andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2119 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
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”).
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I love reading the kind of English that English people write. [sent-1, score-0.242]
2 It’s the same language as American but just slightly different. [sent-2, score-0.209]
3 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. [sent-3, score-0.924]
4 If anyone with a degree of subtlety was singing, it would be quite a record. [sent-5, score-0.461]
5 It’s hard for me to pin down exactly what makes this passage specifically English, but there’s something about it . [sent-6, score-0.701]
6 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”). [sent-11, score-0.932]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('english', 0.37), ('yeah', 0.358), ('pin', 0.219), ('singing', 0.219), ('atmospheric', 0.197), ('arrangement', 0.197), ('subtlety', 0.19), ('origin', 0.18), ('genuinely', 0.18), ('stanley', 0.18), ('liberman', 0.18), ('pop', 0.154), ('footnote', 0.151), ('phrases', 0.146), ('odds', 0.141), ('british', 0.139), ('passage', 0.137), ('bob', 0.12), ('supply', 0.118), ('degree', 0.117), ('combination', 0.113), ('specifically', 0.112), ('modern', 0.11), ('favor', 0.106), ('slightly', 0.105), ('language', 0.104), ('quote', 0.097), ('mark', 0.093), ('reports', 0.089), ('love', 0.089), ('care', 0.086), ('something', 0.085), ('exactly', 0.085), ('add', 0.084), ('anyone', 0.084), ('words', 0.084), ('strong', 0.083), ('kind', 0.082), ('coming', 0.082), ('american', 0.079), ('across', 0.077), ('indeed', 0.071), ('reading', 0.071), ('quite', 0.07), ('evidence', 0.07), ('recently', 0.069), ('several', 0.068), ('thinking', 0.066), ('hard', 0.063), ('story', 0.06)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999988 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”).
2 0.19182178 1255 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-10-Amtrak sucks
Introduction: Couldn’t they at least let me buy my tickets from Amazon so I wouldn’t have to re-enter the credit card information each time? Yeah, yeah, I know it’s no big deal. It just seems so silly.
3 0.18810774 842 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-07-Hey, I’m just like Picasso (but without all the babes)!
Introduction: So says Mark Liberman.
4 0.10839777 567 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-10-English-to-English translation
Introduction: It’s not just for Chaucer (or Mad Max) anymore. Peter Frase writes: It’s a shame that we neglect to re-translate older works into English merely because they were originally written in English. Languages change, and our reactions to words and formulations change. This is obvious when you read something like Chaucer, but it’s true to a more subtle degree of more recent writings. There is a pretty good chance that something written in the 19th century won’t mean the same thing to us that it meant to its contemporary readers. Thus it would make sense to re-translate Huckleberry Finn into modern language, in the same way we periodically get new translations of Homer or Dante or Thomas Mann. This is a point that applies equally well to non-fiction and social theory: in some ways, English-speaking sociologists are lucky that our canonical trio of classical theorists-Marx, Weber, and Durkheim-all wrote in another language. The most recent translation of Capital is eminently more readable
5 0.097996563 1978 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-12-Fixing the race, ethnicity, and national origin questions on the U.S. Census
Introduction: In his new book, “What is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans,” former Census Bureau director Ken Prewitt recommends taking the race question off the decennial census: He recommends gradual changes, integrating the race and national origin questions while improving both. In particular, he would replace the main “race” question by a “race or origin” question, with the instruction to “Mark one or more” of the following boxes: “White,” “Black, African Am., or Negro,” “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian”, “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” and “Some other race or origin.” Then the next question is to write in “specific race, origin, or enrolled or principal tribe.” Prewitt writes: His suggestion is to go with these questions in 2020 and 2030, then in 2040 “drop the race question and use only the national origin question.” He’s also relying on the American Community Survey to gather a lo
6 0.086058721 1166 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-13-Recently in the sister blog
7 0.081692278 1250 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-07-Hangman tips
8 0.075954773 1899 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-14-Turing chess tournament!
9 0.075948641 2071 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-21-Most Popular Girl Names by State over Time
10 0.07265579 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
11 0.072524577 2300 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-21-Ticket to Baaaath
12 0.070916295 852 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-13-Checking your model using fake data
13 0.070760265 429 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-24-“But you and I don’t learn in isolation either”
14 0.070760265 887 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-02-“It’s like marveling over a plastic flower when there’s a huge garden blooming outside”
15 0.069400907 1154 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-04-“Turn a Boring Bar Graph into a 3D Masterpiece”
16 0.067162909 168 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-28-Colorless green, and clueless
17 0.064639919 976 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-27-Geophysicist Discovers Modeling Error (in Economics)
18 0.064420059 1487 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-08-Animated drought maps
19 0.062708899 1521 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-04-Columbo does posterior predictive checks
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.082), (1, -0.041), (2, -0.006), (3, 0.015), (4, -0.015), (5, -0.005), (6, 0.039), (7, 0.005), (8, 0.019), (9, 0.001), (10, -0.023), (11, -0.012), (12, 0.014), (13, -0.001), (14, 0.003), (15, -0.011), (16, 0.016), (17, -0.006), (18, -0.002), (19, -0.029), (20, -0.019), (21, 0.011), (22, -0.019), (23, 0.004), (24, 0.001), (25, 0.003), (26, -0.005), (27, 0.024), (28, -0.019), (29, 0.001), (30, 0.025), (31, -0.002), (32, 0.012), (33, -0.012), (34, 0.035), (35, -0.005), (36, 0.013), (37, 0.019), (38, 0.03), (39, 0.005), (40, -0.022), (41, -0.01), (42, 0.025), (43, 0.005), (44, -0.037), (45, 0.029), (46, -0.01), (47, 0.013), (48, 0.002), (49, 0.018)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96991146 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: In response to my most recent post expressing bafflement over the Erving Goffman mystique, several commenters helped out by suggesting classic Goffman articles for me to read. Naturally, I followed the reference that had a link attached–it was for an article called Cooling the Mark Out, which analogized the frustrations of laid-off and set-aside white-collar workers to the reactions to suckers after being bilked by con artists. Goffman’s article was fascinating, but I was bothered by a tone of smugness. Here’s a quote from Cooling the Mark Out that starts on the cute side but is basically ok: In organizations patterned after a bureaucratic model, it is customary for personnel to expect rewards of a specified kind upon fulfilling requirements of a specified nature. Personnel come to define their career line in terms of a sequence of legitimate expectations and to base their self-conceptions on the assumption that in due course they will be what the institution allows persons t
3 0.73100555 1085 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-Laws as expressive
Introduction: June Carbone points out sometimes people want laws to express a sentiment. This isn’t just about Congress passing National Smoked Meats Week or San Francisco establishing itself as a nuclear-free zone, it also includes things such as laws against gay marriage, where, as Carbone writes, “we ‘care too much,’ when in fact we can do so little.” I don’t have anything to add here, and I expect many of you are familiar with this idea, but it’s new to me. I’d always been puzzled by people who want to use the law to express a sentiment, but perhaps it makes sense to be open-minded and to consider this as one of the purposes of the legislative process.
4 0.72080266 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
Introduction: I recently read a bizarre article by Janet Malcolm on a murder trial in NYC. What threw me about the article was that the story was utterly commonplace (by the standards of today’s headlines): divorced mom kills ex-husband in a custody dispute over their four-year-old daughter. The only interesting features were (a) the wife was a doctor and the husband were a dentist, the sort of people you’d expect to sue rather than slay, and (b) the wife hired a hitman from within the insular immigrant community that she (and her husband) belonged to. But, really, neither of these was much of a twist. To add to the non-storyness of it all, there were no other suspects, the evidence against the wife and the hitman was overwhelming, and even the high-paid defense lawyers didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to convince anyone of their client’s innocents. (One of the closing arguments was that one aspect of the wife’s story was so ridiculous that it had to be true. In the lawyer’s wo
5 0.71304601 1724 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-16-Zero Dark Thirty and Bayes’ theorem
Introduction: A moviegoing colleague writes: I just watched the movie Zero Dark Thirty about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. What struck me about it was: (1) Bayes theorem underlies the whole movie; (2) CIA top brass do not know Bayes theorem (at least as portrayed in the movie). Obviously one does not need to know physics to play billiards, but it helps with the reasoning. Essentially, at some point the key CIA agent locates what she strongly believes is OBL’s hidding place in Pakistan. Then it takes the White House some 150 days to make the decision to attack the compound. Why so long? And why, even on the eve of the operation, were senior brass only some 60% OBL was there? Fear of false positives is the answer. After all, the compound could belong to a drug lord, or some other terrorist. Here is the math: There are two possibilities, according to movie: OBL is in a compound (C) in a city or he is in the mountains in tribal regions. Say P(OBL in C) = 0.5. A diagnosis is made on
6 0.71122962 701 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-07-Bechdel wasn’t kidding
7 0.7071299 17 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-05-Taking philosophical arguments literally
8 0.70457041 1789 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-05-Elites have alcohol problems too!
9 0.69998848 2341 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-20-plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
10 0.69985431 1646 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-01-Back when fifty years was a long time ago
12 0.69585699 335 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-11-How to think about Lou Dobbs
13 0.69218522 139 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Life in New York, Then and Now
14 0.69078326 2251 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-17-In the best alternative histories, the real world is what’s ultimately real
15 0.68892604 707 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Human nature can’t be changed (except when it can)
16 0.68829483 1281 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-25-Dyson’s baffling love of crackpots
17 0.68825448 1210 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-12-Plagiarists are in the habit of lying
18 0.68708521 1370 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-07-Duncan Watts and the Titanic
19 0.68688005 1457 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Retro ethnic slurs
20 0.6865719 430 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-25-The von Neumann paradox
topicId topicWeight
[(8, 0.027), (16, 0.061), (24, 0.195), (28, 0.089), (40, 0.081), (55, 0.018), (60, 0.052), (68, 0.026), (73, 0.026), (80, 0.057), (86, 0.025), (88, 0.031), (99, 0.195)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97921407 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”).
2 0.89286733 1945 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-18-“How big is your chance of dying in an ordinary play?”
Introduction: At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln excepted). Characters in plays die all the time. I wonder what the chance is? Something between 5% and 10%, I’d guess. I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? P.S. The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented.
3 0.89189804 1258 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-10-Why display 6 years instead of 30?
Introduction: I continue to be the go-to guy for bad graphs. Today (i.e., 22 Feb), I received an email from Gary Rosin: I [Rosin] thought you might be interested in this graph showing the decline in median prices of homes since 1997. It exaggerates the proportions by using $150,000 as the floor, rather than zero. Indeed. Here’s the graph: A line plot, rather than a bar plot, would be appropriate here. Also, it’s weird that the headline says “10 years” but the graph has only 6 years. Why not give some perspective and show, say, 30 years?
4 0.88134289 166 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-27-The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research
Introduction: A famous computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra, was writing short memos on a daily basis for most of his life. His memo archives contains a little over 1300 memos. I guess today he would be writing a blog, although his memos do tend to be slightly more profound than what I post. Here are the rules (follow link for commentary), which I tried to summarize: Pursue quality and challenge, avoid routine. (“Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.”) When pursuing social relevance, never compromise on scientific soundness. (“We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific sou
Introduction: In this article , Oliver Sacks talks about his extreme difficulty in recognizing people (even close friends) and places (even extremely familiar locations such as his apartment and his office). After reading this, I started to wonder if I have a very mild case of face-blindness. I’m very good at recognizing places, but I’m not good at faces. And I can’t really visualize faces at all. Like Sacks and some of his correspondents, I often have to do it by cheating, by recognizing certain landmarks that I can remember, thus coding the face linguistically rather than visually. (On the other hand, when thinking about mathematics or statistics, I’m very visual, as readers of this blog can attest.) Anyway, in searching for the link to Sacks’s article, I came across the “ Cambridge Face Memory Test .” My reaction when taking this test was mostly irritation. I just found it annoying to stare at all these unadorned faces, and in my attempt to memorize them, I was trying to use trick
8 0.87180829 953 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-11-Steve Jobs’s cancer and science-based medicine
9 0.87170041 2017 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-11-“Informative g-Priors for Logistic Regression”
10 0.87135065 1087 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-“Keeping things unridiculous”: Berger, O’Hagan, and me on weakly informative priors
11 0.86996853 1455 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-12-Probabilistic screening to get an approximate self-weighted sample
12 0.86901116 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
13 0.8687104 747 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-06-Research Directions for Machine Learning and Algorithms
14 0.86832416 1155 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-05-What is a prior distribution?
15 0.86754239 1671 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-13-Preregistration of Studies and Mock Reports
16 0.86745423 2143 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-22-The kluges of today are the textbook solutions of tomorrow.
17 0.86739385 1367 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-05-Question 26 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
18 0.86730218 846 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-09-Default priors update?
19 0.86698824 1221 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-19-Whassup with deviance having a high posterior correlation with a parameter in the model?
20 0.86677146 1176 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-19-Standardized writing styles and standardized graphing styles