andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1398 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
2 0.38763481 860 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-18-Trolls!
Introduction: Christian Robert points to this absurd patent of the Monte Carlo method (which, as Christian notes, was actually invented by Stanislaw Ulam and others in the 1940s). The whole thing is pretty unreadable. I wonder if they first wrote it as a journal article and then it got rejected everywhere, so they decided to submit it as a patent instead. What’s even worse is this bit: This invention was made with government support under Grant Numbers 0612170 and 0347408 awarded by the National Science Foundation. So our tax dollars are being given to IBM so they can try to bring statistics to a halt by patenting one of our most basic tools? I’d say this is just a waste of money, but given that our country is run by lawyers, there must be some outside chance that this patent could actually succeed? Perhaps there’s room for an improvement in the patent that involves albedo in some way?
3 0.33646101 625 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-23-My last post on albedo, I promise
Introduction: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes: It’s perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.php http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court Just about anyone’s that’s been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an “intellectual mine field” in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google’s PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in netw
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Introduction: Edward Wyatt reports : Now the Obama administration is cracking down on what many call patent trolls , shell companies that exist merely for the purpose of asserting that they should be paid . . . “The United States patent system is vital for our economic growth, job creation, and technological advance,” [Senator] Leahy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system’s image.” There is some opposition: But some big software companies, including Microsoft, expressed dismay at some of the proposals, saying they could themselves stifle innovation. Microsoft . . . patent trolls . . . hmmm, where have we heard this connection before ? There is also some support for the bill: “These guys are terrorists,” said John Boswell, chief legal officer for SAS, a business software and services company, said at a panel discussion on Tuesday. SAS was cited in the White House report as an example of a company that has
5 0.27484971 892 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Info on patent trolls
Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
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same-blog 1 0.91585076 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
2 0.77596045 1885 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-06-Leahy Versus Albedoman and the Moneygoround, Part One
Introduction: Edward Wyatt reports : Now the Obama administration is cracking down on what many call patent trolls , shell companies that exist merely for the purpose of asserting that they should be paid . . . “The United States patent system is vital for our economic growth, job creation, and technological advance,” [Senator] Leahy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system’s image.” There is some opposition: But some big software companies, including Microsoft, expressed dismay at some of the proposals, saying they could themselves stifle innovation. Microsoft . . . patent trolls . . . hmmm, where have we heard this connection before ? There is also some support for the bill: “These guys are terrorists,” said John Boswell, chief legal officer for SAS, a business software and services company, said at a panel discussion on Tuesday. SAS was cited in the White House report as an example of a company that has
3 0.7392624 625 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-23-My last post on albedo, I promise
Introduction: After seeing my recent blogs on Nathan Myhrvold, a friend told me that, in the tech world, the albedo-obsessed genius is known as a patent troll. Really? Yup. My friend writes: It’s perhaps indicative that Myhrvold comes up in the top-ten hits on Google for [patent troll]. These blog posts lay it out pretty clearly: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/giant_patent_troll_awakens_as.php http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/intellectual-ventures-goes-to-court Just about anyone’s that’s been in the tech game thinks patents are ridiculous. The lab where I used to work wanted us to create an “intellectual mine field” in our field so the companycould block anyone from entering the space. Yes, we made stuff, but the patents were for totally obvious ideas that anyone would have. Even Google’s PageRank was just a simple application of standard social network analysis models of authorities in netw
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Introduction: Christian Robert points to this absurd patent of the Monte Carlo method (which, as Christian notes, was actually invented by Stanislaw Ulam and others in the 1940s). The whole thing is pretty unreadable. I wonder if they first wrote it as a journal article and then it got rejected everywhere, so they decided to submit it as a patent instead. What’s even worse is this bit: This invention was made with government support under Grant Numbers 0612170 and 0347408 awarded by the National Science Foundation. So our tax dollars are being given to IBM so they can try to bring statistics to a halt by patenting one of our most basic tools? I’d say this is just a waste of money, but given that our country is run by lawyers, there must be some outside chance that this patent could actually succeed? Perhaps there’s room for an improvement in the patent that involves albedo in some way?
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Introduction: This guy (Michael Risch) actually did a survey . It seems like cheating to add actual systematic knowledge to the debate. . . . What I’m wondering is, can I file a retroactive patent on the concept of albedo? I think I could make millions off the applications to cooking alone.
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same-blog 1 0.90671444 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!
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Introduction: In the annals of hack literature, it is sometimes said that if you aim to write best-selling crap, all you’ll end up with is crap. To truly produce best-selling crap, you have to have a conviction, perhaps misplaced, that your writing has integrity. Whether or not this is a good generalization about writing, I have seen an analogous phenomenon in statistics: If you try to do nothing but model the data, you can be in for a wild and unpleasant ride: real data always seem to have one more twist beyond our ability to model (von Neumann’s elephant’s trunk notwithstanding). But if you model the underlying process, sometimes your model can fit surprisingly well as well as inviting openings for future research progress.
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Introduction: I had a submission a couple years ago that was rejected by a journal. One of the reviewers began with the following snotty aside: In this manuscript Gelman and Shalizi (there’s no anonymity here; this thing has been floating around the web for some time) . . . Actually, we posted it on the same day we submitted it to the journal. But double-blindness allowed the reviewer to act as if we had done something wrong! And, even if it had been “floating around the web for some time,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it just meant that the article had previously been rejected by a bad-attitude reviewer!
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy. That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary : 1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement 2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous”
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Introduction: Our publisher informs me of the exciting news that Amazon is now selling the 3rd edition of our book at 40% off! Enjoy.
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