andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1324 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it.” Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. . . . You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper.” The original author got a check for $500 but, unfortunately, no free subscription to “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” (a $1400-$2800 value ). P.S. To those who think I’m being mean to Wegman: I haven’t yet heard that he’s apologized to the people whose work he copied without attribution, or to the people who spent their time tracking all this down, or to the U.S. Congress for misrepresenting his expertise in his official report. Everyone makes mistakes, and just about everyone has ethical lapses at times. But when you get caught you’re supposed to make apology and restitution.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it. [sent-1, score-0.476]
2 ” Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. [sent-2, score-0.357]
3 You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. [sent-6, score-0.594]
4 It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper. [sent-7, score-0.638]
5 ” The original author got a check for $500 but, unfortunately, no free subscription to “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” (a $1400-$2800 value ). [sent-8, score-0.652]
6 To those who think I’m being mean to Wegman: I haven’t yet heard that he’s apologized to the people whose work he copied without attribution, or to the people who spent their time tracking all this down, or to the U. [sent-11, score-1.199]
7 Congress for misrepresenting his expertise in his official report. [sent-13, score-0.436]
8 Everyone makes mistakes, and just about everyone has ethical lapses at times. [sent-14, score-0.544]
9 But when you get caught you’re supposed to make apology and restitution. [sent-15, score-0.364]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1324 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman
Introduction: Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it.” Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. . . . You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper.” The original author got a check for $500 but, unfortunately, no free subscription to “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” (a $1400-$2800 value ). P.S. To those who think I’m being mean to Wegman: I haven’t yet heard that he’s apologized to the people whose work he copied without attribution, or to the people who spent their time tracking all this down, or to the U.S. Congress for misrepresenting his expertise in his official report. Everyone makes mistakes, and just about everyone has ethical lapses at times. But when you get caught you’re supposed to make apology and restitution.
2 0.20473848 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
Introduction: Someone passed on to a message from his university library announcing that the journal “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” is no longer free. Librarians have to decide what to do, so I thought I’d offer the following consumer guide: Wiley Computational Statistics journal Wikipedia Frequency 6 issues per year Continuously updated Includes articles from Wikipedia? Yes Yes Cites the Wikipedia sources it uses? No Yes Edited by recipient of ASA Founders Award? Yes No Articles are subject to rigorous review? No Yes Errors, when discovered, get fixed? No Yes Number of vertices in n-dimensional hypercube? 2n 2 n Easy access to Brady Bunch trivia? No Yes Cost (North America) $1400-$2800 $0 Cost (UK) £986-£1972 £0 Cost (Europe) €1213-€2426 €0 The choice seems pretty clear to me! It’s funny for the Wiley journal to start charging now
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
5 0.15511034 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
6 0.145799 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
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13 0.083550178 913 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-16-Groundhog day in August?
14 0.082001477 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
15 0.081615545 836 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-03-Another plagiarism mystery
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19 0.068463318 982 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-30-“There’s at least as much as an 80 percent chance . . .”
20 0.062357791 709 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-13-D. Kahneman serves up a wacky counterfactual
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same-blog 1 0.90832144 1324 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman
Introduction: Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it.” Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. . . . You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper.” The original author got a check for $500 but, unfortunately, no free subscription to “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” (a $1400-$2800 value ). P.S. To those who think I’m being mean to Wegman: I haven’t yet heard that he’s apologized to the people whose work he copied without attribution, or to the people who spent their time tracking all this down, or to the U.S. Congress for misrepresenting his expertise in his official report. Everyone makes mistakes, and just about everyone has ethical lapses at times. But when you get caught you’re supposed to make apology and restitution.
2 0.88979816 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
3 0.81805253 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
4 0.80266517 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
5 0.78644568 751 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-08-Another Wegman plagiarism
Introduction: At the time of our last discussion , Edward Wegman, a statistics professor who has also worked for government research agencies, had been involved in three cases of plagiarism: a report for the U.S. Congress on climate models, a paper on social networks, a paper on color graphics. Each of the plagiarism stories was slightly different: the congressional report involved the distorted copying of research by a scientist (Raymond Bradley) whose conclusions Wegman disagreed with, the social networks paper included copied material in its background section, and the color graphics paper included various bits and pieces by others that had been used in old lecture notes. Since then, blogger Deep Climate has uncovered another plagiarized article by Wegman, this time an article in a 2005 volume on data mining and data visualization. Deep Climate writes, “certain sections of Statistical Data Mining rely heavily on lightly edited portions on lectures from Wegman’s statistical data mining c
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8 0.76401454 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
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10 0.72918439 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime
11 0.72245628 1442 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-03-Double standard? Plagiarizing journos get slammed, plagiarizing profs just shrug it off
12 0.72238737 52 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-26-Intellectual property
13 0.70356387 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
14 0.69267833 901 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-12-Some thoughts on academic cheating, inspired by Frey, Wegman, Fischer, Hauser, Stapel
15 0.68107891 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
16 0.67939919 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
17 0.64853168 945 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-06-W’man < W’pedia, again
18 0.64410156 345 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-15-Things we do on sabbatical instead of actually working
19 0.62016886 755 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-09-Recently in the award-winning sister blog
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same-blog 1 0.88491601 1324 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-16-Wikipedia author confronts Ed Wegman
Introduction: Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it.” Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. . . . You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper.” The original author got a check for $500 but, unfortunately, no free subscription to “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” (a $1400-$2800 value ). P.S. To those who think I’m being mean to Wegman: I haven’t yet heard that he’s apologized to the people whose work he copied without attribution, or to the people who spent their time tracking all this down, or to the U.S. Congress for misrepresenting his expertise in his official report. Everyone makes mistakes, and just about everyone has ethical lapses at times. But when you get caught you’re supposed to make apology and restitution.
Introduction: Greg Mankiw writes (link from Tyler Cowen ): Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family’s marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. Is it any wonder that I [Mankiw] turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered? By contrast, without the tax increases advocated by the Obama administration, the numbers would look quite different. I would face a lower income tax rate, a lower Medicare tax rate, and no deduction phaseout or estate tax. Taking that writing assignment would yield my kids about $2,000. I would have twice the incentive to keep working. First, the good news Obama’s tax rates are much lower than Mankiw had anticipated! According to the above quote, his marginal tax rate is currently 80% but threatens to rise to 90%. But, in October 2008, Mankiw calculated that Obama’s would tax his m
3 0.83062136 2261 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-23-Greg Mankiw’s utility function
Introduction: From 2010 : Greg Mankiw writes (link from Tyler Cowen ): Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family’s marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. Is it any wonder that I [Mankiw] turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered? By contrast, without the tax increases advocated by the Obama administration, the numbers would look quite different. I would face a lower income tax rate, a lower Medicare tax rate, and no deduction phaseout or estate tax. Taking that writing assignment would yield my kids about $2,000. I would have twice the incentive to keep working. First, the good news Obama’s tax rates are much lower than Mankiw had anticipated! According to the above quote, his marginal tax rate is currently 80% but threatens to rise to 90%. But, in October 2008, Mankiw calculated that Obama’s
4 0.82361984 140 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-SeeThroughNY
Introduction: From Ira Stoll , a link to this cool data site , courtesy of the Manhattan Institute, with all sorts of state budget information including the salaries of all city and state employees.
5 0.8040446 366 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-24-Mankiw tax update
Introduction: I was going through the blog and noticed this note on an article by Mankiw and Weinzierl who implied that the state only has a right to tax things that are “unjustly wrestled from someone else.” This didn’t make much sense to me–whether it’s the sales tax, the income tax, or whatever, I see taxes as a way to raise money, not as a form of punishment. At the time, I conjectured this was a general difference in attitude between political scientists and economists, but in retrospect I realize I’m dealing with n=1 in each case. See here for further discussion of taxing “justly acquired endowments.” The only reason I’m bringing this all up now is that I think it is relevant to our recent discussion here and here of Mankiw’s work incentives. Mankiw objected to paying a higher marginal tax rate, and I think part of this is that he sees taxes as a form of punishment, and since he came by his income honestly he doesn’t think it’s fair to have to pay taxes on it. My perspective i
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