andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1312 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
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
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Thomas Basbøll points to this ten-year-old article from Anne-Wil Harzing on the consequences of sloppy citations. [sent-1, score-0.113]
2 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. [sent-2, score-0.249]
3 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. [sent-3, score-2.095]
4 ” 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 . [sent-4, score-1.558]
5 ’ Shay and Bruce (1997: 30): `Cross-industry studies have estimated US expatriate failure, defined as premature return from an overseas assignment, at between 25±40 per cent for developed countries (Baker and Ivancevich, 1971; Tung, 1981). [sent-9, score-1.358]
6 ’ Ashamalla (1998: 54): `According to a number of recent [emphasis added] studies, the rate of failure among American expatriates ranges from 25 to 40 per cent depending on the location of the assignment (Dumaine, Fortune, 1995; McDonald, 1993; Ralston et al. [sent-10, score-0.988]
7 ’ Hartzing writes that, despite the profusion of references which appear to show multiple confirmations, these claims all comes from a single publication from 1979 which itself gives no source for its numbers. [sent-12, score-0.302]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('expatriate', 0.556), ('failure', 0.298), ('hartzing', 0.278), ('harzing', 0.278), ('overseas', 0.185), ('tung', 0.185), ('cent', 0.184), ('rate', 0.167), ('assignment', 0.118), ('sloppy', 0.113), ('estimated', 0.111), ('per', 0.104), ('references', 0.092), ('careless', 0.084), ('mendenhall', 0.084), ('expires', 0.084), ('contractual', 0.084), ('abroad', 0.084), ('profusion', 0.084), ('defined', 0.08), ('premature', 0.08), ('mcdonald', 0.074), ('contradicted', 0.074), ('welch', 0.074), ('bruce', 0.07), ('according', 0.069), ('myth', 0.067), ('returning', 0.065), ('fortune', 0.065), ('managers', 0.065), ('baker', 0.065), ('solomon', 0.065), ('multiple', 0.064), ('ranges', 0.064), ('treating', 0.063), ('claims', 0.062), ('unsupported', 0.061), ('claim', 0.059), ('studies', 0.058), ('copying', 0.058), ('citations', 0.056), ('gray', 0.056), ('instances', 0.055), ('fact', 0.055), ('massive', 0.054), ('apparent', 0.054), ('employment', 0.054), ('thrown', 0.054), ('supporting', 0.053), ('depending', 0.053)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 1312 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-11-Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates
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
2 0.09752503 636 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-The Conservative States of America
Introduction: After noting the increasing political conservatism of people in the poorer states, Richard Florida writes : The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism’s hold on America’s states. This trend stands in sharp contrast to the Great Depression, when America embraced FDR and the New Deal. Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more-diverse, and, especially, more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen behind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds. This obviously poses big challenges for liberals, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party moving forward. But the much bigger, long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become pe
Introduction: Uberbloggers Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were kind enough to link to my five-year-old post with graphs from Red State Blue State on time trends of average income by state. Here are the graphs : Yglesias’s take-home point: There isn’t that much change over time in states’ economic well-being. All things considered the best predictor of how rich a state was in 2000 was simply how rich it was in 1929…. Massachusetts and Connecticut have always been rich and Arkansas and Mississippi have always been poor. I’d like to point to a different feature of the graphs, which is that, although the rankings of the states haven’t changed much (as can be seen from the “2000 compared to 1929″ scale), the relative values of the incomes have converged quite a bit—at least, they converged from about 1930 to 1980 before hitting some level of stability. And the rankings have changed a bit. My impression (without checking the numbers) is that New York and Connecticut were
Introduction: Thomas Lumley writes : The Herald has a story about hazards of coffee. The picture caption says Men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die. which is obviously not true: deaths, as we’ve observed before, are fixed at one per customer. The story says It’s not that people are dying at a rapid rate. But men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die and women have double the chance compared with moderate drinkers, according to the The University of Queensland and the University of South Carolina study. What the study actually reported was rates of death: over an average of 17 years, men who drink more than four cups a day died at about a 21% higher rate, with little evidence of any difference in men. After they considered only men and women under 55 (which they don’t say was something they had planned to do), and attempted to control for a whole bunch of other factors, the rate increase went to 56% for me
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
7 0.059700359 96 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-18-Course proposal: Bayesian and advanced likelihood statistical methods for zombies.
9 0.056865141 1730 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-20-Unz on Unz
10 0.055534218 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
11 0.055474762 706 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-11-The happiness gene: My bottom line (for now)
12 0.054223709 1016 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-17-I got 99 comparisons but multiplicity ain’t one
13 0.05412421 1671 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-13-Preregistration of Studies and Mock Reports
14 0.053953063 803 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-14-Subtleties with measurement-error models for the evaluation of wacky claims
15 0.05331723 1291 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-30-Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias
16 0.052837316 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)
18 0.05165967 1705 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-04-Recently in the sister blog
19 0.051467329 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
20 0.050838608 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.091), (1, -0.023), (2, 0.017), (3, -0.049), (4, -0.01), (5, -0.03), (6, -0.0), (7, -0.019), (8, -0.015), (9, 0.0), (10, -0.016), (11, -0.002), (12, -0.023), (13, 0.044), (14, 0.011), (15, 0.023), (16, 0.034), (17, 0.009), (18, -0.009), (19, 0.004), (20, 0.005), (21, 0.039), (22, -0.008), (23, 0.005), (24, 0.007), (25, 0.021), (26, -0.003), (27, 0.016), (28, 0.038), (29, 0.016), (30, 0.021), (31, 0.005), (32, -0.002), (33, 0.021), (34, 0.022), (35, 0.027), (36, -0.015), (37, -0.004), (38, 0.033), (39, -0.013), (40, -0.026), (41, -0.017), (42, -0.02), (43, -0.01), (44, 0.011), (45, 0.009), (46, -0.047), (47, 0.015), (48, -0.029), (49, -0.029)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96607405 1312 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-11-Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates
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
2 0.70046496 1893 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-11-Folic acid and autism
Introduction: Aurelian Muntean writes: I have read an article on NPR and the journal article that spun this news. What draw my attention was the discussion in terms of causation implied by one of the authors of the article interviewed in the NPR news, and also by the conclusions of the article itself claiming large effects. Although the total sample (self-selecting pregnant women) seems very large (85,176) the subsamples (270 out of which 114 were in the sub-subsample revealing statistically significant association) used to support the analysis seem to be too small. Or not? My response: The different sources of information do seem to be in some conflict: - The JAMA article reports the autism rate of 1 per 1000 for children of mothers taking folic acid and 2 per 1000 for children of mothers not taking folic acid. (They also report the adjusted odds ratio as 0.6 rather than 0.5, indicted that the two groups differ a bit in some background variables.) - The NPR article has this q
3 0.69544065 67 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-More on that Dartmouth health care study
Introduction: Hank Aaron at the Brookings Institution, who knows a lot more about policy than I do, had some interesting comments on the recent New York Times article about problems with the Dartmouth health care atlas. which I discussed a few hours ago . Aaron writes that much of the criticism in that newspaper article was off-base, but that there are real difficulties in translating the Dartmouth results (finding little relation between spending and quality of care) to cost savings in the real world. Aaron writes: The Dartmouth research, showing huge variation in the use of various medical procedures and large variations in per patient spending under Medicare, has been a revelation and a useful one. There is no way to explain such variation on medical grounds and it is problematic. But readers, including my former colleague Orszag, have taken an oversimplistic view of what the numbers mean and what to do about them. There are three really big problems with the common interpreta
4 0.67794096 1558 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-02-Not so fast on levees and seawalls for NY harbor?
Introduction: I was talking with June Williamson and mentioned offhand that I’d seen something in the paper saying that if only we’d invested a few billion dollars in levees we would’ve saved zillions in economic damage from the flood. (A quick search also revealed this eerily prescient article from last month and, more recently, this online discussion.) June said, No, no, no: levees are not the way to go: Here and here are the articles on “soft infrastructure” for the New York-New Jersey Harbor I was mentioning, summarizing work that is more extensively published in two books, “Rising Currents” and “On the Water: Palisade Bay”: The hazards posed by climate change, sea level rise, and severe storm surges make this the time to transform our coastal cities through adaptive design. The conventional response to flooding, in recent history, has been hard engineering — fortifying the coastal infrastructure with seawalls and bulkheads to protect real estate at the expense of natural t
Introduction: Thomas Lumley writes : The Herald has a story about hazards of coffee. The picture caption says Men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die. which is obviously not true: deaths, as we’ve observed before, are fixed at one per customer. The story says It’s not that people are dying at a rapid rate. But men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die and women have double the chance compared with moderate drinkers, according to the The University of Queensland and the University of South Carolina study. What the study actually reported was rates of death: over an average of 17 years, men who drink more than four cups a day died at about a 21% higher rate, with little evidence of any difference in men. After they considered only men and women under 55 (which they don’t say was something they had planned to do), and attempted to control for a whole bunch of other factors, the rate increase went to 56% for me
6 0.65908611 12 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-More on problems with surveys estimating deaths in war zones
8 0.64515066 1404 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-03-Counting gays
10 0.64180088 2049 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-03-On house arrest for p-hacking
11 0.64015001 1239 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-01-A randomized trial of the set-point diet
12 0.6352089 1671 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-13-Preregistration of Studies and Mock Reports
13 0.63048977 908 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-14-Type M errors in the lab
17 0.61757541 1906 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-19-“Behind a cancer-treatment firm’s rosy survival claims”
18 0.61706942 2114 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-26-“Please make fun of this claim”
19 0.61700398 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.018), (15, 0.017), (16, 0.043), (21, 0.026), (24, 0.107), (34, 0.015), (47, 0.043), (55, 0.019), (60, 0.01), (65, 0.016), (83, 0.245), (84, 0.011), (86, 0.042), (89, 0.015), (98, 0.02), (99, 0.205)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.86375171 1977 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-11-Debutante Hill
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.
2 0.86362886 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
same-blog 3 0.85745418 1312 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-11-Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates
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
4 0.84385914 1890 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-09-Frontiers of Science update
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
5 0.82679683 926 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-26-NYC
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.
6 0.79710925 1923 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-03-Bayes pays!
7 0.79538685 1613 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-09-Hey—here’s a photo of me making fun of a silly infographic (from last year)
8 0.78773731 1456 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest
9 0.77887082 645 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
10 0.77688694 1294 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-01-Modeling y = a + b + c
11 0.77376324 649 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-05-Internal and external forecasting
12 0.73993701 1042 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-05-Timing is everything!
13 0.72953683 1704 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-03-Heuristics for identifying ecological fallacies?
14 0.72804201 711 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-14-Steven Rhoads’s book, “The Economist’s View of the World”
15 0.70823169 2195 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-02-Microfoundations of macroeconomics
16 0.70780051 582 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-20-Statisticians vs. everybody else
17 0.70738411 822 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-26-Any good articles on the use of error bars?
18 0.70289946 2125 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-05-What predicts whether a school district will participate in a large-scale evaluation?
19 0.70091212 961 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-16-The “Washington read” and the algebra of conditional distributions
20 0.69687766 100 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Unsurprisingly, people are more worried about the economy and jobs than about deficits