andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1808 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In response to the latest controversy , a statistics professor writes: It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software! Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its d
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1 In response to the latest controversy , a statistics professor writes: It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. [sent-1, score-0.576]
2 Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. [sent-2, score-0.551]
3 It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software! [sent-3, score-0.613]
4 Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. [sent-4, score-0.631]
5 I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. [sent-5, score-1.146]
6 Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its desirable features. [sent-7, score-0.452]
7 The disaster that is Excel seems like more of a mystery. [sent-8, score-0.148]
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Introduction: In response to the latest controversy , a statistics professor writes: It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software! Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its d
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Introduction: I was trying to make some new graphs using 5-year-old R code and I got all these problems because I was reading in files with variable names such as “co.fipsid” and now R is automatically changing them to “co_fipsid”. Or maybe the names had underbars all along, and the old R had changed them into dots. Whatever. I understand that backward compatibility can be hard to maintain, but this is just annoying.
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Introduction: I received the following email: Did you know that it looks like Microsoft is entering the modeling game? I mean, outside of Excel. I recently received an email at work from a MS research contractor looking for ppl that program in R, SAS, Matlab, Excel, and Mathematica. . . . So far I [the person who sent me this email] haven’t seen anything about applying any actual models. Only stuff about assigning variables, deleting rows, merging tables, etc. I don’t know how common knowledge this all is within the statistical community. I did a quick google search for the name of the programming language and didn’t come up with anything. That sounds cool. Working with anything from Microsoft sounds pretty horrible, but it would be useful to have another modeling language out there, just for checking our answers if nothing else.
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Introduction: This post is by Phil A recent post on this blog discusses a prominent case of an Excel error leading to substantially wrong results from a statistical analysis. Excel is notorious for this because it is easy to add a row or column of data (or intermediate results) but forget to update equations so that they correctly use the new data. That particular error is less common in a language like R because R programmers usually refer to data by variable name (or by applying functions to a named variable), so the same code works even if you add or remove data. Still, there is plenty of opportunity for errors no matter what language one uses. Andrew ran into problems fairly recently, and also blogged about another instance. I’ve never had to retract a paper, but that’s partly because I haven’t published a whole lot of papers. Certainly I have found plenty of substantial errors pretty late in some of my data analyses, and I obviously don’t have sufficient mechanisms in place to be sure
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Introduction: Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. And that’s not even considering Dr. Anil Potti. On the other hand, the revelation of all these problems can be taken as evidence that things are getting better. Psychology researcher Gary Marcus writes : There is something positive that has come out of the crisis of replicability—something vitally important for all experimental sciences. For years, it was extremely difficult to publish a direct replication, or a failure to replicate an experiment, in a good journal. . . . Now, happily, the scientific culture has changed. . . . The Reproducibility Project, from the Center for Open Science is now underway . . . And sociologist Fabio Rojas
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Introduction: In response to the latest controversy , a statistics professor writes: It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software! Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its d
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Introduction: Christian Robert posts these thoughts : I [Ross Ihaka] have been worried for some time that R isn’t going to provide the base that we’re going to need for statistical computation in the future. (It may well be that the future is already upon us.) There are certainly efficiency problems (speed and memory use), but there are more fundamental issues too. Some of these were inherited from S and some are peculiar to R. One of the worst problems is scoping. Consider the following little gem. f =function() { if (runif(1) > .5) x = 10 x } The x being returned by this function is randomly local or global. There are other examples where variables alternate between local and non-local throughout the body of a function. No sensible language would allow this. It’s ugly and it makes optimisation really difficult. This isn’t the only problem, even weirder things happen because of interactions between scoping and lazy evaluation. In light of this, I [Ihaka] have come to the c
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Introduction: I opened the paper today and saw this from Paul Krugman, on Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the [recent unemployment data] had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities. It was nonsense, of course. Job numbers are prepared by professional civil servants, at an agency that currently has no political appointees. But then maybe Mr. Welch — under whose leadership G.E. reported remarkably smooth earnings growth, with none of the short-term fluctuations you might have expected (fluctuations that reappeared under his successor) — doesn’t know how hard it would be to cook the jobs data. I was curious so I googled *general electric historical earnings*. It was surprisingly difficult to find the numbers! Most of the links just went back to 2011, or to 2008. Eventually I came across this blog by Barry Ritholtz that showed this
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Introduction: “She was forty years old when she died. It is possible that her art might have developed to include a wider area of human experience, just as possible that the chilling climate of the thirties might have withered it altogether. But what she actually wrote was greatly talented. She deserves a place, although obviously not a foremost one, in any literary history of the years between the wars. The last letter she wrote, or rather dictated, to the printer of the Laforgue translations shows the invariable fastidiousness of her talent, a fastidiousness which is often infuriating but just as often impressive, and is in any case rare enough to be worth remembrance: To the Printer of Six Moral Tales This book is to be spelled and its words are to be hyphenated according to the usage of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Page introduction continuously with the tales. Do not put brackets around the numbers of the pages. All the ‘todays’ and all the ‘tomorrows’ should be spelled w
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Introduction: In response to the latest controversy , a statistics professor writes: It’s somewhat surprising to see Very Serious Researchers (apologies to Paul Krugman) using Excel. Some years ago, I was consulting on a trademark infringement case and was trying (unsuccessfully) to replicate another expert’s regression analysis. It wasn’t until I had the brainstorm to use Excel that I was able to reproduce his results – it may be better now, but at the time, Excel could propagate round-off error and catastrophically cancel like no other software! Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy. I mean, sure, I understand in some general way that they have a large user base, it’s hard to maintain backward compatibility, there’s feature creep, and, besides all that, lots of people have different preferences in data analysis than I do. But still, it’s such a joke. Word has problems too, but I can see how these problems arise from its d
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