andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1822 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword. . . . Hendrix, a pharmaceutical statistician, was one of several neighbors who came to the woman’s aid after she began yelling for help . . . Too bad the whole “statistician” thing got buried in the middle of the article. Fair enough, though: I don’t know what it takes to become a Mormon bishop, but I assume it’s more effort than what it takes to learn statistics.
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1 Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. [sent-1, score-1.052]
2 Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. [sent-2, score-1.148]
3 The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword. [sent-3, score-1.164]
4 Hendrix, a pharmaceutical statistician, was one of several neighbors who came to the woman’s aid after she began yelling for help . [sent-7, score-0.685]
5 Too bad the whole “statistician” thing got buried in the middle of the article. [sent-10, score-0.266]
6 Fair enough, though: I don’t know what it takes to become a Mormon bishop, but I assume it’s more effort than what it takes to learn statistics. [sent-11, score-0.491]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1822 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-24-Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop pharmaceutical statistician stops mugger
Introduction: Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword. . . . Hendrix, a pharmaceutical statistician, was one of several neighbors who came to the woman’s aid after she began yelling for help . . . Too bad the whole “statistician” thing got buried in the middle of the article. Fair enough, though: I don’t know what it takes to become a Mormon bishop, but I assume it’s more effort than what it takes to learn statistics.
2 0.1114186 1027 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-25-Note to student journalists: Google is your friend
Introduction: A student journalist called me with some questions about when the U.S. would have a female president. At one point she asked if there were any surveys of whether people would vote for a woman. I suggested she try Google. I was by my computer anyway so typed “what percentage of americans would vote for a woman president” (without the quotation marks), and the very first hit was this from Gallup, from 2007: The Feb. 9-11, 2007, poll asked Americans whether they would vote for “a generally well-qualified” presidential candidate nominated by their party with each of the following characteristics: Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, an atheist, a woman, black, Hispanic, homosexual, 72 years of age, and someone married for the third time. Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happene
3 0.094318271 926 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-26-NYC
Introduction: Our downstairs neighbor hates us. She looks away from us when we see them on the street, if we’re coming into the building at the same time she doesn’t hold open the door, and if we’re in the elevator when it stops on her floor, she refuses to get on. On the other hand, if you’re a sociology professor in Chicago, one of your colleagues might try to run you over in a parking lot. So I guess I’m getting off easy.
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Introduction: There is no increased inequality, unless you look at the top 1% The revolving door of U.S. politics The redistricting song
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Introduction: Phil points to this post by Brett Keller and writes: I [Phil] haven’t seen Hunger Games or read the book(s?). It’s sort of nice that people do this kind of thing but might be even nicer if they dedicated this sort of amateur data analysis to real-world problems. I dunno. I think it’s always good to get practice. Analyzing a book/movie is like doing sports statistics; it can keep you in shape.
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same-blog 1 0.94213849 1822 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-24-Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop pharmaceutical statistician stops mugger
Introduction: Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword. . . . Hendrix, a pharmaceutical statistician, was one of several neighbors who came to the woman’s aid after she began yelling for help . . . Too bad the whole “statistician” thing got buried in the middle of the article. Fair enough, though: I don’t know what it takes to become a Mormon bishop, but I assume it’s more effort than what it takes to learn statistics.
2 0.77617246 1553 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-30-Real rothko, fake rothko
Introduction: Jay Livingston writes : I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things. Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake. One day a painting is worth $8.3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless.”* Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive. If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko. It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i.e., something that costs a lot. Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious. What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. Objects that are rare and therefore expensive
3 0.72840399 2119 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-01-Separated by a common blah blah blah
Introduction: I love reading the kind of English that English people write. It’s the same language as American but just slightly different. I was thinking about this recently after coming across this footnote from “Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop,” by Bob Stanley: Mantovani’s atmospheric arrangement on ‘Care Mia’, I should add, is something else. Genuinely celestial. If anyone with a degree of subtlety was singing, it would be quite a record. It’s hard for me to pin down exactly what makes this passage specifically English, but there’s something about it . . . P.S. Mark Liberman reports that, in combination, several of the words and phrases in the above quote indeed supply strong evidence (“odds of better than 50 to 1 in favor of a British origin”).
Introduction: Scott “Dilbert” Adams has met Charlie Sheen and thinks he really is a superbeing. This perhaps relates to some well-known cognitive biases. I’m not sure what this one’s called, but the idea is that Adams is probably overweighting his direct impressions: he saw Sheen-on-the-set, not Sheen-beating-his-wife. Also, everybody else hates Sheen, so Adams can distinguish himself by being tolerant, etc. I’m not sure what this latter phenomenon is called, but I’ve noticed it before. When I come into a new situation and meet some person X, who everybody says is a jerk, and then person X happens to act in a civilized way that day, then there’s a real temptation to say, Hey, X isn’t so bad after all. It makes me feel so tolerant and above-it-all. Perhaps that’s partly what’s going on with Scott Adams here: he can view himself as the objective outsider who can be impressed by Sheen, not like all those silly emotional people who get hung up on the headlines. From here, though, it just ma
Introduction: Jed Dougherty points me to this opinion piece by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of art at Northwestern University, who writes: Artists are defensive these days because in May the House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. Colleagues, especially those who have received N.E.A. grants, will loathe me for saying this, but just this once I’m sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a subject that has troubled me for decades: the government — disproportionately — supports art that I do not like. Actually, just about nobody likes modern art. All those soup cans—what’s that all about? The stuff they have in museums nowadays, my 4-year-old could do better than that. Two-thirds of so-called modern artists are drunk and two-thirds are frauds. And, no, I didn’t get my math wrong—there’s just a lot of overlap among these categories! It’s an open secret in my
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same-blog 1 0.89937162 1822 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-24-Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop pharmaceutical statistician stops mugger
Introduction: Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword. . . . Hendrix, a pharmaceutical statistician, was one of several neighbors who came to the woman’s aid after she began yelling for help . . . Too bad the whole “statistician” thing got buried in the middle of the article. Fair enough, though: I don’t know what it takes to become a Mormon bishop, but I assume it’s more effort than what it takes to learn statistics.
2 0.63866264 1133 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-21-Judea Pearl on why he is “only a half-Bayesian”
Introduction: In an article published in 2001, Pearl wrote: I [Pearl] turned Bayesian in 1971, as soon as I began reading Savage’s monograph The Foundations of Statistical Inference [Savage, 1962]. The arguments were unassailable: (i) It is plain silly to ignore what we know, (ii) It is natural and useful to cast what we know in the language of probabilities, and (iii) If our subjective probabilities are erroneous, their impact will get washed out in due time, as the number of observations increases. Thirty years later, I [Pearl] am still a devout Bayesian in the sense of (i), but I now doubt the wisdom of (ii) and I know that, in general, (iii) is false. He elaborates: The bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships. Specifically, the building blocks of our scientific and everyday knowledge are elementary facts such as “mud does not cause rain” and “symptom
3 0.62355375 916 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-18-Multimodality in hierarchical models
Introduction: Jim Hodges posted a note to the Bugs mailing list that I thought could be of more general interest: Is multi-modality a common experience? I [Hodges] think the answer is “nobody knows in any generality”. Here are some examples of bimodality that certainly do *not* involve the kind of labeling problems that arise in mixture models. The only systematic study of multimodality I know of is Liu J, Hodges JS (2003). Posterior bimodality in the balanced one-way random effects model. J.~Royal Stat.~Soc., Ser.~B, 65:247-255. The surprise of this paper is that in the simplest possible hierarchical model (analyzed using the standard inverse-gamma priors for the two variances), bimodality occurs quite readily, although it is much less common to have two modes that are big enough so that you’d actually get a noticeable fraction of MCMC draws from both of them. Because the restricted likelihood (= the marginal posterior for the two variances, if you’ve put flat priors on them) is
4 0.6185776 1128 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-19-Sharon Begley: Worse than Stephen Jay Gould?
Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
5 0.58808571 1378 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-13-Economists . . .
Introduction: Catherine Rampell writes : On Monday the Nobel Foundation, which bestows the world’s most prestigious academic, literary and humanitarian prizes, said it was reducing the cash awarded with Nobel Prizes by about 20 percent. . . . Peter A. Diamond, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also received the Nobel in economic science in 2010, observed that over the long run, cutting the cash award could dilute the prize’s prestige. But he added that Monday’s news overstates the financial blow to future laureates. “One of the things that comes with the prize, besides the prestige and the money,” he said, “is the opportunities to make more money.” I wouldn’t think these guys need the money, but I suppose it’s part of their professional code that they have to say that? (Recall our earlier discussion of the economist who said he’d stop working once his marginal tax rate reached the anticipated value of 93%.)
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