser, Wegman, Fischer, and Weick get under my skin because they have the chutzpah to just deny deny deny. The grainy time-stamped videotape with their hand in the cookie jar is right there, and they’ll still talk around the problem. Makes me want to scream. This happens all the time . All. Over. The. Place. Everybody makes mistakes, and just about everybody does thing
Introduction: Matt Taibbi writes : Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness . . . Hidden among the reams of material recently filed in connection with the lawsuit of monoline insurer MBIA against Bank of America and Countrywide is a deposition of none other than Columbia University’s Glenn Hubbard. . . . Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting. That’s interesting, because I worked on the other side of this case! I was hired by MBIA’s lawyers. It wouldn’t be polite of me to reveal my consulting rate, and I never actually got depose
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes on what seems to be the topic of the week : In reflecting on Lehrer , I [Kahan] have to wonder why the sanction is so much more severe — basically career “death penalty” subject to parole [I think he means "life imprisonment" --- ed.], I suppose, if he manages decades of “good behavior” — for this science journalist when scholars who stick plagiarized material in their “popular science” writing don’t even get slap on wrist — more like shrug of the shoulders. I do think the behavior is comparable; if anything, it’s probably “less wrong” to make up innocuous filler quotes (the Dylan one is, for sure), then to stick paragraphs of someone else’s writing into a book. But the cause is the same: laziness. (The plagarism I’m talking about is not the sort done by Wegman; its sort done by scholars who use factory production techniques to write popular press books — teams of research assistants who write memos, which the “author” then knits together & passes off as learne
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Introduction: Amy Hundley writes in the New Yorker about a notorious recent case of unacknowledged literary quilting : I [Hundley] was the editor at Grove/Atlantic to whom Quentin Rowan’s novel “Appearance and the Park” was submitted (“The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, February 13th & 20th). Widdicombe writes that the editor in question thought that “its plot was too close to that of another of the house’s books, ‘My Idea of Fun,’ by Will Self,” and I can only assume that this explanation came from Rowan. In fact, Rowan had lifted a passage nearly verbatim from Will Self’s novella “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis.” It was an especially delicious one, in which Self describes the media denizens of a particular bar. I recognized it immediately and informed his agent that he’d plagiarized it. Writing a plot similar to a successful novelist’s—something that can arise innocently—is very different from plagiarizing. Appropriating and remixing someone else’s work while acknowledging sources is
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simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
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Introduction: Commenters here are occasionally bothered that I spend so much time attacking frauds and plagiarists. See, for example, here and here . Why go on and on about these losers, given that there are more important problems in the world such as war, pestilence, hunger, and graphs where the y-axis doesn’t go all the way down to zero? Part of the story is that I do research for a living so I resent people who devalue research through misattribution or fraud, in the same way that rich people don’t like counterfeiters. What really bugs me, though, is when cheaters get caught and still don’t admit it. People like Hauser, Wegman, Fischer, and Weick get under my skin because they have the chutzpah to just deny deny deny. The grainy time-stamped videotape with their hand in the cookie jar is right there, and they’ll still talk around the problem. Makes me want to scream. This happens all the time . All. Over. The. Place. Everybody makes mistakes, and just about everybody does thing
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Introduction: I was curious so I ordered a used copy. It was pretty good. It fit in my pocket and I read it on the plane. It was written in a bland, spare manner, not worth reading for any direct insights it would give into human nature, but the plot moved along. And the background material was interesting in the window it gave into the society of the 1950s. It was fun to read a book of pulp fiction that didn’t have any dead bodies in it. I wonder what Jenny Davidson would think of it.
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Introduction: This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . . Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper): Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul. After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month , I respe
Introduction: Thomas Basbøll points to this ten-year-old article from Anne-Wil Harzing on the consequences of sloppy citations. Harzing tells the story of an unsupported claim that is contradicted by published data but has been presented as fact in a particular area of the academic literature. She writes that “high expatriate failure rates [with "expatriate failure" defined as "the expatriate returning home before his/her contractual period of employment abroad expires"] were in fact a myth created by massive misquotations and careless copying of references.” Many papers claimed an expatriate failure rate of 25-40% (according to Harzing, this is much higher than the actual rate as estimated from empirical data), with this overly-high rate supported by a complicated link of references leading to . . . no real data. Hartzing reports the following published claims: Harvey (1996: 103): `The rate of failure of expatriate managers relocating overseas from United States based MNCs has been estima
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Introduction: Our downstairs neighbor hates us. She looks away from us when we see them on the street, if we’re coming into the building at the same time she doesn’t hold open the door, and if we’re in the elevator when it stops on her floor, she refuses to get on. On the other hand, if you’re a sociology professor in Chicago, one of your colleagues might try to run you over in a parking lot. So I guess I’m getting off easy.
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