andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1404 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
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1 Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3. [sent-1, score-0.574]
2 The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. [sent-3, score-0.629]
3 This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. [sent-4, score-0.456]
4 First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. [sent-5, score-0.932]
5 Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. [sent-6, score-1.851]
6 This article goes on to offer observations about the challenges and implications that are associated with the varying estimates of the size of the LGBT population. [sent-7, score-0.676]
7 And it concludes by arguing that, today, the size of the LGBT community is less important than understanding the struggles of its members and informing crucial policy debates with facts rather than stereotype and anecdote. [sent-8, score-1.226]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1404 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-03-Counting gays
Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
2 0.12396318 381 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-30-Sorry, Senator DeMint: Most Americans Don’t Want to Ban Gays from the Classroom
Introduction: Justin Phillips placed some questions on the YouGov Model Politics poll and reports the following: Early this month, Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) angered gay rights organizations when he said that openly gay people (along with sexually active unmarried women) shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom. This comment was originally reported in the Spartanberg Herald-Journal and subsequently covered by a variety of national media outlets including CBS News. The Senator justified his comments by suggesting that his beliefs are shared by many Americans. DeMint told the Herald Journal “[When I said those things] no one came to my defense. But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn’t back down. They don’t want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.” So is the Senator correct? Do Americans want openly gay men and women out of the classroom? . . . Most Americans do not share Senator DeMint’s views. Our survey shows that a large majorit
3 0.10408081 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
Introduction: Gary Gates writes the following in response to the discussion of my recent blog on the difficulty of using “gaydar” to estimate the frequencies of gays in a population: First, here’s a better (I think, anyway) method than using AIDS deaths from the NY Times (yikes!) to estimate the % of the military that is gay or lesbian. Gates estimates 2.2%, with, unsurprisingly, a higher rate among women than men. He continues: Here’s a tale of the false positive problem affecting who gets counted as same-sex couples in the Census and attached is a working paper that updates those analyses (with better methods, I think) using ACS data. In this paper, Gates (along with Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor) finds: Our work indicates that over 40 percent of same-sex “unmarried partner” couples in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census are likely misclassified different-sex couples. 40% misclassification. Wow.
4 0.10052641 2043 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-29-The difficulties of measuring just about anything
Introduction: Mark Duckenfield writes: Some comments on statistics and “bad math”, that I think display a clear misunderstanding of statistics and surveys. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130714/NEWS/307140016/Marine-officer-Scope-sex-assault-problem-exaggerated and the editorial to which it refers http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323582904578484941173658754.html The original report is quite clear about weighting things, smaple sizes, etc. The apparent “clincher” argument in the editorial—that over 50% of unwanted sexual advances in the military are experienced by men—seems to confound several things. The first being, of course, that with only 14% of service members being female, it is quite likely by their broad definition that the 86% of service members who are men actually *do* comprise the majority of unwanted sexual attention even if the incidence is only a fraction of that of female service members. Of course, the general population, which is over 50% female would
5 0.093199417 1607 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-05-The p-value is not . . .
Introduction: From a recent email exchange: I agree that you should never compare p-values directly. The p-value is a strange nonlinear transformation of data that is only interpretable under the null hypothesis. Once you abandon the null (as we do when we observe something with a very low p-value), the p-value itself becomes irrelevant. To put it another way, the p-value is a measure of evidence, it is not an estimate of effect size (as it is often treated, with the idea that a p=.001 effect is larger than a p=.01 effect, etc). Even conditional on sample size, the p-value is not a measure of effect size.
7 0.083594903 1320 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-14-Question 4 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
8 0.081824064 1929 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-07-Stereotype threat!
10 0.079703592 803 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-14-Subtleties with measurement-error models for the evaluation of wacky claims
11 0.077745996 1982 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-15-Blaming scientific fraud on the Kuhnians
12 0.068928033 1194 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-04-Multilevel modeling even when you’re not interested in predictions for new groups
14 0.064741962 963 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-18-Question on Type M errors
15 0.064566232 255 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-04-How does multilevel modeling affect the estimate of the grand mean?
16 0.062960789 960 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-15-The bias-variance tradeoff
17 0.062203456 797 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-11-How do we evaluate a new and wacky claim?
19 0.058980137 1326 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-17-Question 7 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
20 0.058556452 2269 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-27-Beyond the Valley of the Trolls
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same-blog 1 0.98219615 1404 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-03-Counting gays
Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
Introduction: Alexander at GiveWell writes : The Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP2), a major report funded by the Gates Foundation . . . provides an estimate of $3.41 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the cost-effectiveness of soil-transmitted-helminth (STH) treatment, implying that STH treatment is one of the most cost-effective interventions for global health. In investigating this figure, we have corresponded, over a period of months, with six scholars who had been directly or indirectly involved in the production of the estimate. Eventually, we were able to obtain the spreadsheet that was used to generate the $3.41/DALY estimate. That spreadsheet contains five separate errors that, when corrected, shift the estimated cost effectiveness of deworming from $3.41 to $326.43. [I think they mean to say $300 -- ed.] We came to this conclusion a year after learning that the DCP2’s published cost-effectiveness estimate for schistosomiasis treatment – another kind of
3 0.67072755 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
Introduction: My article with Daniel and Yair has recently appeared in The Forum: We use multilevel modeling to estimate support for health-care reform by age, income, and state. Opposition to reform is concentrated among higher-income voters and those over 65. Attitudes do not vary much by state. Unfortunately, our poll data only go to 2004, but we suspect that much can be learned from the relative positions of different demographic groups and different states, despite swings in national opinion. We speculate on the political implications of these findings. The article features some pretty graphs that originally appeared on the blog. It’s in a special issue on health care politics that has several interesting articles, among which I’d like to single out this one by Bob Shapiro and Lawrence Jacobs entitled, “Simulating Representation: Elite Mobilization and Political Power in Health Care Reform”: The public’s core policy preferences have, for some time, favored expanding access to heal
4 0.66837513 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
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
6 0.66334683 702 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-09-“Discovered: the genetic secret of a happy life”
7 0.66198432 64 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-Estimates of war deaths: Darfur edition
9 0.64639527 918 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-21-Avoiding boundary estimates in linear mixed models
10 0.64536208 12 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-More on problems with surveys estimating deaths in war zones
11 0.6365115 1427 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-24-More from the sister blog
12 0.63290215 1910 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-22-Struggles over the criticism of the “cannabis users and IQ change” paper
13 0.63094658 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
14 0.63087708 706 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-11-The happiness gene: My bottom line (for now)
15 0.63035762 1086 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-The most dangerous jobs in America
16 0.62887824 797 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-11-How do we evaluate a new and wacky claim?
17 0.62826991 2223 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-24-“Edlin’s rule” for routinely scaling down published estimates
18 0.62557727 142 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-12-God, Guns, and Gaydar: The Laws of Probability Push You to Overestimate Small Groups
19 0.6215266 963 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-18-Question on Type M errors
20 0.61907989 152 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-17-Distorting the Electoral Connection? Partisan Representation in Confirmation Politics
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same-blog 1 0.95937407 1404 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-03-Counting gays
Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
2 0.95407534 139 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Life in New York, Then and Now
Introduction: Interesting mini-memoir from John Podhoretz about the Upper West Side, in his words, “the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen.” The only part I can’t quite follow is his offhand remark, “It is an expensive place to live, but then it always was.” I always thought that, before 1985 or so, the Upper West Side wasn’t so upscale. People at Columbia tell all sorts of stories about how things used to be in the bad old days. I have one other comment. Before giving it, let me emphasize that enjoyed reading Podhoretz’s article and, by making the comment below, I’m not trying to shoot Podhoretz down; rather, I’m trying to help out by pointing out a habit in his writing that might be getting in the way of his larger messages. Podhoretz writes the following about slum clearance: Over the course of the next four years, 20 houses on the block would be demolished and replaced with a high school named for Louis Brandeis and a relocated elementary school. Of the 35 brownstones t
3 0.94249171 64 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-03-Estimates of war deaths: Darfur edition
Introduction: Perhaps because of these discussions , I was pointed toward an article on “Rethinking Darfur” by Marc Gustafson, which was written up in a news story here . From the publicity email: This paper is intended to challenge the conventional wisdom about the causes and levels of violence in Darfur during the conflict there. Gustafson, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, draws on historical analysis, explores mortality surveys, and dissects six years of American budgetary allocations in Sudan, contending that while the war in Darfur has had horrific results, it has been mischaracterized persistently in terms of the scale and causes of the conflict. Gustafson argues that these mischaracterizations had negative effects on elite and public understanding of the conflict, and consequently had a rather dubious effect on policy choices. I don’t have time to look at this and so offer no comment one way or the other, but I thought it might be of interest to some of you, so I’m posting it her
4 0.94020271 813 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Scrabble!
Introduction: AT writes : Sitting on my [AT's] to-do list for a while now has been an exploration of Scrabble from an experimental design point of view; how to better design a tournament to make the variance as small as possible while still preserving the appearance of the home game to its players. . . . I’m proud (relieved?) to say that I’ve finally finished the first draft of this work for two-player head-to-head games, with a duplication method that ensures that if the game were repeated, each player would receive tiles from the reserve in the same sequence: think of the tiles being laid out in order (but unseen to the players), so that one player draws from the front and the other draws from the back. . . . One goal of this was to figure out how much of the variance in score comes from the tile order and how much comes from the board, given that a tile order would be expected. It turns out to be about half-bag, half-board . . . Some other findings from the simulations: The blank
5 0.93789518 633 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-“The New Tyranny: Carbon Monoxide Detectors?”
Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
6 0.91363835 2206 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-10-On deck this week
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9 0.89981425 903 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-13-Duke postdoctoral fellowships in nonparametric Bayes & high-dimensional data
10 0.89919829 2207 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-11-My talks in Bristol this Wed and London this Thurs
11 0.89528936 438 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-30-I just skyped in from Kentucky, and boy are my arms tired
12 0.89519405 2348 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-26-On deck this week
13 0.89356905 1162 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-11-Adding an error model to a deterministic model
14 0.89186454 670 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-20-Attractive but hard-to-read graph could be made much much better
15 0.89184558 1910 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-22-Struggles over the criticism of the “cannabis users and IQ change” paper
16 0.88947499 897 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-09-The difference between significant and not significant…
18 0.88888007 776 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-22-Deviance, DIC, AIC, cross-validation, etc
19 0.88835806 486 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-26-Age and happiness: The pattern isn’t as clear as you might think
20 0.88833076 1459 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-15-How I think about mixture models