andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1646 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: New Year’s Day is an excellent time to look back at changes, not just in the past year, but in the past half-century. Mark Palko has an interesting post on the pace of changes in everyday life. We’ve been hearing a lot in the past few decades about how things are changing faster and faster. But, as Palko points out, the difference between life in 1962 and life today does not seem so different, at least for many people in the United States. Sure, there are some big changes: nonwhites get more respect, people mostly live longer, many cancers can be cured, fewer people are really really poor but it’s harder to hold down a job, cars are more reliable, you can get fresh fish in the suburbs, containers are lighter and stronger, vacations in the Caribbean instead of the Catskills, people have a lot more stuff and a lot more place to put it, etc etc etc. But life in the 1950s or 1960s just doesn’t seem so different from how we live today. In contrast, Palko writes, “You can also get
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1 New Year’s Day is an excellent time to look back at changes, not just in the past year, but in the past half-century. [sent-1, score-0.24]
2 Mark Palko has an interesting post on the pace of changes in everyday life. [sent-2, score-0.186]
3 We’ve been hearing a lot in the past few decades about how things are changing faster and faster. [sent-3, score-0.224]
4 But, as Palko points out, the difference between life in 1962 and life today does not seem so different, at least for many people in the United States. [sent-4, score-0.4]
5 But life in the 1950s or 1960s just doesn’t seem so different from how we live today. [sent-6, score-0.278]
6 In contrast, Palko writes, “You can also get some interesting insights looking at the way pop culture portrayed these changes”: In the middle of the century, particularly in the Forties, there was a great fascination with the Gay Nineties. [sent-7, score-0.217]
7 It was a period in living memory and yet in many ways it seemed incredibly distant, socially, politically, economically, artistically and most of all, technologically. [sent-8, score-0.084]
8 In 1945, much, if not most day-to-day life depended on devices and media that were either relatively new in 1890 or were yet to be invented. [sent-9, score-0.374]
9 Even relatively old tech like newspapers were radically different, employing advances in printing and photography and filled with Twentieth Century innovations like comic strips. [sent-10, score-0.524]
10 The world of these films was pleasantly alien, separated from the viewers by cataclysmic changes. [sent-12, score-0.289]
11 We have seen an uptick in interest in the world of fifty years ago but it’s much smaller than the mid-Twentieth Century fascination with the Nineties and, more importantly, shows like Mad Men, Pan Am and the Playboy Club focused almost entirely on social mores. [sent-14, score-0.306]
12 None of them had the sense of travelling to an alien place that you often get from Gay Nineties stories. [sent-15, score-0.242]
13 Indeed, when I’ve watched Mad Men, one thing that’s struck me is that I can see where so much of our increased wealth in the past 50 years has gone: we have faster cars and more planes, we travel farther, we have lots more furniture and appliances and bigger houses and bigger apartments. [sent-16, score-0.683]
14 But, as Palko says, life as of 1965 was not so different from now. [sent-18, score-0.2]
15 The changes from 1900 to 1950 do seem to be bigger. [sent-19, score-0.186]
16 Palko cites Paul Krugman who writes about the unpredictability of economic progress, but I wonder if that all misses the point, a bit. [sent-20, score-0.177]
17 For white middle-class Americans, material life was already OK in 1965. [sent-21, score-0.2]
18 Sure, improvement is fine—I certainly won’t complain about the expensive medical technology that fixed my broken wrist and cleared up my heartbeat, nor will I complain about all the advances that have led to Stan. [sent-22, score-0.535]
19 (And, yes, improvements for ethnic minorities are important, but of course most of the economic growth went to whites. [sent-23, score-0.093]
20 ) Overall, there has a limit on what economic progress can do to change our lives. [sent-24, score-0.181]
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Introduction: New Year’s Day is an excellent time to look back at changes, not just in the past year, but in the past half-century. Mark Palko has an interesting post on the pace of changes in everyday life. We’ve been hearing a lot in the past few decades about how things are changing faster and faster. But, as Palko points out, the difference between life in 1962 and life today does not seem so different, at least for many people in the United States. Sure, there are some big changes: nonwhites get more respect, people mostly live longer, many cancers can be cured, fewer people are really really poor but it’s harder to hold down a job, cars are more reliable, you can get fresh fish in the suburbs, containers are lighter and stronger, vacations in the Caribbean instead of the Catskills, people have a lot more stuff and a lot more place to put it, etc etc etc. But life in the 1950s or 1960s just doesn’t seem so different from how we live today. In contrast, Palko writes, “You can also get
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Introduction: Fun stories here (from Kliph Nesteroff, link from Mark Palko).
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Introduction: This post is by Phil, and I’m writing about the slow pace of change in 21st-century America. [Note added later: at the time that I wrote this, I was unaware that a year-and-a-half ago Andrew had written a similar post on the theme. I suspect I, and perhaps most of this blog's readers, missed it because he posted it on New Year's Day]. [Note added later still: evidently I'm wrong and I did see Andrew's post, because I left a comment on it: " If you want to pick a 50-year period, with nice round numbers for the start and the end, my vote for the biggest lifestyle change for Americans is 1900-1950. Radio, telephone, television, indoor plumbing, refrigerators, home air conditioning, automobiles, airplanes… in the past 50 years all of those things have gotten better than they used to be (although I’m not sure there have been any major advances in indoor plumbing), but the change is small compared with having vs not having." And I was wrong about indoor plumbing, which most people di
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Introduction: Despite the title, this post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics. It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of a graph that seems to show a bimodal income distribution but only by combining cells in the tail: McArdle makes a good point: of course, if you spread the histogram along a uniform scale (or, for that matter, a log scale), you don’t see that bump at the high end. McArdle reproduces some Census charts showing income stability over the past few decades: Before I had a chance to chance to write about this, I noticed that Mark Palko did the job for me. Palko writes: To the extent that statistics includes data visualization, this is definitely bad statistics. When trying to depict trends and relationships, you generally want to get as much of the pertinent information as possible into the same grap
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Introduction: Mark Palko writes : I can understand the appeal of the cutting edge. The new stuff is sexier. It gets people’s attention. The trouble is, those cutting edge studies often collapse under scrutiny. Some can’t be replicated. Others prove to be not that important. Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy. It doesn’t drive traffic. It’s harder to fit into a paragraph. In a way, though, it’s more interesting because it has a high likelihood of being true and fills in the gaps in big, important questions. The interaction between the ideas is usually the interesting part. In this particular example, Palko is telling the story of a journalist who reports a finding as new when it is essentially a replication of decades-old work. Palko’s point is not that there’s anything wrong with replication but rather that the journalist seems to feel that it is necessary to report the idea as new and cutting-edge, even if it falls within a long tradition. (Also, Palko is not claiming that this
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Introduction: New Year’s Day is an excellent time to look back at changes, not just in the past year, but in the past half-century. Mark Palko has an interesting post on the pace of changes in everyday life. We’ve been hearing a lot in the past few decades about how things are changing faster and faster. But, as Palko points out, the difference between life in 1962 and life today does not seem so different, at least for many people in the United States. Sure, there are some big changes: nonwhites get more respect, people mostly live longer, many cancers can be cured, fewer people are really really poor but it’s harder to hold down a job, cars are more reliable, you can get fresh fish in the suburbs, containers are lighter and stronger, vacations in the Caribbean instead of the Catskills, people have a lot more stuff and a lot more place to put it, etc etc etc. But life in the 1950s or 1960s just doesn’t seem so different from how we live today. In contrast, Palko writes, “You can also get
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Introduction: In a post entitled, “A holiday message from the creative class to Richard Florida — screw you,” Mark Palko argues that Florida’s famous theories about the rise of the creative class have not held up over time: Florida paints a bright picture of these people and their future, with rapidly increasing numbers, influence and wealth. He goes so far as to say “Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t.” . . . But, Palko argues, Except for a few special cases, this may be the worst time to make a living in the arts since the emergence of modern newspapers and general interest magazines and other mass media a hundred and twenty years ago . . . Though we now have tools that make creating and disseminating art easier than ever, no one has come up with a viable business model that supports creation in today’s economy. . . . OK, fine, so individual creatives aren’t doing so well? But what about the larger urban economies? P
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Introduction: Mark Palko writes : Salmon is dismissive of the claim that there are fifty million over-the-air television viewers: The 50 million number, by the way, should not be considered particularly reliable: it’s Aereo’s guess as to the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. (Maybe they have a hut somewhere with an old rabbit-ear TV in it.) And he strongly suggests the number is not only smaller but shrinking. By comparison, here’s a story from the broadcasting news site TV News Check from June of last year (if anyone has more recent numbers please let me know): According to new research by GfK Media, the number of Americans now relying solely on over-the-air (OTA) television reception increased to almost 54 million, up from 46 million just a year ago. The recently completed survey also found that the demographics of broadcast-only households skew towards younger adults, minorities and lower-income families. As Palko says,
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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
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Introduction: Hamdan Azhar writes: I came across this graphic of vaccine-attributed decreases in mortality and was curious if you found it as unattractive and unintuitive as I did. Hope all is well with you! My reply: All’s well with me. And yes, that’s one horrible graph. It has all the problems with a bad infographic with none of the virtues. Compared to this monstrosity, the typical USA Today graph is a stunning, beautiful masterpiece. I don’t think I want to soil this webpage with the image. In fact, I don’t even want to link to it.
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Introduction: Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. Our responses to the debate were posted on our website last week. “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. We also argued that deaths from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition had declined. (The exec. summary is here .) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries w
3 0.95886451 1820 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-23-Foundation for Open Access Statistics
Introduction: Now here’s a foundation I (Bob) can get behind: Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS) Their mission is to “promote free software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics.” To me, that’s like supporting motherhood and apple pie ! FOAS spun out of and is partially designed to support the Journal of Statistical Software (aka JSS , aka JStatSoft ). I adore JSS because it (a) is open access, (b) publishes systems papers on statistical software, (c) has fast reviewing turnaround times, and (d) is free for authors and readers. One of the next items on my to-do list is to write up the Stan modeling language and submit it to JSS . As a not-for-profit with no visible source of income, they are quite sensibly asking for donations (don’t complain — it beats $3K author fees or not being able to read papers).
Introduction: Greg Kaplan writes: I noticed that you have blogged a little about interstate migration trends in the US, and thought that you might be interested in a new working paper of mine (joint with Sam Schulhofer-Wohl from the Minneapolis Fed) which I have attached. Briefly, we show that much of the recent reported drop in interstate migration is a statistical artifact: The Census Bureau made an undocumented change in its imputation procedures for missing data in 2006, and this change significantly reduced the number of imputed interstate moves. The change in imputation procedures — not any actual change in migration behavior — explains 90 percent of the reported decrease in interstate migration between the 2005 and 2006 Current Population Surveys, and 42 percent of the decrease between 2000 and 2010. I haven’t had a chance to give a serious look so could only make the quick suggestion to make the graphs smaller and put multiple graphs on a page, This would allow the reader to bett
Introduction: Ben Hyde sends along this : Stuck in the middle of the supplemental data, reporting the total workup for their compounds, was this gem: Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis . . . I’m reminded of our recent discussions of coauthorship, where I argued that I see real advantages to having multiple people taking responsibility for the result. Jay Verkuilen responded: “On the flipside of collaboration . . . is diffusion of responsibility, where everybody thinks someone else ‘has that problem’ and thus things don’t get solved.” That’s what seems to have happened (hilariously) here.
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