andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2002 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A journalist asked me for my thoughts on academics and blogging, in light of the recently announced move of the sister blog to the Washington Post. I responded as follows: John Sides is the leader of the Monkey Cage and in particular was the key person involved in the Washington Post move. But I will give you some general comments based on my own experiences. I started blogging in 2004: Samantha Cook (my postdoc at the time) and I set up the blog so that we could communicate our partially-formed research ideas to each other, in a way that would be open to the world so that (a) we could get input from interested outsiders, and (b) we could publicize our work. We decided to post daily (or approximately thus). At the time, I figured that if there was ever a time that we ran out of material, I could post summaries of my old research papers. The blog quickly became a place for us to give our various thoughts on statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 A journalist asked me for my thoughts on academics and blogging, in light of the recently announced move of the sister blog to the Washington Post. [sent-1, score-0.229]
2 I responded as follows: John Sides is the leader of the Monkey Cage and in particular was the key person involved in the Washington Post move. [sent-2, score-0.11]
3 We decided to post daily (or approximately thus). [sent-5, score-0.153]
4 At the time, I figured that if there was ever a time that we ran out of material, I could post summaries of my old research papers. [sent-6, score-0.387]
5 The blog quickly became a place for us to give our various thoughts on statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science. [sent-7, score-0.438]
6 Samantha and, later on, other research collaborators have posted to the blog but it’s been mostly me. [sent-8, score-0.384]
7 I had always been posting on political science related topics, but the Monkey Cage has an audience that is more focused on that topic. [sent-11, score-0.15]
8 Each of us (the five primary collaborators and the various occasional and guest collaborators) plays a distinct role. [sent-13, score-0.355]
9 In particular, I am not so conversant with the political science research literature (I am a prof of statistics and political science, and my Ph. [sent-14, score-0.392]
10 is in statistics) so I end up focusing more on American voting and public opinion (my main substantive research interest in poli sci) as well as methods (survey research, statistical modeling, causal inference, etc). [sent-16, score-0.466]
11 The other contributors to the Monkey Cage can do a better job linking the news of the day with current and classic poli sci research. [sent-17, score-0.352]
12 They often supply me with useful insights, references, and connections to new ideas of which I was not aware. [sent-19, score-0.126]
13 Not all my blogging experiences have worked so well. [sent-20, score-0.213]
14 When that blog moved to the New York Times, the contributions by authors other than Nate fell off. [sent-22, score-0.167]
15 The problem was that we had to run all our posts past a New York Times editor, and these editors were usually too busy to read our posts! [sent-23, score-0.072]
16 I felt frustrating writing a blog post and then waiting weeks to find out if it could run. [sent-24, score-0.322]
17 It was better to just post directly on the Monkey Cage and my research blog. [sent-25, score-0.388]
18 I expect the Monkey Cage at the Washington Post will work better because it is my understanding that we will post directly to the blog and not have to go through an editor. [sent-26, score-0.372]
19 A key part of blogging is its immediacy and its informality. [sent-28, score-0.282]
20 But it will be good to reach new audiences, and I really appreciate the work of John Sides that’s let us to this point. [sent-31, score-0.109]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 2002 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-30-Blogging
Introduction: A journalist asked me for my thoughts on academics and blogging, in light of the recently announced move of the sister blog to the Washington Post. I responded as follows: John Sides is the leader of the Monkey Cage and in particular was the key person involved in the Washington Post move. But I will give you some general comments based on my own experiences. I started blogging in 2004: Samantha Cook (my postdoc at the time) and I set up the blog so that we could communicate our partially-formed research ideas to each other, in a way that would be open to the world so that (a) we could get input from interested outsiders, and (b) we could publicize our work. We decided to post daily (or approximately thus). At the time, I figured that if there was ever a time that we ran out of material, I could post summaries of my old research papers. The blog quickly became a place for us to give our various thoughts on statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science.
Introduction: Elsewhere: 1. They asked me to write about my “favorite election- or campaign-related movie, novel, or TV show” (Salon) 2. The shopping period is over; the time for buying has begun (NYT) 3. If anybody’s gonna be criticizing my tax plan, I want it to be this guy (Monkey Cage) 4. The 4 key qualifications to be a great president; unfortunately George W. Bush satisfies all four, and Ronald Reagan doesn’t match any of them (Monkey Cage) 5. The politics of eyeliner (Monkey Cage)
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Introduction: This one’s probably the most important: Republicans on track to retain control of House in 2014 And I like this one for the headline: Impact factor 911 is a joke Here are the others: Press releases make for fishy statistics Why is the Motley Fool hyping Netflix? Our health-care system is like Coca Cola Obama takes big bucks from telecoms, ramps up national security state I have mixed feelings about the move of the Monkey Cage blog to the Washington Post. I’ve been told we get many more readers, but the the comments have declined in number and in quality. It used to be that posting at the Monkey Cage felt like “blogging”: I’d post something there and look at the comments. It was a political science community with many participants from outside the field. Posting at the new blog is more like writing for the newspaper: it’s a broadcast without real feedback. This all makes me realize how much I appreciate the commenters here. Just as I blog for free, out
4 0.21132772 1997 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-24-Measurement error in monkey studies
Introduction: Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.
5 0.19313401 2048 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-03-A comment on a post at the Monkey Cage
Introduction: The sister blog has moved to the Washington Post. It’s harder to leave comments there, so I’ll post my comments to Monkey Cage posts here instead. Political scientist Lisa Martin wrote a post on student evaluations of teaching, based on a recent paper where she writes: Many female faculty believe that they face prejudice in student evaluations of teaching (SETs), and that this prejudice may be exaggerated by developments such as online evaluations and the prevalence of sites such as RateMyProfessor. However, systematic studies of SETs are mixed in their findings of gender bias. As a statistician, I always like to hear this sort of moderate statement. On the blog, Martin shows the following graph based on data from the political science departments of “publicly available SET data from two large public universities, one in the South and the other on the West Coast”: The graph left me with two questions and a comment: 1. If the data were public, why are the names
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Introduction: A journalist asked me for my thoughts on academics and blogging, in light of the recently announced move of the sister blog to the Washington Post. I responded as follows: John Sides is the leader of the Monkey Cage and in particular was the key person involved in the Washington Post move. But I will give you some general comments based on my own experiences. I started blogging in 2004: Samantha Cook (my postdoc at the time) and I set up the blog so that we could communicate our partially-formed research ideas to each other, in a way that would be open to the world so that (a) we could get input from interested outsiders, and (b) we could publicize our work. We decided to post daily (or approximately thus). At the time, I figured that if there was ever a time that we ran out of material, I could post summaries of my old research papers. The blog quickly became a place for us to give our various thoughts on statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science.
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Introduction: This one’s probably the most important: Republicans on track to retain control of House in 2014 And I like this one for the headline: Impact factor 911 is a joke Here are the others: Press releases make for fishy statistics Why is the Motley Fool hyping Netflix? Our health-care system is like Coca Cola Obama takes big bucks from telecoms, ramps up national security state I have mixed feelings about the move of the Monkey Cage blog to the Washington Post. I’ve been told we get many more readers, but the the comments have declined in number and in quality. It used to be that posting at the Monkey Cage felt like “blogging”: I’d post something there and look at the comments. It was a political science community with many participants from outside the field. Posting at the new blog is more like writing for the newspaper: it’s a broadcast without real feedback. This all makes me realize how much I appreciate the commenters here. Just as I blog for free, out
3 0.7617175 2232 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-03-What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week?
Introduction: I post (approximately) once a day and don’t plan to change that. I have enough material to post more often—for example, I could intersperse existing blog posts with summaries of my published papers or of other work that I like; and, beyond this, we currently have a one-to-two-month backlog of posts—but I’m afraid that if the number of posts were doubled, the attention given to each would be roughly halved. Looking at it the other way, I certainly don’t want to reduce my level of posting. Sure, it takes time to blog, but these are things that are important for me to say. If I were to blog less frequently, it would only be because I was pouring all these words into a different vessel, for example a book. For now, though, I think it makes sense to blog and then collect the words later as appropriate. With blogging I get comments, and many of these comments are helpful—either directly (by pointing out errors in my thinking or linking to relevant software or literature) or indirec
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Introduction: Rajiv Sethi writes : I suspect that within a decade, blogs will be a cornerstone of research in economics. Many original and creative contributions to the discipline will first be communicated to the profession (and the world at large) in the form of blog posts, since the medium allows for material of arbitrary length, depth and complexity. Ideas first expressed in this form will make their way (with suitable attribution) into reading lists, doctoral dissertations and more conventionally refereed academic publications. And blogs will come to play a central role in the process of recruitment, promotion and reward at major research universities. This genie is not going back into its bottle. And he thinks this is a good thing: In fact, the refereeing process for blog posts is in some respects more rigorous than that for journal articles. Reports are numerous, non-anonymous, public, rapidly and efficiently produced, and collaboratively constructed. It is not obvious to me [Sethi]
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Introduction: I’m trying to temporarily kick the blogging habit as I seem to be addicted. I’m currently on a binge and my plan is to schedule a bunch of already-written entries at one per weekday and not blog anything new for awhile. Yesterday I fell off the wagon and posted 4 items, but maybe now I can show some restraint. P.S. In keeping with the spirit of this blog, I scheduled it to appear on 13 May, even though I wrote it on 15 Apr. Just about everything you’ve been reading on this blog for the past several weeks (and lots of forthcoming items) were written a month ago. The only exceptions are whatever my cobloggers have been posting and various items that were timely enough that I inserted them in the queue afterward. P.P.S I bumped it up to 22 Jun because, as of 14 Apr, I was continuing to write new entries. I hope to slow down soon! P.P.P.S. (20 June) I was going to bump it up again–the horizon’s now in mid-July–but I thought, enough is enough! Right now I think that about ha
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1 0.98194611 1962 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-30-The Roy causal model?
Introduction: A link from Simon Jackman’s blog led me to an article by James Heckman, Hedibert Lopes, and Remi Piatek from 2011, “Treatment effects: A Bayesian perspective.” I was pleasantly surprised to see this, partly because I didn’t know that Heckman was working on Bayesian methods, and partly because the paper explicitly refers to the “potential outcomes model,” a term I associate with Don Rubin. I’ve had the impression that Heckman and Rubin don’t like each other (I was a student of Rubin and have never met Heckman, so I’m only speaking at second hand here), so I was happy to see some convergence. I was curious how Heckman et al. would source the potential outcome model. They do not refer to Rubin’s 1974 paper or to Neyman’s 1923 paper (which was republished in 1990 and is now taken to be the founding document of the Neyman-Rubin approach to causal inference). Nor, for that matter, do Heckman et al. refer to the more recent developments of these theories by Robins, Pearl, and other
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Introduction: A journalist asked me for my thoughts on academics and blogging, in light of the recently announced move of the sister blog to the Washington Post. I responded as follows: John Sides is the leader of the Monkey Cage and in particular was the key person involved in the Washington Post move. But I will give you some general comments based on my own experiences. I started blogging in 2004: Samantha Cook (my postdoc at the time) and I set up the blog so that we could communicate our partially-formed research ideas to each other, in a way that would be open to the world so that (a) we could get input from interested outsiders, and (b) we could publicize our work. We decided to post daily (or approximately thus). At the time, I figured that if there was ever a time that we ran out of material, I could post summaries of my old research papers. The blog quickly became a place for us to give our various thoughts on statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science.
3 0.97484165 1222 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-20-5 books book
Introduction: Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? What do you call these things generically?) in that special room. But then again, maybe you already do! P.S. You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books.
Introduction: This link on education reform send me to this blog on foreign languages in Canadian public schools: The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer effects matter. Being with high achieving peers raises a student’s own achievement level. . . . Several studies have found that Anglophones who can speak French enjoy an earning premium. The question is: do bilingual Anglophones earn more because speaking French is a valuable skill in the workplace? Or do they earn more because they’re on average smarter and more capable people (after all, they’ve mastered two languages)? And the blog features this comments like this : French immersion classes (as opposed to science, maths or any
5 0.96742409 556 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-04-Patterns
Introduction: Pete Gries writes: I [Gries] am not sure if what you are suggesting by “doing data analysis in a patternless way” is a pitch for deductive over inductive approaches as a solution to the problem of reporting and publication bias. If so, I may somewhat disagree. A constant quest to prove or disprove theory in a deductive manner is one of the primary causes of both reporting and publication bias. I’m actually becoming a proponent of a remarkably non-existent species – “applied political science” – because there is so much animosity in our discipline to inductive empirical statistical work that seeks to answer real world empirical questions rather than contribute to parsimonious theory building. Anyone want to start a JAPS – Journal of Applied Political Science? Our discipline is in danger of irrelevance. My reply: By “doing data analysis in a patternless way,” I meant statistical methods such as least squares, maximum likelihood, etc., that estimate parameters independently witho
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