andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1480 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by historian Robert Proctor. My first stop upon receiving the book was the index, in particular the entry for Rubin, Donald B. I followed the reference to pages 440-442 and found the description of Don’s activities to be accurate, neither diminished nor overstated, to the best of my knowledge. Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. Here’s a partial list . Just including the people I know or have heard of: Herbert Solomon, Stanford Richard Tweedie, Bond U Arnold Zellner, U of Chicago Paul Switzer, S
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. [sent-4, score-0.533]
2 Of all these people, the names that surprise me the most are the public health researchers such as Fleiss. [sent-7, score-0.129]
3 Saiger from Columbia University received [Council for Tobacco Research] Special Project funds “to seek to reduce the correlation of smoking and diseases by introduction of additional variables”; he also was paid $10,873 in 1966 to testify before Congress, denying the cigarette-cancer link. [sent-10, score-0.342]
4 ” This does not fit well with cigarette lobbyists’ claims that everybody knew all along that cigarettes are dangerous, people used to call them “cancer sticks” etc etc. [sent-18, score-0.698]
5 As Proctor demonstrates, surveys over the decades have found a lot of uncertainty about the health risks of cigarettes—and the cigarette companies were doing their best to prolong this uncertainty. [sent-19, score-0.721]
6 One thing I learned from Proctor’s book was the distinction between tobacco and cigarettes . [sent-20, score-0.522]
7 Two biggies: mass production and how the tobacco is processed. [sent-23, score-0.359]
8 Mass production means that higher doses are more convenient and affordable (not such a good thing if you’re addicted to a product that causes cancer). [sent-24, score-0.212]
9 The part I didn’t know about, before reading this book, is that the physical/chemical treatment (in particular, something called “flue-curing”) makes cigarettes much less irritating to the throat, so that a smoker can more easily inhale and get those carcinogens directly into the lungs. [sent-25, score-0.354]
10 Thus, a world in which people grew tobacco in their backyards and rolled their own cigars would cut out lots and lots of smoking morbidity and mortality. [sent-26, score-0.571]
11 One thing I didn’t quite catch, though—I’ve never puffed on a cigarette myself—is my the nicotine patch isn’t more popular. [sent-27, score-0.522]
12 If people want to quit, why not give the patch a try? [sent-28, score-0.132]
13 ” According to surveys cited by Proctor, most smokers (in the U. [sent-30, score-0.129]
14 I’m assuming that most cigarette companies don’t want this. [sent-33, score-0.546]
15 Ludmerer says he agreed to work for the industry after seeing the poor quality of historical testimony introduced by the plaintiffs, but what is remarkable is how truncated his own investigations have been . [sent-41, score-0.181]
16 I wonder if he still has no opinion on whether “cigarette smoking contributes to the development of lung cancer in human beings”? [sent-46, score-0.474]
17 In the first part of the twentieth century, cigarette companies conducted research into smoking and cancer, with the hope of developing a safe cigarette. [sent-57, score-0.837]
18 It eventually became clear that the safe cigarette wasn’t going to happen. [sent-59, score-0.493]
19 Then the story was that everyone had known forever that smoking caused cancer, and that cigarette manufacturers were performing the useful service of supplying a consumer good that many people wanted. [sent-61, score-0.716]
20 It’s interesting to see that, at least in public, cigarette executives taking a much more direct position that they did not want to be in the position of giving people cancer: “If our product is harmful . [sent-62, score-0.539]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('cigarette', 0.436), ('proctor', 0.383), ('tobacco', 0.243), ('smoking', 0.234), ('cigarettes', 0.216), ('ludmerer', 0.21), ('cancer', 0.192), ('stanford', 0.129), ('testimony', 0.121), ('companies', 0.11), ('olkin', 0.096), ('patch', 0.086), ('smokers', 0.081), ('health', 0.079), ('rubin', 0.076), ('lie', 0.065), ('book', 0.063), ('production', 0.062), ('dangerous', 0.061), ('received', 0.061), ('industry', 0.06), ('joseph', 0.059), ('bet', 0.058), ('safe', 0.057), ('product', 0.057), ('washington', 0.054), ('mass', 0.054), ('names', 0.05), ('george', 0.048), ('surveys', 0.048), ('contributes', 0.048), ('lonely', 0.048), ('darrell', 0.048), ('morbidity', 0.048), ('addicted', 0.048), ('biggies', 0.048), ('ingram', 0.048), ('inhale', 0.048), ('prolong', 0.048), ('throat', 0.048), ('picture', 0.047), ('paid', 0.047), ('stop', 0.047), ('people', 0.046), ('carcinogens', 0.045), ('liar', 0.045), ('zellner', 0.045), ('smoker', 0.045), ('affordable', 0.045), ('huff', 0.045)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000008 1480 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-02-“If our product is harmful . . . we’ll stop making it.”
Introduction: After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by historian Robert Proctor. My first stop upon receiving the book was the index, in particular the entry for Rubin, Donald B. I followed the reference to pages 440-442 and found the description of Don’s activities to be accurate, neither diminished nor overstated, to the best of my knowledge. Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. Here’s a partial list . Just including the people I know or have heard of: Herbert Solomon, Stanford Richard Tweedie, Bond U Arnold Zellner, U of Chicago Paul Switzer, S
2 0.32375607 1533 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-14-If x is correlated with y, then y is correlated with x
Introduction: Michael Collins ( here’s a link but I don’t know the original source) picked up on my article about statistics and the cigarette companies, which mentioned a consulting job of famed Stanford statistician Ingram Olkin, and noticed that Olkin was recently in the news as a coauthor of a report on organic food: A widely publicized study claiming that there is no demonstrated difference in nutritional value between organically and conventionally grown foods just appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Broad mainstream media coverage produced headlines like Stanford Scientists Cast Doubt on Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce. The media failed to mention one point that may be of major interest. . . . The article co-author with recognized expertise in meta-analysis, Ingram Olkin, applied for a grant from Council of Tobacco Research (CTR) in 1976. . . . Olkin applied to the CTR to conduct a project on the statistical methods used in the Framingham Heart Study, the landmark projec
Introduction: Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”: Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops–which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
4 0.16540845 21 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Environmentally induced cancer “grossly underestimated”? Doubtful.
Introduction: The (U.S.) “President’s Cancer Panel” has released its 2008-2009 annual report, which includes a cover letter that says “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.” The report itself discusses exposures to various types of industrial chemicals, some of which are known carcinogens, in some detail, but gives nearly no data or analysis to suggest that these exposures are contributing to significant numbers of cancers. In fact, there is pretty good evidence that they are not. The plot above shows age-adjusted cancer mortality for men, by cancer type, in the U.S. The plot below shows the same for women. In both cases, the cancers with the highest mortality rates are shown, but not all cancers (e.g. brain cancer is not shown). For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how trustworthy the rates are from the 1930s — it seems possible that reporting, autopsies, or both, were less careful during the Great Depression — so I suggest focusing on the r
Introduction: I’ll be on Radio 4 at 8.40am, on the BBC show “Today,” talking about The Honest Rainmaker . I have no idea how the interview went (it was about 5 minutes), but I’m kicking myself because I was planning to tell the hookah story, but I forgot. Here it is: I was at a panel for the National Institutes of Health evaluating grants. One of the proposals had to do with the study of the effect of water-pipe smoking, the hookah. There was a discussion around the table. The NIH is a United States government organisation; not many people in the US really smoke hookahs; so should we fund it? Someone said, ‘Well actually it’s becoming more popular among the young.’ And if younger people smoke it, they have a longer lifetime exposure, and apparently there is some evidence that the dose you get of carcinogens from hookah smoking might be 20 times the dose of smoking a cigarette. I don’t know the details of the math, but it was a lot. So even if not many people do it, if you multiply the risk, yo
7 0.10803103 1766 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-16-“Nightshifts Linked to Increased Risk for Ovarian Cancer”
8 0.095741324 1293 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-01-Huff the Magic Dragon
9 0.09112636 1432 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-27-“Get off my lawn”-blogging
10 0.091006227 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
11 0.085684776 1288 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-29-Clueless Americans think they’ll never get sick
12 0.084811434 205 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-13-Arnold Zellner
13 0.079947151 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
14 0.077351213 411 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-13-Ethical concerns in medical trials
16 0.073345564 1025 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-24-Always check your evidence
17 0.072926551 1848 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-09-A tale of two discussion papers
18 0.072731912 132 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-07-Note to “Cigarettes”
19 0.070483953 219 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-20-Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts.
20 0.069046572 1484 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-05-Two exciting movie ideas: “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen”
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.159), (1, -0.082), (2, -0.02), (3, 0.003), (4, -0.005), (5, 0.037), (6, 0.033), (7, 0.007), (8, 0.012), (9, 0.031), (10, -0.043), (11, -0.048), (12, 0.03), (13, 0.027), (14, 0.01), (15, 0.03), (16, 0.038), (17, -0.013), (18, 0.046), (19, -0.024), (20, -0.014), (21, 0.015), (22, 0.003), (23, -0.01), (24, 0.011), (25, 0.012), (26, -0.045), (27, -0.011), (28, -0.005), (29, 0.024), (30, -0.06), (31, 0.052), (32, 0.028), (33, 0.048), (34, 0.005), (35, 0.004), (36, 0.037), (37, -0.007), (38, 0.008), (39, 0.02), (40, 0.0), (41, -0.029), (42, 0.027), (43, -0.011), (44, 0.06), (45, -0.016), (46, 0.003), (47, 0.041), (48, -0.023), (49, 0.031)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95006549 1480 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-02-“If our product is harmful . . . we’ll stop making it.”
Introduction: After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by historian Robert Proctor. My first stop upon receiving the book was the index, in particular the entry for Rubin, Donald B. I followed the reference to pages 440-442 and found the description of Don’s activities to be accurate, neither diminished nor overstated, to the best of my knowledge. Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. Here’s a partial list . Just including the people I know or have heard of: Herbert Solomon, Stanford Richard Tweedie, Bond U Arnold Zellner, U of Chicago Paul Switzer, S
2 0.80342662 1533 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-14-If x is correlated with y, then y is correlated with x
Introduction: Michael Collins ( here’s a link but I don’t know the original source) picked up on my article about statistics and the cigarette companies, which mentioned a consulting job of famed Stanford statistician Ingram Olkin, and noticed that Olkin was recently in the news as a coauthor of a report on organic food: A widely publicized study claiming that there is no demonstrated difference in nutritional value between organically and conventionally grown foods just appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Broad mainstream media coverage produced headlines like Stanford Scientists Cast Doubt on Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce. The media failed to mention one point that may be of major interest. . . . The article co-author with recognized expertise in meta-analysis, Ingram Olkin, applied for a grant from Council of Tobacco Research (CTR) in 1976. . . . Olkin applied to the CTR to conduct a project on the statistical methods used in the Framingham Heart Study, the landmark projec
Introduction: Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”: Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops–which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
4 0.77378917 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
Introduction: A blog commenter pointed me to this news article on Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology professor here: He was the subject last year of a grueling investigation into a quarter-million dollars of spending that Columbia auditors said was insufficiently documented, misappropriated or outright fabricated. According to internal documents from that investigation, which were obtained by The New York Times, the auditors said that Professor Venkatesh directed $52,328 to someone without any “documented evidence of work performed.” He listed a dinner for 25 people, relating to research on professional baseball players; auditors found that only 8 people had attended . . . All told, auditors questioned expenses amounting to $241,364.83. . . . Professor Venkatesh said in a brief phone conversation in October that he had repaid $13,000. . . . “I have never been accused of fraud or embezzlement.” One thing that frustrates me with newspaper articles is when they don’t follow up. Venkatesh was
5 0.75840867 411 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-13-Ethical concerns in medical trials
Introduction: I just read this article on the treatment of medical volunteers, written by doctor and bioethicist Carl Ellliott. As a statistician who has done a small amount of consulting for pharmaceutical companies, I have a slightly different perspective. As a doctor, Elliott focuses on individual patients, whereas, as a statistician, I’ve been trained to focus on the goal of accurately estimate treatment effects. I’ll go through Elliott’s article and give my reactions. Elliott: In Miami, investigative reporters for Bloomberg Markets magazine discovered that a contract research organisation called SFBC International was testing drugs on undocumented immigrants in a rundown motel; since that report, the motel has been demolished for fire and safety violations. . . . SFBC had recently been named one of the best small businesses in America by Forbes magazine. The Holiday Inn testing facility was the largest in North America, and had been operating for nearly ten years before inspecto
6 0.75738776 1741 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-27-Thin scientists say it’s unhealthy to be fat
7 0.74431074 1766 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-16-“Nightshifts Linked to Increased Risk for Ovarian Cancer”
8 0.73505211 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
9 0.73396301 21 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Environmentally induced cancer “grossly underestimated”? Doubtful.
10 0.72497034 1906 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-19-“Behind a cancer-treatment firm’s rosy survival claims”
11 0.72308815 284 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Continuing efforts to justify false “death panels” claim
12 0.72020876 827 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-28-Amusing case of self-defeating science writing
13 0.70514846 1707 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-05-Glenn Hubbard and I were on opposite sides of a court case and I didn’t even know it!
14 0.70453435 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
16 0.69717002 1058 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-14-Higgs bozos: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spinning in their graves
17 0.68924272 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
18 0.68886709 148 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-15-“Gender Bias Still Exists in Modern Children’s Literature, Say Centre Researchers”
20 0.68720543 526 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-19-“If it saves the life of a single child…” and other nonsense
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.01), (9, 0.017), (16, 0.08), (21, 0.039), (22, 0.027), (24, 0.101), (29, 0.014), (42, 0.012), (47, 0.01), (63, 0.226), (81, 0.01), (86, 0.028), (93, 0.016), (95, 0.013), (96, 0.012), (99, 0.23)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.9566133 739 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-31-When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
Introduction: That cute picture is of toddler FDR in a dress, from 1884. Jeanne Maglaty writes : A Ladies’ Home Journal article [or maybe from a different source, according to a commenter] in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago. Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s . . . When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, w
2 0.9551968 313 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-03-A question for psychometricians
Introduction: Don Coffin writes: A colleague of mine and I are doing a presentation for new faculty on a number of topics related to teaching. Our charge is to identify interesting issues and to find research-based information for them about how to approach things. So, what I wondered is, do you know of any published research dealing with the sort of issues about structuring a course and final exam in the ways you talk about in this blog post ? Some poking around in the usual places hasn’t turned anything up yet. I don’t really know the psychometrics literature but I imagine that some good stuff has been written on principles of test design. There are probably some good papers from back in the 1920s. Can anyone supply some references?
3 0.93902707 782 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-29-Putting together multinomial discrete regressions by combining simple logits
Introduction: When predicting 0/1 data we can use logit (or probit or robit or some other robust model such as invlogit (0.01 + 0.98*X*beta)). Logit is simple enough and we can use bayesglm to regularize and avoid the problem of separation. What if there are more than 2 categories? If they’re ordered (1, 2, 3, etc), we can do ordered logit (and use bayespolr() to avoid separation). If the categories are unordered (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry), there are unordered multinomial logit and probit models out there. But it’s not so easy to fit these multinomial model in a multilevel setting (with coefficients that vary by group), especially if the computation is embedded in an iterative routine such as mi where you have real time constraints at each step. So this got me wondering whether we could kluge it with logits. Here’s the basic idea (in the ordered and unordered forms): - If you have a variable that goes 1, 2, 3, etc., set up a series of logits: 1 vs. 2,3,…; 2 vs. 3,…; and so forth
4 0.9386059 628 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-25-100-year floods
Introduction: According to the National Weather Service : What is a 100 year flood? A 100 year flood is an event that statistically has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. A 500 year flood has a .2% chance of occurring and a 1000 year flood has a .1% chance of occurring. The accompanying map shows a part of Tennessee that in May 2010 had 1000-year levels of flooding. At first, it seems hard to believe that a 1000-year flood would have just happened to occur last year. But then, this is just a 1000-year flood for that particular place. I don’t really have a sense of the statistics of these events. How many 100-year, 500-year, and 1000-year flood events have been recorded by the Weather Service, and when have they occurred?
5 0.93073463 1621 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-13-Puzzles of criminal justice
Introduction: Four recent news stories about crime and punishment made me realize, yet again, how little I understand all this. 1. “HSBC to Pay $1.92 Billion to Settle Charges of Money Laundering” : State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system. Instead, HSBC announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to a record $1.92 billion settlement with authorities. . . . I don’t understand this idea of punishing the institution. I have the same problem when the NCAA punishes a college football program. These are individual people breaking the law (or the rules), right? So why not punish them directly? Giving 40 lashes to a bunch of HSBC executives and garnisheeing their salaries for life, say, that wouldn’t destabilize the global financial system would it? From the article: “A money-laundering indictment, or a guilt
7 0.91719198 1078 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-22-Tables as graphs: The Ramanujan principle
8 0.91653442 568 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-11-Calibration in chess
9 0.91421413 684 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-28-Hierarchical ordered logit or probit
same-blog 10 0.91217601 1480 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-02-“If our product is harmful . . . we’ll stop making it.”
11 0.91064441 1484 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-05-Two exciting movie ideas: “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen”
12 0.90884471 745 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-04-High-level intellectual discussions in the Columbia statistics department
13 0.9041217 102 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-21-Why modern art is all in the mind
14 0.90274262 293 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-23-Lowess is great
15 0.89585871 126 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-03-Graphical presentation of risk ratios
16 0.86514908 286 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-20-Are the Democrats avoiding a national campaign?
17 0.85876775 2103 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-16-Objects of the class “Objects of the class”
18 0.8576504 1316 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-12-black and Black, white and White
19 0.85481054 1201 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-07-Inference = data + model
20 0.85080594 544 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-29-Splitting the data