andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1440 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: John Mashey sends me this delightful video (not in English but it has subtitles) from the University of Bergen (link comes from this page from Elsevier but I don’t see any direct connection between the controversial academic publisher and the Bergen group). Part of me believes, deep down, that if someone were to send this link to Edward Wegman , he will repent, that he’ll just break down, confess, and apologize to everybody involved. I can’t understand the psychology of such people. I mean, I can understand someone being lazy enough to plagiarize and to deny if accused. But to keep denying after you’ve been caught and everyone knows you did it—I simply can’t see how someone can do that. But this surely reflects my nerd-like lack of understanding of human nature, more than anything else. It’s a bit scary that someone such as myself who has such poor intuitions about human behavior can become a prominent social scientist, but I suppose it takes all kinds. P.S. At least I’m
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 John Mashey sends me this delightful video (not in English but it has subtitles) from the University of Bergen (link comes from this page from Elsevier but I don’t see any direct connection between the controversial academic publisher and the Bergen group). [sent-1, score-0.997]
2 Part of me believes, deep down, that if someone were to send this link to Edward Wegman , he will repent, that he’ll just break down, confess, and apologize to everybody involved. [sent-2, score-0.891]
3 I can’t understand the psychology of such people. [sent-3, score-0.194]
4 I mean, I can understand someone being lazy enough to plagiarize and to deny if accused. [sent-4, score-0.76]
5 But to keep denying after you’ve been caught and everyone knows you did it—I simply can’t see how someone can do that. [sent-5, score-0.646]
6 But this surely reflects my nerd-like lack of understanding of human nature, more than anything else. [sent-6, score-0.502]
7 It’s a bit scary that someone such as myself who has such poor intuitions about human behavior can become a prominent social scientist, but I suppose it takes all kinds. [sent-7, score-1.215]
8 At least I’m not the only nerd involved in politics! [sent-10, score-0.273]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 1440 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-02-“A Christmas Carol” as applied to plagiarism
Introduction: John Mashey sends me this delightful video (not in English but it has subtitles) from the University of Bergen (link comes from this page from Elsevier but I don’t see any direct connection between the controversial academic publisher and the Bergen group). Part of me believes, deep down, that if someone were to send this link to Edward Wegman , he will repent, that he’ll just break down, confess, and apologize to everybody involved. I can’t understand the psychology of such people. I mean, I can understand someone being lazy enough to plagiarize and to deny if accused. But to keep denying after you’ve been caught and everyone knows you did it—I simply can’t see how someone can do that. But this surely reflects my nerd-like lack of understanding of human nature, more than anything else. It’s a bit scary that someone such as myself who has such poor intuitions about human behavior can become a prominent social scientist, but I suppose it takes all kinds. P.S. At least I’m
2 0.17712413 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
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
4 0.12939197 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
5 0.10443905 945 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-06-W’man < W’pedia, again
Introduction: Blogger Deep Climate looks at another paper by the 2002 recipient of the American Statistical Association’s Founders award. This time it’s not funny, it’s just sad. Here’s Wikipedia on simulated annealing: By analogy with this physical process, each step of the SA algorithm replaces the current solution by a random “nearby” solution, chosen with a probability that depends on the difference between the corresponding function values and on a global parameter T (called the temperature), that is gradually decreased during the process. The dependency is such that the current solution changes almost randomly when T is large, but increasingly “downhill” as T goes to zero. The allowance for “uphill” moves saves the method from becoming stuck at local minima—which are the bane of greedier methods. And here’s Wegman: During each step of the algorithm, the variable that will eventually represent the minimum is replaced by a random solution that is chosen according to a temperature
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same-blog 1 0.97920859 1440 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-02-“A Christmas Carol” as applied to plagiarism
Introduction: John Mashey sends me this delightful video (not in English but it has subtitles) from the University of Bergen (link comes from this page from Elsevier but I don’t see any direct connection between the controversial academic publisher and the Bergen group). Part of me believes, deep down, that if someone were to send this link to Edward Wegman , he will repent, that he’ll just break down, confess, and apologize to everybody involved. I can’t understand the psychology of such people. I mean, I can understand someone being lazy enough to plagiarize and to deny if accused. But to keep denying after you’ve been caught and everyone knows you did it—I simply can’t see how someone can do that. But this surely reflects my nerd-like lack of understanding of human nature, more than anything else. It’s a bit scary that someone such as myself who has such poor intuitions about human behavior can become a prominent social scientist, but I suppose it takes all kinds. P.S. At least I’m
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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
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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
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvio
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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
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Introduction: Michael Betancourt will be speaking at Google and at the University of California, Berkeley. The Google talk is closed to outsiders (but if you work at Google, you should go!); the Berkeley talk is open to all: Friday March 22, 12:10 pm, Evans Hall 1011. Title of talk: Stan : Practical Bayesian Inference with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Abstract: Practical implementations of Bayesian inference are often limited to approximation methods that only slowly explore the posterior distribution. By taking advantage of the curvature of the posterior, however, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) efficiently explores even the most highly contorted distributions. In this talk I will review the foundations of and recent developments within HMC, concluding with a discussion of Stan, a powerful inference engine that utilizes HMC, automatic differentiation, and adaptive methods to minimize user input. This is cool stuff. And he’ll be showing the whirlpool movie!
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Introduction: David Hogg pointed me to this news article by Angela Saini: It’s not often that the quiet world of mathematics is rocked by a murder case. But last summer saw a trial that sent academics into a tailspin, and has since swollen into a fevered clash between science and the law. At its heart, this is a story about chance. And it begins with a convicted killer, “T”, who took his case to the court of appeal in 2010. Among the evidence against him was a shoeprint from a pair of Nike trainers, which seemed to match a pair found at his home. While appeals often unmask shaky evidence, this was different. This time, a mathematical formula was thrown out of court. The footwear expert made what the judge believed were poor calculations about the likelihood of the match, compounded by a bad explanation of how he reached his opinion. The conviction was quashed. . . . “The impact will be quite shattering,” says Professor Norman Fenton, a mathematician at Queen Mary, University of London.
3 0.9399299 178 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-03-(Partisan) visualization of health care legislation
Introduction: Congressman Kevin Brady from Texas distributes this visualization of reformed health care in the US (click for a bigger picture): Here’s a PDF at Brady’s page, and a local copy of it. Complexity has its costs. Beyond the cost of writing it, learning it, following it, there’s also the cost of checking it. John Walker has some funny examples of what’s hidden in the almost 8000 pages of IRS code. Text mining and applied statistics will solve all that, hopefully. Anyone interested in developing a pork detection system for the legislation? Or an analysis of how much entropy to the legal code did each congressman contribute? There are already spin detectors , that help you detect whether the writer is a Democrat (“stimulus”, “health care”) or a Republican (“deficit spending”, “ObamaCare”). D+0.1: Jared Lander points to versions by Rep. Boehner and Robert Palmer .
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Introduction: John Mashey sends me this delightful video (not in English but it has subtitles) from the University of Bergen (link comes from this page from Elsevier but I don’t see any direct connection between the controversial academic publisher and the Bergen group). Part of me believes, deep down, that if someone were to send this link to Edward Wegman , he will repent, that he’ll just break down, confess, and apologize to everybody involved. I can’t understand the psychology of such people. I mean, I can understand someone being lazy enough to plagiarize and to deny if accused. But to keep denying after you’ve been caught and everyone knows you did it—I simply can’t see how someone can do that. But this surely reflects my nerd-like lack of understanding of human nature, more than anything else. It’s a bit scary that someone such as myself who has such poor intuitions about human behavior can become a prominent social scientist, but I suppose it takes all kinds. P.S. At least I’m
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Introduction: I was unsurprised to read that Lou Dobbs, the former CNN host who crusaded against illegal immigrants, had actually hired a bunch of them himself to maintain his large house and his horse farm. (OK, I have to admit I was surprised by the part about the horse farm.) But I think most of the reactions to this story missed the point. Isabel Macdonald’s article that broke the story was entitled, “Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite,” and most of the discussion went from there, with some commenters piling on Dobbs and others defending him by saying that Dobbs hired his laborers through contractors and may not have known they were in the country illegally. To me, though, the key issue is slightly different. And Macdonald’s story is relevant whether or not Dobbs knew he was hiring illegals. My point is not that Dobbs is a bad guy, or a hypocrite, or whatever. My point is that, in his setting, it would take an extraordinary effort to not hire illegal immigrants to take care of his house
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