andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1427 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding.
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2 Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). [sent-2, score-0.452]
3 Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. [sent-3, score-1.299]
4 This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding. [sent-4, score-0.522]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1427 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-24-More from the sister blog
Introduction: Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding.
Introduction: I was updating my Mac and noticed the following: Lots of obscure European languages there. That got me wondering: what’s the least obscure language not on the above list? Igbo? Swahili? Or maybe Tagalog? I did a quick google and found this list of languages by number of native speakers. Once you see the list, the answer is obvious: Hindi, first language of 295 million people, is not on Apple’s list. The next most popular languages not included: Bengali, Punjabi, Javanese, Wu, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu. Wow: most of these are Indian! Then comes Persian and a bunch of others. It turns out that Tagalog, Igbo, and Swahili, are way down on this list with 28 million, 24 million, and 26 million native speakers, respectively. Only 26 million for Swahili? This made me want to check the list of languages by total number of speakers . The ranking of most of the languages isn’t much different, but Swahili is now #10, at 140 million. Hindi and Bengali are still th
3 0.12997007 706 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-11-The happiness gene: My bottom line (for now)
Introduction: I had a couple of email exchanges with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and James Fowler, two of the authors of the article on the gene that is associated with life satisfaction which we blogged the other day. (Bruno Frey, the third author of the article in question, is out of town according to his email.) Fowler also commented directly on the blog. I won’t go through all the details, but now I have a better sense of what’s going on. (Thanks, Jan and James!) Here’s my current understanding: 1. The original manuscript was divided into two parts: an article by De Neve alone published in the Journal of Human Genetics, and an article by De Neve, Fowler, Frey, and Nicholas Christakis submitted to Econometrica. The latter paper repeats the analysis from the Adolescent Health survey and also replicates with data from the Framingham heart study (hence Christakis’s involvement). The Framingham study measures a slightly different gene and uses a slightly life-satisfaction question com
4 0.11192899 2289 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-11-“More research from the lunatic fringe”
Introduction: A linguist send me an email with the above title and a link to a paper, “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” by M. Keith Chen, which begins: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented e§ects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice. I ran this by another linguist who confirmed the “lunatic fringe” comme
5 0.092113607 2327 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-09-Nicholas Wade and the paradox of racism
Introduction: The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly true, but the racism of the past always seems so ridiculous. I’ve been thinking about this for a few months ever since receiving in the mail a new book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History,” by New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade. Here’s what I wrote in my review of this book for Slate : The word “inequality” does not appear in the book’s index, but what Wade is offering is essentially a theory of economic and social inequality, explaining systematic racial differences in prosperity based on a combination of innate traits (“the disinclination to save in tribal societies is linked to a strong propensity for immediate consumption”) and genetic adaptation to political and social institutions (arguing, for example, that generations of centralized rule have effected a selection pressure for Chinese to be accepting of authority). Wade is clearly in
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20 0.048573419 161 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-24-Differences in color perception by sex, also the Bechdel test for women in movies
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same-blog 1 0.9273563 1427 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-24-More from the sister blog
Introduction: Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding.
2 0.70161158 1128 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-19-Sharon Begley: Worse than Stephen Jay Gould?
Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
3 0.67553371 845 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-08-How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes
Introduction: Interesting article by Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens: Products, styles, and social movements often catch on and become popular, but little is known about why such identity-relevant cultural tastes and practices die out. We demonstrate that the velocity of adoption may affect abandonment: Analysis of over 100 years of data on first-name adoption in both France and the United States illustrates that cultural tastes that have been adopted quickly die faster (i.e., are less likely to persist). Mirroring this aggregate pattern, at the individual level, expecting parents are more hesitant to adopt names that recently experienced sharper increases in adoption. Further analysis indicate that these effects are driven by concerns about symbolic value: Fads are perceived negatively, so people avoid identity-relevant items with sharply increasing popularity because they believe that they will be short lived. Ancillary analyses also indicate that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, identity-r
4 0.67147142 1305 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-07-Happy news on happiness; what can we believe?
Introduction: Sharon Jayson writes : The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings in several studies weren’t so clear-cut and may, in fact, be flawed. The newer analyses presented this week use analytical methods based on data from almost 130,000 adults around the globe — including more than 52,000 parents — and the conclusions aren’t so grim. They say that parents today may indeed be happier than non-parents and that parental happiness levels — while they do drop — don’t dip below the levels they were before having children. . . . The other study, of some 120,000 adults from two nationally representative surveys between 1972-2008, finds that parents were indeed less happy than non-parents in the d
5 0.66499507 702 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-09-“Discovered: the genetic secret of a happy life”
Introduction: I took the above headline from a news article in the (London) Independent by Jeremy Laurance reporting a study by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, James Fowler, and Bruno Frey that reportedly just appeared in the Journal of Human Genetics. One of the pleasures of blogging is that I can go beyond the usual journalistic approaches to such a story: (a) puffing it, (b) debunking it, (c) reporting it completely flatly. Even convex combinations of (a), (b), (c) do not allow what I’d like to do, which is to explore the claims and follow wherever my exploration takes me. (And one of the pleasures of building my own audience is that I don’t need to endlessly explain background detail as was needed on a general-public site such as 538.) OK, back to the genetic secret of a happy life. Or, in the words the authors of the study, a gene that “explains less than one percent of the variation in life satisfaction.” “The genetic secret” or “less than one percent of the variation”? Perhaps the secre
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same-blog 1 0.91503555 1427 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-24-More from the sister blog
Introduction: Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s a division among the Eskimo-Aleut languages, which straddle the Bering Straits even today, the Athabaskan languages (which were discovered to be related to a small Siberian language family only within the last few years, not by Greenberg as Wade suggested), and everything else. This is not to say that the results from genetics are unimportant, but it’s good to see how it fits with other aspects of our understanding.
2 0.9046796 558 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-05-Fattening of the world and good use of the alpha channel
Introduction: In the spirit of Gapminder , Washington Post created an interactive scatterplot viewer that’s using alpha channel to tell apart overlapping fat dots better than sorting-by-circle-size Gapminder is using: Good news: the rate of fattening of the USA appears to be slowing down. Maybe because of high gas prices? But what’s happening with Oceania?
Introduction: I was updating my Mac and noticed the following: Lots of obscure European languages there. That got me wondering: what’s the least obscure language not on the above list? Igbo? Swahili? Or maybe Tagalog? I did a quick google and found this list of languages by number of native speakers. Once you see the list, the answer is obvious: Hindi, first language of 295 million people, is not on Apple’s list. The next most popular languages not included: Bengali, Punjabi, Javanese, Wu, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu. Wow: most of these are Indian! Then comes Persian and a bunch of others. It turns out that Tagalog, Igbo, and Swahili, are way down on this list with 28 million, 24 million, and 26 million native speakers, respectively. Only 26 million for Swahili? This made me want to check the list of languages by total number of speakers . The ranking of most of the languages isn’t much different, but Swahili is now #10, at 140 million. Hindi and Bengali are still th
4 0.87103057 1530 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-11-Migrating your blog from Movable Type to WordPress
Introduction: Cord Blomquist, who did a great job moving us from horrible Movable Type to nice nice WordPress, writes: I [Cord] wanted to share a little news with you related to the original work we did for you last year. When ReadyMadeWeb converted your Movable Type blog to WordPress, we got a lot of other requestes for the same service, so we started thinking about a bigger market for such a product. After a bit of research, we started work on automating the data conversion, writing rules, and exceptions to the rules, on how Movable Type and TypePad data could be translated to WordPress. After many months of work, we’re getting ready to announce TP2WP.com , a service that converts Movable Type and TypePad export files to WordPress import files, so anyone who wants to migrate to WordPress can do so easily and without losing permalinks, comments, images, or other files. By automating our service, we’ve been able to drop the price to just $99. I recommend it (and, no, Cord is not paying m
5 0.82131964 873 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Luck or knowledge?
Introduction: Joan Ginther has won the Texas lottery four times. First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2million, then two years later $3million and in the summer of 2010, she hit a $10million jackpot. The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years. According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all. The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been ‘born under a lucky star’, and that they don’t suspect foul play. Harper’s reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which calls the the validity of her ‘luck’ into question. First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics. More at Daily Mail. [Edited Saturday] In comments, C Ryan King points to the original article at Harper’s and Bill Jefferys to Wired .
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