andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1677 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

1677 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-16-Greenland is one tough town


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Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. [sent-1, score-0.11]

2 Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. [sent-2, score-0.799]

3 I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. [sent-3, score-0.84]

4 , we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. [sent-6, score-1.385]

5 According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. [sent-10, score-0.158]

6 I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people. [sent-11, score-0.931]


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tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

[('western', 0.353), ('countries', 0.352), ('european', 0.313), ('belgium', 0.2), ('sweden', 0.2), ('eastern', 0.2), ('satellite', 0.2), ('chew', 0.2), ('wiki', 0.19), ('reminder', 0.19), ('finland', 0.179), ('greenland', 0.177), ('murder', 0.167), ('lax', 0.163), ('kill', 0.156), ('watch', 0.152), ('tv', 0.148), ('differ', 0.136), ('tough', 0.135), ('pointing', 0.131), ('reality', 0.127), ('jeff', 0.122), ('rest', 0.11), ('americans', 0.105), ('tend', 0.102), ('according', 0.097), ('rate', 0.093), ('higher', 0.093), ('sent', 0.092), ('guess', 0.076), ('nothing', 0.075), ('including', 0.075), ('much', 0.072), ('particular', 0.062), ('post', 0.061), ('take', 0.061), ('blog', 0.052), ('good', 0.039), ('know', 0.038), ('people', 0.032), ('think', 0.026), ('one', 0.023)]

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Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.

2 0.16377558 670 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-20-Attractive but hard-to-read graph could be made much much better

Introduction: Matthew Yglesias shares this graph from the Economist : I hate this graph. OK, sure, I don’t hate hate hate hate it: it’s not a 3-d exploding pie chart or anything. It’s not misleading, it’s just extremely difficult to read. Basically, you have to go back and forth between the colors and the labels and the countries and read it like a table. OK, so here’s the table: Average Hours Per Day Spent in Each Activity Work, Unpaid Eating, Personal Country study work sleeping care Leisure Other France 4 3 11 1 2 2 Germany 4 3 10 1 3 3 Japan 6 2 10 1 2 2 Britain 4 3 10 1 3 3 USA 5 3 10 1 3 2 Turkey 4 3 11 1 3 2 Hmm, that didn’t work too well. Let’s try subtracting the average from each column (for these six countries,

3 0.13024394 829 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-29-Infovis vs. statgraphics: A clear example of their different goals

Introduction: I recently came across a data visualization that perfectly demonstrates the difference between the “infovis” and “statgraphics” perspectives. Here’s the image ( link from Tyler Cowen): That’s the infovis. The statgraphic version would simply be a dotplot, something like this: (I purposely used the default settings in R with only minor modifications here to demonstrate what happens if you just want to plot the data with minimal effort.) Let’s compare the two graphs: From a statistical graphics perspective, the second graph dominates. The countries are directly comparable and the numbers are indicated by positions rather than area. The first graph is full of distracting color and gives the misleading visual impression that the total GDP of countries 5-10 is about equal to that of countries 1-4. If the goal is to get attention , though, it’s another story. There’s nothing special about the top graph above except how it looks. It represents neither a dat

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Introduction: Sam Behseta writes: There is a report by Martin Tingley and Peter Huybers in Nature on the unprecedented high temperatures at northern latitudes (Russia, Greenland, etc). What is more interesting is the authors are have used a straightforward hierarchical Bayes model, and for the first time (as far as I can remember) the results are reported with a probability attached to them (P>0.99), as opposed to the usual p-value<0.01 business. This might be a sign that editors of big time science journals are welcoming Bayesian approaches. I agree. This is a good sign for statistical communication. Here are the key sentences from the abstract: Here, using a hierarchical Bayesian analysis of instrumental, tree-ring, ice-core and lake-sediment records, we show that the magnitude and frequency of recent warm temperature extremes at high northern latitudes are unprecedented in the past 600 years. The summers of 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011 were warmer than those of all prior years back to 1

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Introduction: From my new article in the journal Epidemiology: Sander Greenland and Charles Poole accept that P values are here to stay but recognize that some of their most common interpretations have problems. The casual view of the P value as posterior probability of the truth of the null hypothesis is false and not even close to valid under any reasonable model, yet this misunderstanding persists even in high-stakes settings (as discussed, for example, by Greenland in 2011). The formal view of the P value as a probability conditional on the null is mathematically correct but typically irrelevant to research goals (hence, the popularity of alternative—if wrong—interpretations). A Bayesian interpretation based on a spike-and-slab model makes little sense in applied contexts in epidemiology, political science, and other fields in which true effects are typically nonzero and bounded (thus violating both the “spike” and the “slab” parts of the model). I find Greenland and Poole’s perspective t

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Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.

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Introduction: Uberbloggers Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were kind enough to link to my five-year-old post with graphs from Red State Blue State on time trends of average income by state. Here are the graphs : Yglesias’s take-home point: There isn’t that much change over time in states’ economic well-being. All things considered the best predictor of how rich a state was in 2000 was simply how rich it was in 1929…. Massachusetts and Connecticut have always been rich and Arkansas and Mississippi have always been poor. I’d like to point to a different feature of the graphs, which is that, although the rankings of the states haven’t changed much (as can be seen from the “2000 compared to 1929″ scale), the relative values of the incomes have converged quite a bit—at least, they converged from about 1930 to 1980 before hitting some level of stability. And the rankings have changed a bit. My impression (without checking the numbers) is that New York and Connecticut were

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Introduction: Tyler Cowen writes : Texas has begun to enforce [a law regarding parallel parking] only recently . . . Up until now, of course, there has been strong net mobility into the state of Texas, so was the previous lack of enforcement so bad? I care not at all about the direction in which people park their cars and I have no opinion on this law, but I have to raise an alarm at Cowen’s argument here. Let me strip it down to its basic form: 1. Until recently, state X had policy A. 2. Up until now, there has been strong net mobility into state X 3. Therefore, the presumption is that policy A is ok. In this particular case, I think we can safely assume that parallel parking regulations have had close to zero impact on the population flows into and out of Texas. More generally, I think logicians could poke some holes into the argument that 1 and 2 above imply 3. For one thing, you could apply this argument to any policy in any state that’s had positive net migration. Hai

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Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.

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