andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1479 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Philip Cohen asks , “Why are mothers becoming moms?” These aren’t just two words for the same thing: in political terms “mother” is merely descriptive while “mom” is more positive. Indeed, we speak of “mom and apple pie” as unquestionable American icons. Cohen points out that motherhood is sometimes but not always respected in political discourse: On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus. On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work.” For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously decla
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1 Philip Cohen asks , “Why are mothers becoming moms? [sent-1, score-0.165]
2 ” These aren’t just two words for the same thing: in political terms “mother” is merely descriptive while “mom” is more positive. [sent-2, score-0.074]
3 Indeed, we speak of “mom and apple pie” as unquestionable American icons. [sent-3, score-0.16]
4 Cohen points out that motherhood is sometimes but not always respected in political discourse: On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. [sent-4, score-0.588]
5 And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus. [sent-5, score-0.073]
6 On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work. [sent-6, score-0.442]
7 ” For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. [sent-7, score-0.377]
8 When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously declared: “The days of something for nothing are over. [sent-8, score-0.151]
9 ” President Obama and Mitt Romney both support that welfare reform. [sent-9, score-0.123]
10 Cohen writes: Parenthood won’t get the respect it deserves – including men embracing it in more equal numbers – until the monetary reward it draws matches the rhetoric of its symbolic value. [sent-13, score-0.509]
11 Consider soldiers: they get a lot of respect even though they don’t get paid well. [sent-15, score-0.313]
12 It is clear that domestic work is essential to the creation of the next generation of people and that it is not easy labor. [sent-22, score-0.338]
13 The idea that dignity can only come from paid employment rather than worthwhile work is perverse. [sent-23, score-0.713]
14 I [Delaney] would consider a Buddhist monk, for example, to have plenty of dignity even if their vocation never (ever) results in paid employment. [sent-24, score-0.615]
15 Another example would be those old-time rabbis who would sit around arguing about the Bible while their wives were busy chasing the kids, scrubbing the laundry, etc. [sent-25, score-0.245]
16 The modern equivalent would be sitting on the couch and watching sports of tv, I suppose. [sent-26, score-0.086]
17 It’s not paid employment but it’s essential to society. [sent-27, score-0.416]
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same-blog 1 0.99999982 1479 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-01-Mothers and Moms
Introduction: Philip Cohen asks , “Why are mothers becoming moms?” These aren’t just two words for the same thing: in political terms “mother” is merely descriptive while “mom” is more positive. Indeed, we speak of “mom and apple pie” as unquestionable American icons. Cohen points out that motherhood is sometimes but not always respected in political discourse: On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus. On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work.” For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously decla
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Introduction: I was just thinking about that Yale professor who wrote that book, remember , she screamed at her daughters all the time and didn’t let them go the bathroom while they were practicing piano (violin?), Asian parenting-style etc etc. I was just wondering . . . what if she’d had sons rather than daughters? What are the rules? Would bringing up boys be the job of mellow white dad rather than intense Asian mom? If mom were still in charge, would the boys be doing piano, or something else like hockey? Tiger Mom seems to be into traditional values so I’m assuming she’d want her kids doing something sex-stereotyped? But sports would be tough, her (hypothetical) boys would have to compete with big strong athletes and would be less likely to be winners so then she couldn’t brag about her amazing parenting skills. I really don’t know the answer to this one. Maybe some of our readers who are Yale law professors can enlighten us?
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Introduction: Hey, we all know the answer: “correlation does not imply causation”—but of course life is more complicated than that. As philosophers, economists, statisticians, and others have repeatedly noted, most of our information about the world is observational not experimental, yet we manage to draw causal conclusions all the time. Sure, some of these conclusions are wrong (more often than 5% of the time, I’m sure) but that’s an accepted part of life. Challenges in this regard arise in the design of a study, in the statistical analysis, in how you write it up for a peer-reviewed journal, and finally in how you present it to the world. School sports and life outcomes An interesting case of all this came up recently in a post on Freakonomics that pointed to a post on Deadspin that pointed to a research article . The claim was that “sports participation [in high school] causes women to be less likely to be religious . . . more likely to have children . . . more likely to be singl
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Introduction: Interesting discussion from David Gorski (which I found via this link from Joseph Delaney). I don’t have anything really to add to this discussion except to note the value of this sort of anecdote in a statistics discussion. It’s only n=1 and adds almost nothing to the literature on the effectiveness of various treatments, but a story like this can help focus one’s thoughts on the decision problems.
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Introduction: Barack Obama’s win has a potentially huge effect on policy. The current budget negotiations will affect the level and direction of government spending and on the mix of taxes paid by different groups of Americans. We can guess that a President Romney would have fought hard against upper-income tax increases. Other areas of long-term impact include the government’s stance on global warming, foreign policy, and the likelihood that Obama will nominate new Supreme Court justices who will uphold the right to abortion announced in Roe v. Wade. When it comes to public opinion, the story is different. The Democrats may well benefit in 2014 and 2016 from the anticipated slow but steady recovery of the economy over the next few years—but, as of November 6, 2012, the parties are essentially tied, with Barack Obama receiving 51% of the two-party vote, compared to Mitt Romney’s 49%, a split comparable to Al Gore’s narrow victory in 2000, Richard Nixon’s in 1968, and John Kennedy’s in 1960.
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Introduction: Philip Cohen asks , “Why are mothers becoming moms?” These aren’t just two words for the same thing: in political terms “mother” is merely descriptive while “mom” is more positive. Indeed, we speak of “mom and apple pie” as unquestionable American icons. Cohen points out that motherhood is sometimes but not always respected in political discourse: On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus. On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work.” For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously decla
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Introduction: Statisticians are literalists. When someone says that the U.K. boundary commission’s delay in redistricting gave the Tories an advantage equivalent to 10 percent of the vote, we’re the kind of person who looks it up and claims that the effect is less than 0.7 percent. When someone says, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm,” we’re like, Hey, really? And we go look that one up too. And when someone says that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters . . . well, let’s not go there. So, when I was pointed to this blog by Michael O’Hare making the following claim, in the context of K-12 education in the United States: My [O'Hare's] favorite examples of this junk [educational content with no workplace value] are spelling and pencil-and-paper algorithm arithmetic. These are absolutely critical for a clerk
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Introduction: Seeing Sarah Palin’s recent witticism : It’s no wonder Michelle Obama is telling everybody you need to breast feed your babies … the price of milk is so high! I was reminded of Dan Quayle’s quip during the 1988 campaign: The governor of Massachusetts, he lost his top naval adviser last week. His rubber ducky drowned in the bathtub. And this got me wondering: how often do legitimate political figures–not talk show hosts, but actual politicians–communicate via schoolyard-style taunts? I’m not talking here about dry wit of the Bob Dole or Morris Udall variety, or political gamesmanship such as Ronald Reagan’s “make my day,” or flat-out partisanship like Alan Grayson’s “the Republicans want you to die quickly” or James Watt’s line about “liberals and Americans.” It’s gotta be an actual joke. There must be some other examples of Palin/Quayle style humor, but I’m not sure where to look. I keep thinking of Veronica Geng’s hilarious story which includes the line: In
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Introduction: A couple things in this interview by Andrew Goldman of Larry Summers currently irritated me. I’ll give the quotes and then explain my annoyance. 1. Goldman: What would the economy look like now if $1.2 trillion had been spent? Summers: I think it’s an artificial question because there would have been all kinds of problems in actually moving $1.2 trillion dollars through the system — finding enough bridge projects that were ready to go and the like. But the recovery probably would have proceeded more rapidly if the fiscal program had been larger. . . . 2. Goldman: You’re aware of — and were making light of — the fact that you occasionally rub people the wrong way. Summers: In meetings, I’m more focused on trying to figure out what the right answer is than making everybody feel validated. In Washington and at Harvard, that sometimes rubs people the wrong way. OK, now my reactions: 1. Not enough bridge projects, huh? I don’t believe it. We’ve been hearing fo
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Introduction: Jouni Kerman did a cool bit of research justifying the Beta (1/3, 1/3) prior as noninformative for binomial data, and the Gamma (1/3, 0) prior for Poisson data. You probably thought that nothing new could be said about noninformative priors in such basic problems, but you were wrong! Here’s the story : The conjugate binomial and Poisson models are commonly used for estimating proportions or rates. However, it is not well known that the conventional noninformative conjugate priors tend to shrink the posterior quantiles toward the boundary or toward the middle of the parameter space, making them thus appear excessively informative. The shrinkage is always largest when the number of observed events is small. This behavior persists for all sample sizes and exposures. The effect of the prior is therefore most conspicuous and potentially controversial when analyzing rare events. As alternative default conjugate priors, I [Jouni] introduce Beta(1/3, 1/3) and Gamma(1/3, 0), which I cal
2 0.99219787 1437 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-31-Paying survey respondents
Introduction: I agree with Casey Mulligan that participants in government surveys should be paid, and I think it should be part of the code of ethics for commercial pollsters to compensate their respondents also. As Mulligan points out, if a survey is worth doing, it should be worth compensating the participants for their time and effort. P.S. Just to clarify, I do not recommend that Census surveys be made voluntary, I just think that respondents (who can be required to participate) should be paid a small amount. P.P.S. More rant here .
3 0.99162799 471 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-17-Attractive models (and data) wanted for statistical art show.
Introduction: I have agreed to do a local art exhibition in February. An excuse to think about form, colour and style for plotting almost individual observation likelihoods – while invoking the artists privilege of refusing to give interpretations of their own work. In order to make it possibly less dry I’ll try to use intuitive suggestive captions like in this example TheTyranyof13.pdf thereby side stepping the technical discussions like here RadfordNealBlog Suggested models and data sets (or even submissions) would be most appreciated. I likely be sticking to realism i.e. plots that represent ‘statistical reality’ faithfully. K?
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Introduction: People sometimes email asking if a solution set is available for the exercises in ARM. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Many years ago, I wrote up 50 solutions for BDA and it was a lot of work–really, it was like writing a small book in itself. The trouble is that, once I started writing them up, I wanted to do it right, to set a good example. That’s a lot more effort than simply scrawling down some quick answers.
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Introduction: I received the following (unsolicited) email today: Hello Andrew, I’m interested in whether you are accepting guest article submissions for your site Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science? I’m the owner of the recently created nonprofit site OnlineEngineeringDegree.org and am interested in writing / submitting an article for your consideration to be published on your site. Is that something you’d be willing to consider, and if so, what specs in terms of topics or length requirements would you be looking for? Thanks you for your time, and if you have any questions or are interested, I’d appreciate you letting me know. Sincerely, Samantha Rhodes Huh? P.S. My vote for most obnoxious spam remains this one , which does its best to dilute whatever remains of the reputation of Wolfram Research. Or maybe that particular bit of spam was written by a particularly awesome cellular automaton that Wolfram discovered? I guess in the world of big-time software
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