andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2172 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the l
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. [sent-1, score-0.297]
2 Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. [sent-2, score-0.184]
3 In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. [sent-5, score-0.462]
4 But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. [sent-6, score-0.4]
5 Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. [sent-10, score-0.276]
6 What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. [sent-13, score-0.209]
7 Now go back and write the literature review and the introduction. [sent-15, score-0.209]
8 Moving forward one last time: go to your results and conclusions and give alternative explanations. [sent-17, score-0.335]
9 An easy way to start is to take the first sentence from each of the first five paragraphs of the article. [sent-23, score-0.305]
10 You can find typos on your own time, but you need somebody else’s eyes to get a sense of the message you’re sending. [sent-28, score-0.315]
11 Some silly but useful advice: go through and remove all contentless words and phrases, such as: - “Of course” - “Note that” - “Interestingly” - “very” - “nice” - “We can see that” - “It is important to note that” Give descriptive captions to all your figures and tables. [sent-36, score-0.564]
12 For example, in Figure 1, add a sentence explaining why you call this observation “extreme. [sent-37, score-0.208]
13 Don’t forget these basic principles: (a) Don’t write something unless you expect people to read it. [sent-41, score-0.298]
14 (b) This principle holds for tables and figures as well. [sent-42, score-0.265]
15 Do you want the reader to know that in line 3, Min Obs is 894? [sent-44, score-0.22]
16 When an article is filled with numbers and words that you neither expect or want people to read, this distracts them from the content. [sent-48, score-0.334]
17 Maybe so, but I’d find the presentation more convincing if the authors gave some discussion of why the new methods work better, and—especially important—where the new methods would not be expected to perform well. [sent-53, score-0.226]
18 Also, I’d remove the last sentence from the abstract: pre-emptive apologies are not usually a good idea. [sent-64, score-0.404]
19 I don’t want to be picky-picky about the use of the passive voice, (“courses . [sent-74, score-0.198]
20 Or, more to the point, you need to figure out what message you’re trying to send, and to focus, focus, focus, focus, focus. [sent-90, score-0.31]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('conclusions', 0.232), ('sentence', 0.208), ('selected', 0.165), ('figures', 0.158), ('focus', 0.155), ('moving', 0.146), ('abstract', 0.14), ('message', 0.136), ('advice', 0.125), ('want', 0.12), ('courses', 0.119), ('remove', 0.119), ('descriptive', 0.118), ('expect', 0.117), ('methods', 0.113), ('tables', 0.107), ('write', 0.106), ('give', 0.103), ('back', 0.103), ('friend', 0.101), ('reader', 0.1), ('need', 0.099), ('distracts', 0.097), ('vivid', 0.097), ('start', 0.097), ('research', 0.096), ('obs', 0.092), ('writing', 0.088), ('captions', 0.088), ('rewriting', 0.088), ('background', 0.084), ('note', 0.081), ('typos', 0.08), ('min', 0.08), ('step', 0.079), ('campus', 0.078), ('digits', 0.078), ('passive', 0.078), ('trail', 0.078), ('hardest', 0.078), ('findings', 0.077), ('bold', 0.077), ('apologies', 0.077), ('care', 0.076), ('sent', 0.076), ('read', 0.075), ('applicability', 0.075), ('signals', 0.075), ('grabbed', 0.075), ('figure', 0.075)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000002 2172 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-14-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the l
2 0.67716604 1338 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-23-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch , using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the literature review
3 0.15148792 1428 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-25-The problem with realistic advice?
Introduction: In an article entitled 16 Weeks, Thomas Basbøll ruthlessly lays out the time constraints that limit what a student will be able to write during a semester and recommends that students follow a plan: Try to be realistic. If you need time for “free writing” or “thought writing” (writing to find out what you think) book that into your calendar as well, but the important part of the challenge is to find time to write down what you already know needs to be written. If you don’t yet know what you’re going to say this semester, then your challenge is, in part, to figure that out. But you should still find at least 30 minutes a day to write down something you know you want to say. Keep in mind that we are only talking about sixteen weeks in the very near future. . . . Assuming that you do have something say, then, here’s the challenge: write always and only when (and what) your calendar tells you to. Don’t write when “inspired” to do so (unless this happens to coincide with your writing s
4 0.14772412 727 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-23-My new writing strategy
Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
5 0.1462025 61 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-31-A data visualization manifesto
Introduction: Details matter (at least, they do for me), but we don’t yet have a systematic way of going back and forth between the structure of a graph, its details, and the underlying questions that motivate our visualizations. (Cleveland, Wilkinson, and others have written a bit on how to formalize these connections, and I’ve thought about it too, but we have a ways to go.) I was thinking about this difficulty after reading an article on graphics by some computer scientists that was well-written but to me lacked a feeling for the linkages between substantive/statistical goals and graphical details. I have problems with these issues too, and my point here is not to criticize but to move the discussion forward. When thinking about visualization, how important are the details? Aleks pointed me to this article by Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky, “A Tour through the Visualization Zoo: A survey of powerful visualization techniques, from the obvious to the obscure.” Th
6 0.13976142 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
7 0.13931243 1502 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-19-Scalability in education
9 0.13136657 2287 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-09-Advice: positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum
10 0.12460614 2111 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-23-Tables > figures yet again
11 0.12449743 302 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-28-This is a link to a news article about a scientific paper
12 0.12437935 1611 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-07-Feedback on my Bayesian Data Analysis class at Columbia
14 0.12068781 1403 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-02-Moving beyond hopeless graphics
15 0.12041134 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
16 0.12014011 372 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-27-A use for tables (really)
18 0.11901365 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.304), (1, -0.091), (2, -0.079), (3, 0.001), (4, 0.053), (5, -0.042), (6, 0.024), (7, 0.001), (8, 0.019), (9, -0.053), (10, 0.078), (11, -0.023), (12, 0.013), (13, -0.03), (14, 0.028), (15, -0.008), (16, -0.01), (17, -0.0), (18, -0.026), (19, 0.03), (20, 0.025), (21, -0.039), (22, 0.05), (23, 0.005), (24, -0.017), (25, -0.006), (26, 0.072), (27, 0.005), (28, 0.011), (29, 0.074), (30, 0.009), (31, 0.024), (32, -0.02), (33, 0.032), (34, 0.025), (35, -0.08), (36, -0.028), (37, -0.004), (38, 0.027), (39, -0.097), (40, 0.085), (41, -0.002), (42, 0.013), (43, 0.031), (44, 0.048), (45, -0.062), (46, -0.101), (47, -0.043), (48, -0.007), (49, 0.038)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.98357892 2172 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-14-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the l
2 0.96423459 1338 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-23-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch , using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the literature review
3 0.84959215 727 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-23-My new writing strategy
Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
4 0.8294583 1225 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-22-Procrastination as a positive productivity strategy
Introduction: Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self ( link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. I think that when I write this sort of thing it annoys people, because I’m lucky enough to be in a position to get a lot done—projects ranging from the ethics column to Stan—but I get frustrated when I spend a week trying to work, and then when the week’s over, I realize that all I did was respond to emails, review a bunch of journal submissions and grant proposals, and spend a lot of time staring into space while putting off whatever it was that I really thought I should be doing. I thought and thought, and I decided that my best strategy is what I call positive procrastination . Procrastination is of course typically considered a bad thing (or, as ironic-style writers would write, a Bad Thing). But you can actually use it, ju
5 0.81528544 1428 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-25-The problem with realistic advice?
Introduction: In an article entitled 16 Weeks, Thomas Basbøll ruthlessly lays out the time constraints that limit what a student will be able to write during a semester and recommends that students follow a plan: Try to be realistic. If you need time for “free writing” or “thought writing” (writing to find out what you think) book that into your calendar as well, but the important part of the challenge is to find time to write down what you already know needs to be written. If you don’t yet know what you’re going to say this semester, then your challenge is, in part, to figure that out. But you should still find at least 30 minutes a day to write down something you know you want to say. Keep in mind that we are only talking about sixteen weeks in the very near future. . . . Assuming that you do have something say, then, here’s the challenge: write always and only when (and what) your calendar tells you to. Don’t write when “inspired” to do so (unless this happens to coincide with your writing s
6 0.78900832 955 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-12-Why it doesn’t make sense to chew people out for not reading the help page
7 0.78375095 2287 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-09-Advice: positive-sum, zero-sum, or negative-sum
8 0.78084147 2225 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-26-A good comment on one of my papers
9 0.77979541 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
10 0.7785157 1502 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-19-Scalability in education
11 0.77366751 2080 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-28-Writing for free
12 0.77203625 1351 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-29-A Ph.D. thesis is not really a marathon
13 0.76990426 1520 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-03-Advice that’s so eminently sensible but so difficult to follow
14 0.76173711 1889 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-08-Using trends in R-squared to measure progress in criminology??
15 0.75911951 1413 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-11-News flash: Probability and statistics are hard to understand
16 0.75856763 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
17 0.7536571 103 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-22-Beach reads, Proust, and income tax
18 0.75262153 49 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-24-Blogging
19 0.75225997 1134 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-21-Lessons learned from a recent R package submission
topicId topicWeight
[(15, 0.022), (16, 0.059), (24, 0.244), (55, 0.02), (72, 0.024), (84, 0.011), (86, 0.021), (87, 0.014), (95, 0.019), (96, 0.089), (99, 0.363)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.98545718 1338 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-23-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch , using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the literature review
same-blog 2 0.98273396 2172 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-14-Advice on writing research articles
Introduction: From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the l
3 0.97848958 327 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-07-There are never 70 distinct parameters
Introduction: Sam Seaver writes: I’m a graduate student in computational biology, and I’m relatively new to advanced statistics, and am trying to teach myself how best to approach a problem I have. My dataset is a small sparse matrix of 150 cases and 70 predictors, it is sparse as in many zeros, not many ‘NA’s. Each case is a nutrient that is fed into an in silico organism, and its response is whether or not it stimulates growth, and each predictor is one of 70 different pathways that the nutrient may or may not belong to. Because all of the nutrients do not belong to all of the pathways, there are thus many zeros in my matrix. My goal is to be able to use the pathways themselves to predict whether or not a nutrient could stimulate growth, thus I wanted to compute regression coefficients for each pathway, with which I could apply to other nutrients for other species. There are quite a few singularities in the dataset (summary(glm) reports that 14 coefficients are not defined because of sin
4 0.97603512 1176 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-19-Standardized writing styles and standardized graphing styles
Introduction: Back in the 1700s—JennyD can correct me if I’m wrong here—there was no standard style for writing. You could be discursive, you could be descriptive, flowery, or terse. Direct or indirect, serious or funny. You could construct a novel out of letters or write a philosophical treatise in the form of a novel. Nowadays there are rules. You can break the rules, but then you’re Breaking. The. Rules. Which is a distinctive choice all its own. Consider academic writing. Serious works of economics or statistics tend to be written in a serious style in some version of plain academic English. The few exceptions (for example, by Tukey, Tufte, Mandelbrot, and Jaynes) are clearly exceptions, written in styles that are much celebrated but not so commonly followed. A serious work of statistics, or economics, or political science could be written in a highly unconventional form (consider, for example, Wallace Shawn’s plays), but academic writers in these fields tend to stick with the sta
5 0.9759593 2023 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-14-On blogging
Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
6 0.97521901 2109 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-21-Hidden dangers of noninformative priors
7 0.97497141 2129 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-10-Cross-validation and Bayesian estimation of tuning parameters
8 0.9748714 970 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-24-Bell Labs
10 0.97370309 1023 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-22-Going Beyond the Book: Towards Critical Reading in Statistics Teaching
11 0.97354478 1941 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-16-Priors
12 0.97342491 787 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-05-Different goals, different looks: Infovis and the Chris Rock effect
13 0.97337669 2208 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-12-How to think about “identifiability” in Bayesian inference?
14 0.97322565 1644 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-30-Fixed effects, followed by Bayes shrinkage?
15 0.97318363 511 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-11-One more time on that ESP study: The problem of overestimates and the shrinkage solution
16 0.97259659 247 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-01-How does Bayes do it?
17 0.97247964 1966 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-03-Uncertainty in parameter estimates using multilevel models
18 0.97190344 899 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-10-The statistical significance filter
19 0.97122037 1151 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-03-Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Senn
20 0.97080082 1240 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-02-Blogads update