andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1601 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This story reminded me of when I was planning my short course for Procter & Gamble: The question in my mind was: should I take the consulting fee they offered or should I try to get a voucher for a lifetime supply of P&G; products (assuming, of course, that such a voucher exists)? Wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing, to go into the supermarket, fill up the cart with Tide and Pampers, then flash the P&G; card? P.S. On an unrelated note, this is just sad. Uncle Woody is spinning.
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1 This story reminded me of when I was planning my short course for Procter & Gamble: The question in my mind was: should I take the consulting fee they offered or should I try to get a voucher for a lifetime supply of P&G; products (assuming, of course, that such a voucher exists)? [sent-1, score-2.713]
2 Wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing, to go into the supermarket, fill up the cart with Tide and Pampers, then flash the P&G; card? [sent-2, score-0.826]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 1601 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-A lifetime supply of . . .
Introduction: This story reminded me of when I was planning my short course for Procter & Gamble: The question in my mind was: should I take the consulting fee they offered or should I try to get a voucher for a lifetime supply of P&G; products (assuming, of course, that such a voucher exists)? Wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing, to go into the supermarket, fill up the cart with Tide and Pampers, then flash the P&G; card? P.S. On an unrelated note, this is just sad. Uncle Woody is spinning.
2 0.1101675 1597 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-What is expected of a consultant
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. On the other side is Steven Levitt, who Hanson quotes as saying: My own experience has been that even though I know nothing about an industry, if you give me a week, and you get a bunch of really smart people to explain the industry to me, and to tell me what they do, a lot of times what I’ve learned in economics, what I’ve learned in other places can actually be really helpful in changing the way that they see the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the d
3 0.088389181 504 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-05-For those of you in the U.K., also an amusing paradox involving the infamous hookah story
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
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Introduction: Stan will make a total lifetime profit of $0, so we can’t be sued !
5 0.069015019 1596 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-More consulting experiences, this time in computational linguistics
Introduction: Bob wrote this long comment that I think is worth posting: I [Bob] have done a fair bit of consulting for my small natural language processing company over the past ten years. Like statistics, natural language processing is something may companies think they want, but have no idea how to do themselves. We almost always handed out “free” consulting. Usually on the phone to people who called us out of the blue. Our blog and tutorials Google ranking was pretty much our only approach to marketing other than occassionally going to business-oriented conferences. Our goal was to sell software licenses (because consulting doesn’t scale nor does it provide continuing royalty income), but since so few people knew how to use toolkits like ours, we had to help them along the way. We even provided “free” consulting with our startup license package. We were brutally honest with customers, both about our goals and their goals. Their goals were often incompatible with ours (use company X’
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Introduction: This story reminded me of when I was planning my short course for Procter & Gamble: The question in my mind was: should I take the consulting fee they offered or should I try to get a voucher for a lifetime supply of P&G; products (assuming, of course, that such a voucher exists)? Wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing, to go into the supermarket, fill up the cart with Tide and Pampers, then flash the P&G; card? P.S. On an unrelated note, this is just sad. Uncle Woody is spinning.
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Introduction: A colleague asked if I had any material for a course in sample surveys. And indeed I do. See here . It’s all the slides for a 14-week course, also the syllabus (“surveyscourse.pdf”), the final exam (“final2012.pdf”) and various misc files. Also more discussion of final exam questions here (keep scrolling thru the “previous entries” until you get to Question 1). Enjoy! This is in no way a self-contained teach-it-yourself course, but I do think it could be helpful for anyone who is trying to teach a class on this material.
3 0.64856023 515 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-13-The Road to a B
Introduction: A student in my intro class came by the other day with a lot of questions. It soon became clear that he was confused about a lot of things, going back several weeks in the course. What this means is that we did not do a good job of monitoring his performance earlier during the semester. But the question now is: what do do next? I’ll sign the drop form any time during the semester, but he didn’t want to drop the class (the usual scheduling issues). And he doesn’t want to get a C or a D. He’s in big trouble and at this point is basically rolling the dice that he’ll do well enough on the final to eke out a B in the course. (Yes, he goes to section meetings and office hours, and he even tried hiring a tutor. But it’s tough–if you’ve already been going to class and still don’t know what’s going on, it’s not so easy to pull yourself out of the hole, even if you have a big pile of practice problems ahead of you.) What we really need for this student, and others like him, is a road
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Introduction: This recent story of a wacky psychology professor reminds me of this old story of a wacky psychology professor. This story of a wacky philosophy professor reminds me of a course I almost took at MIT. I was looking through the course catalog one day and saw that Thomas Kuhn was teaching a class in the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn–wow! So I enrolled in the class. I only sat through one session before dropping it, though. Kuhn just stood up there and mumbled. At the time, this annoyed me a little. In retrospect, though, it made more sense. I’m sure he felt he had better things to do with his life than teach classes. And MIT was paying him whether or not he did a good job teaching, so it’s not like he was breaking his contract or anything. (Given the range of instructors we had at MIT, it was always a good idea to make use of the shopping period at the beginning of the semester. I had some amazing classes but only one or two really bad ones. Mostly I dropped the b
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Introduction: People in Chicago are nice. The conductor on the train came by and I asked if I could buy a ticket right there. He said yes, $2.50. While I was getting the money he asked if the ticket machine at the station had been broken. I said, I don’t know, I saw the train and ran up the stairs to catch it. He said, that’s not what you’re supposed to say. So I said, that’s right, the machine was broken. It’s just like on that radio show where Peter Sagal hems and haws to clue the contestant in that his guess is wrong so he can try again.
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same-blog 1 0.9129132 1601 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-A lifetime supply of . . .
Introduction: This story reminded me of when I was planning my short course for Procter & Gamble: The question in my mind was: should I take the consulting fee they offered or should I try to get a voucher for a lifetime supply of P&G; products (assuming, of course, that such a voucher exists)? Wouldn’t that just be the coolest thing, to go into the supermarket, fill up the cart with Tide and Pampers, then flash the P&G; card? P.S. On an unrelated note, this is just sad. Uncle Woody is spinning.
Introduction: Rajiv Sethi writes the above in a discussion of a misunderstanding of the economics of Keynes. The discussion is interesting. According to Sethi, Keynes wrote that, in a depression, nominal wages might be sticky but in any case a decline in wages would not do the trick to increase hiring. But many modern economics writers have missed this. For example, Gary Becker writes, “Keynes and many earlier economists emphasized that unemployment rises during recessions because nominal wage rates tend to be inflexible in the downward direction. . . . A fall in price stimulates demand and reduces supply until they are brought back to rough equality.” Whether Becker is empirically correct is another story, but in any case he is misinterpreting Keynes. But the actual reason I’m posting here is in reaction to Sethi’s remark quoted in the title above, in which he endorses a 1975 paper by James Tobin on wages and employment but remarks that Tobin’s paper did not include the individual-level de
3 0.56600404 5 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-27-Ethical and data-integrity problems in a study of mortality in Iraq
Introduction: Michael Spagat notifies me that his article criticizing the 2006 study of Burnham, Lafta, Doocy and Roberts has just been published . The Burnham et al. paper (also called, to my irritation (see the last item here ), “the Lancet survey”) used a cluster sample to estimate the number of deaths in Iraq in the three years following the 2003 invasion. In his newly-published paper, Spagat writes: [The Spagat article] presents some evidence suggesting ethical violations to the survey’s respondents including endangerment, privacy breaches and violations in obtaining informed consent. Breaches of minimal disclosure standards examined include non-disclosure of the survey’s questionnaire, data-entry form, data matching anonymised interviewer identifications with households and sample design. The paper also presents some evidence relating to data fabrication and falsification, which falls into nine broad categories. This evidence suggests that this survey cannot be considered a reliable or
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