andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1590 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: “Ethics and Statistics” is descriptive but boring. It sounds like the textbook for a course which, unfortunately, nobody will take. “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is too unoriginal. “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal With Statistics” is kind of ok, maybe? “Statistical Dilemmas”: maybe a bit too boring as well. “Knaves and Frauds of Statistics, and Some Guys Who’ve Skated a Bit Close to the Edge”: Hmmm…. Maybe we have to get “statistics” out of the title altogether? “Knaves and Frauds of Data Science”? “Date Science and Data Fraud”? “10 Things You Really Really Really Shouldn’t Do With Numbers”? And, if no better idea comes along, there’s always “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” (Regular readers will know what I’m talking about here; the rest of you can google it.) Or maybe just “The Wegman Report”? It’s hard to come up with a good title. Even John Updike had difficulties in this regard. If any of you can suggest a better title for my eth
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1 It sounds like the textbook for a course which, unfortunately, nobody will take. [sent-2, score-0.257]
2 “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal With Statistics” is kind of ok, maybe? [sent-4, score-0.065]
3 “Statistical Dilemmas”: maybe a bit too boring as well. [sent-5, score-0.348]
4 Maybe we have to get “statistics” out of the title altogether? [sent-7, score-0.152]
5 And, if no better idea comes along, there’s always “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. [sent-11, score-0.075]
6 ” (Regular readers will know what I’m talking about here; the rest of you can google it. [sent-12, score-0.159]
7 Even John Updike had difficulties in this regard. [sent-15, score-0.09]
8 If any of you can suggest a better title for my ethics and statistics book, please let me know in the comments. [sent-16, score-0.957]
9 The starting point for the book will be the series of columns on ethics and statistics that I’ve been running in Chance magazine. [sent-20, score-1.029]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1590 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-26-I need a title for my book on ethics and statistics!!
Introduction: “Ethics and Statistics” is descriptive but boring. It sounds like the textbook for a course which, unfortunately, nobody will take. “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is too unoriginal. “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal With Statistics” is kind of ok, maybe? “Statistical Dilemmas”: maybe a bit too boring as well. “Knaves and Frauds of Statistics, and Some Guys Who’ve Skated a Bit Close to the Edge”: Hmmm…. Maybe we have to get “statistics” out of the title altogether? “Knaves and Frauds of Data Science”? “Date Science and Data Fraud”? “10 Things You Really Really Really Shouldn’t Do With Numbers”? And, if no better idea comes along, there’s always “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” (Regular readers will know what I’m talking about here; the rest of you can google it.) Or maybe just “The Wegman Report”? It’s hard to come up with a good title. Even John Updike had difficulties in this regard. If any of you can suggest a better title for my eth
2 0.16945006 1237 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-30-Statisticians: When We Teach, We Don’t Practice What We Preach
Introduction: My new Chance ethics column (cowritten with Eric Loken). Click through and take a look. It’s a short article and I really like it. And here’s more Chance.
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
Introduction: I’ve recently started a regular column on ethics, appearing every three months in Chance magazine . My first column, “Open Data and Open Methods,” is here , and my second column, “Statisticians: When we teach, we don’t practice what we preach” (coauthored with Eric Loken) will be appearing in the next issue. Statistical ethics is a wide-open topic, and I’d be very interested in everyone’s thoughts, questions, and stories. I’d like to get beyond generic questions such as, Is it right to do a randomized trial when you think the treatment is probably better than the control?, and I’d also like to avoid the really easy questions such as, Is it ethical to copy Wikipedia entries and then sell the resulting publication for $2800 a year? [Note to people who are sick of hearing about this particular story: I'll consider stopping my blogging on it, the moment that the people involved consider apologizing for their behavior.] Please insert your thoughts, questions, stories, links, et
5 0.11945892 2106 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-19-More on “data science” and “statistics”
Introduction: After reading Rachel and Cathy’s book , I wrote that “Statistics is the least important part of data science . . . I think it would be fair to consider statistics as a subset of data science. . . . it’s not the most important part of data science, or even close.” But then I received “Data Science for Business,” by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett, in the mail. I might not have opened the book at all (as I’m hardly in the target audience) but for seeing a blurb by Chris Volinsky, a statistician whom I respect a lot. So I flipped through the book and it indeed looked pretty good. It moves slowly but that’s appropriate for an intro book. But what surprised me, given the book’s title and our recent discussion on the nature of data science, was that the book was 100% statistics! It had some math (for example, definitions of various distance measures), some simple algebra, some conceptual graphs such as ROC curve, some tables and graphs of low-dimensional data summaries—but almost
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19 0.083346479 1835 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-02-7 ways to separate errors from statistics
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same-blog 1 0.97165602 1590 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-26-I need a title for my book on ethics and statistics!!
Introduction: “Ethics and Statistics” is descriptive but boring. It sounds like the textbook for a course which, unfortunately, nobody will take. “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is too unoriginal. “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal With Statistics” is kind of ok, maybe? “Statistical Dilemmas”: maybe a bit too boring as well. “Knaves and Frauds of Statistics, and Some Guys Who’ve Skated a Bit Close to the Edge”: Hmmm…. Maybe we have to get “statistics” out of the title altogether? “Knaves and Frauds of Data Science”? “Date Science and Data Fraud”? “10 Things You Really Really Really Shouldn’t Do With Numbers”? And, if no better idea comes along, there’s always “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” (Regular readers will know what I’m talking about here; the rest of you can google it.) Or maybe just “The Wegman Report”? It’s hard to come up with a good title. Even John Updike had difficulties in this regard. If any of you can suggest a better title for my eth
2 0.79965359 1816 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-21-Exponential increase in the number of stat majors
Introduction: Joe Blitztein sent around the following graph: (The x-axis goes from 2000 to 2012 and the y=axis goes from 0 to 120.) 100 statistics majors (this combines sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but still, that’s a lot more than the 1 or 2 or 3 a year we’re used to seeing). At first I was like, whoa! But then I thought, why not 100 or even 200 or 300 statistics majors? Statistics is important in itself, it’s relatively easy as far as quantitative majors go, it’s applicable to lots of other areas. The real question should be not, What’s been happening that’s made statistics so trendy lately? but rather, What took so long for this to happen, and why isn’t statistics more popular? Both places where I studied as an undergraduate, statistics was just a subset of the math department, and maybe the only reason I ended up in statistics is that I took a probability course one semester because, at 5pm, it fit my schedule.
3 0.76655161 2098 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-12-Plaig!
Introduction: This one is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but . . . wow! Pretty blatant. Maybe someone could endow the Raymond Keene Chair of Cut-and-Paste in the statistics department at George Mason University. Anyway, say what you want about this dude, at least he’s classy. He steals not from Wikipedia but from Gary Kasparov:
4 0.76506686 735 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-28-New app for learning intro statistics
Introduction: Carol Cronin writes: The new Wolfram Statistics Course Assistant App, which was released today for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Optimized for mobile devices, the Wolfram Statistics Course Assistant App helps students understand concepts such as mean, median, mode, standard deviation, probabilities, data points, random integers, random real numbers, and more. To see some examples of how you and your readers can use the app, I’d like to encourage you to check out this post on the Wolfram|Alpha Blog. If anybody out there with an i-phone etc. wants to try this out, please let me know how it works. I’m always looking for statistics-learning tools for students. I’m not really happy with the whole “mean, median, mode” thing (see above), but if the app has good things, then an instructor could pick and choose what to recommend, I assume. P.S. This looks better than the last Wolfram initiative we encountered.
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).
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Introduction: This conference touches nicely on many of the more Biostatistics related topics that have come up on this blog from a pragmatic and perceptive Bayesian perspective. Fourth Annual Bayesian Biostatistics Conference Including the star of that recent Cochrane TV debate who will be the key note speaker. See here Subtle statistical issues to be debated on TV. and perhaps the last comment which is my personal take on that debate. Reruns are still available here http://justin.tv/cochranetv/b/272278382 K?
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Introduction: Kaiser asks: Trying to figure out what are some keywords to research for this problem I’m trying to solve. I need to estimate seasonality but without historical data. What I have are multiple time series of correlated metrics (think department store sales, movie receipts, etc.) but all of them for 52 weeks only. I’m thinking that if these metrics are all subject to some underlying seasonality, I should be able to estimate that without needing prior years data. My reply: Can I blog this and see if the hive mind responds? I’m not an expert on this one. My first thought is to fit an additive model including date effects, with some sort of spline on the date effects along with day-of-week effects, idiosyncratic date effects (July 4th, Christmas, etc.), and possible interactions. Actually, I’d love to fit something like that in Stan, just to see how it turns out. It could be a tangled mess but it could end up working really well!
3 0.92756844 203 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-John McPhee, the Anti-Malcolm
Introduction: This blog is threatening to turn into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Social Science, and Literature Criticism, but I’m just going to go with the conversational flow, so here’s another post about an essayist. I’m not a big fan of Janet Malcolm’s essays — and I don’t mean I don’t like her attitude or her pro-murderer attitude, I mean I don’t like them all that much as writing. They’re fine, I read them, they don’t bore me, but I certainly don’t think she’s “our” best essayist. But that’s not a debate I want to have right now, and if I did I’m quite sure most of you wouldn’t want to read it anyway. So instead, I’ll just say something about John McPhee. As all right-thinking people agree, in McPhee’s long career he has written two kinds of books: good, short books, and bad, long books. (He has also written many New Yorker essays, and perhaps other essays for other magazines too; most of these are good, although I haven’t seen any really good recent work from him, and so
same-blog 4 0.92225659 1590 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-26-I need a title for my book on ethics and statistics!!
Introduction: “Ethics and Statistics” is descriptive but boring. It sounds like the textbook for a course which, unfortunately, nobody will take. “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is too unoriginal. “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal With Statistics” is kind of ok, maybe? “Statistical Dilemmas”: maybe a bit too boring as well. “Knaves and Frauds of Statistics, and Some Guys Who’ve Skated a Bit Close to the Edge”: Hmmm…. Maybe we have to get “statistics” out of the title altogether? “Knaves and Frauds of Data Science”? “Date Science and Data Fraud”? “10 Things You Really Really Really Shouldn’t Do With Numbers”? And, if no better idea comes along, there’s always “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad.” (Regular readers will know what I’m talking about here; the rest of you can google it.) Or maybe just “The Wegman Report”? It’s hard to come up with a good title. Even John Updike had difficulties in this regard. If any of you can suggest a better title for my eth
Introduction: Joe Blitzstein and Xiao-Li Meng write : An e ffectively designed examination process goes far beyond revealing students’ knowledge or skills. It also serves as a great teaching and learning tool, incentivizing the students to think more deeply and to connect the dots at a higher level. This extends throughout the entire process: pre-exam preparation, the exam itself, and the post-exam period (the aftermath or, more appropriately, afterstat of the exam). As in the publication process, the first submission is essential but still just one piece in the dialogue. Viewing the entire exam process as an extended dialogue between students and faculty, we discuss ideas for making this dialogue induce more inspiration than perspiration, and thereby making it a memorable deep-learning triumph rather than a wish-to-forget test-taking trauma. We illustrate such a dialogue through a recently introduced course in the Harvard Statistics Department, Stat 399: Problem Solving in Statistics, and tw
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