andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2088 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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
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1 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? [sent-1, score-1.178]
2 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. [sent-2, score-1.056]
3 I’ve been told we get many more readers, but the the comments have declined in number and in quality. [sent-3, score-0.293]
4 It used to be that posting at the Monkey Cage felt like “blogging”: I’d post something there and look at the comments. [sent-4, score-0.391]
5 It was a political science community with many participants from outside the field. [sent-5, score-0.466]
6 Posting at the new blog is more like writing for the newspaper: it’s a broadcast without real feedback. [sent-6, score-0.374]
7 This all makes me realize how much I appreciate the commenters here. [sent-7, score-0.284]
8 Just as I blog for free, out of a sense of service to the profession and the community, you comment for free and add so much. [sent-8, score-0.595]
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same-blog 1 0.99999976 2088 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-04-Recently in the sister blog
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
2 0.40688032 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)
4 0.13533823 2215 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-17-The Washington Post reprints university press releases without editing them
Introduction: Somebody points me to this horrifying exposé by Paul Raeburn on a new series by the Washington Post where they reprint press releases as if they are actual news. And the gimmick is, the reason why it’s appearing on this blog, is that these are university press releases on science stories . What could possibly go wrong there? After all, Steve Chaplin, a self-identified “science-writing PIO from an R1,” writes in a comment to Raeburn’s post: We write about peer-reviewed research accepted for publication or published by the world’s leading scientific journals after that research has been determined to be legitimate. Repeatability of new research is a publication requisite. I emphasized that last sentence myself because it was such a stunner. Do people really think that??? So I guess what he’s saying is, they don’t do press releases for articles from Psychological Science or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . But I wonder how the profs in the psych d
5 0.1349951 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
6 0.12882312 1997 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-24-Measurement error in monkey studies
8 0.11271965 286 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-20-Are the Democrats avoiding a national campaign?
9 0.10433178 790 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-08-Blog in motion
10 0.10036117 2075 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-23-PubMed Commons: A system for commenting on articles in PubMed
11 0.099248298 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
12 0.096523374 120 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-30-You can’t put Pandora back in the box
13 0.093588628 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
14 0.092968553 1964 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-01-Non-topical blogging
15 0.092638917 2096 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-10-Schiminovich is on The Simpsons
16 0.090021163 1202 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-08-Between and within-Krugman correlation
17 0.087059744 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
18 0.086979911 663 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-15-Happy tax day!
19 0.084176868 865 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-22-Blogging is “destroying the business model for quality”?
20 0.082327373 210 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-16-What I learned from those tough 538 commenters
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same-blog 1 0.95932215 2088 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-04-Recently in the sister blog
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
2 0.75776392 104 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-22-Seeking balance
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
3 0.74979144 856 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-16-Our new improved blog! Thanks to Cord Blomquist
Introduction: Hi all. You may have noticed changes in the appearance of the blog. Cord Blomquist moved us over to this new WordPress blog. He earlier did it for our sister blog and he can do it for you too, for a reasonable fee. We had a few hitches in getting all the files and links and comments working, and Cord was with us all the way to straighten things out. Thanks, Cord! You did a great job and we’re happy to recommend you to others. P.S. The last thing we got working was the RSS feed. So if you’ve been reading the blog on RSS, you have about 3 weeks of backlog you can catch up on. P.P.S. We’re still playing a bit with the blog’s formatting. Feel free to put any formatting suggestions in the comments.
4 0.74642301 1964 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-01-Non-topical blogging
Introduction: On a day with four blog posts (and followed by a day with two more), econblogger Mark Thoma wrote : Every once in awhile I [Thoma] kind of need a bit of a break . . . I ran out of energy a few weeks ago . . . I’ll do my best until then, daily links at least somehow and short “echo” posts as usual, but I doubt I’ll have time to say much myself . . . [There's a reason I haven't missed a day posting to the blog in over eight years. When I first started, I was afraid that if I missed a day new readers would bail out . . . I realize a missed day won't kill the blog at this point, but it's still important to me to keep posting every day.] What I do is post once a day; when I write new posts, I schedule them for the future. I currently have approx 2-month lag. Sometimes I post 2 or 3 times in one day, if I have something topical or just something I feel like posting on. Overall, though, I find a benefit to the lag. Posts that are less topical (not tied to the news or to a current o
5 0.73535699 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.
6 0.71718329 771 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-16-30 days of statistics
7 0.71001166 1432 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-27-“Get off my lawn”-blogging
8 0.70690626 2232 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-03-What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week?
9 0.7017436 91 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-16-RSS mess
10 0.69509995 220 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-20-Why I blog?
11 0.69242728 868 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-24-Blogs vs. real journalism
12 0.69047195 966 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-20-A qualified but incomplete thanks to Gregg Easterbrook’s editor at Reuters
15 0.68132186 2075 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-23-PubMed Commons: A system for commenting on articles in PubMed
16 0.67802846 2085 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-02-I’ve already written next year’s April Fools post!
17 0.66417295 1508 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-23-Speaking frankly
18 0.66392708 570 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-12-Software request
19 0.66290689 1567 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-Election reports
20 0.66174519 790 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-08-Blog in motion
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same-blog 1 0.93914223 2088 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-04-Recently in the sister blog
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
2 0.90901041 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
3 0.8990252 552 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-03-Model Makers’ Hippocratic Oath
Introduction: Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott wonder how to get their fellow modelers to give up their fantasy of perfection. In a Business Week article they proposed, not entirely in jest, a model makers’ Hippocratic Oath: I will remember that I didn’t make the world and that it doesn’t satisfy my equations. Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics. I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights. I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension. Found via Abductive Intelligence .
4 0.89418232 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.
5 0.89123923 858 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-17-Jumping off the edge of the world
Introduction: Tomas Iesmantas writes: I’m facing a problem where parameter space is bounded, e.g. all parameters have to be positive. If in MCMC as proposal distribution I use normal distribution, then at some iterations I get negative proposals. So my question is: should I use recalculation of acceptance probability every time I reject the proposal (something like in delayed rejection method), or I have to use another proposal (like lognormal, truncated normal, etc.)? The simplest solution is to just calculate p(theta)=0 for theta outside the legal region, thus reject those jumps. This will work fine (just remember that when you reject, you have to stay at the last value for one more iteration), but if you’re doing these rejections all the time, you might want to reparameterize your space, for example using logs for positive parameters, logits for constrained parameters, and softmax for parameters that are constrained to sum to 1.
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18 0.87649703 2010 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-06-Would today’s captains of industry be happier in a 1950s-style world?
19 0.87581658 2338 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-19-My short career as a Freud expert
20 0.87373692 588 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-24-In case you were wondering, here’s the price of milk