andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2212 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In our Cliff thread from yesterday, sociologist Philip Cohen pointed to his discussions in the decline in the popularity of the name Mary. One thing that came up was the traditional trendiness of girls’ names. So I thought I’d share my thoughts from a couple of years ago, as reported by David Leonhardt: Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing. By the 1990s, of course, not many girls from the 1880s were still around, and that era’s names could seem fresh again. This search for youthfulness makes girls’ names more volatile — and increasingly so, as more statistics about names become available and parents grow more willing to experiment
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 In our Cliff thread from yesterday, sociologist Philip Cohen pointed to his discussions in the decline in the popularity of the name Mary. [sent-1, score-0.417]
2 One thing that came up was the traditional trendiness of girls’ names. [sent-2, score-0.158]
3 So I thought I’d share my thoughts from a couple of years ago, as reported by David Leonhardt: Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. [sent-3, score-1.041]
4 William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. [sent-4, score-0.202]
5 With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing. [sent-5, score-1.661]
6 By the 1990s, of course, not many girls from the 1880s were still around, and that era’s names could seem fresh again. [sent-6, score-1.099]
7 This search for youthfulness makes girls’ names more volatile — and increasingly so, as more statistics about names become available and parents grow more willing to experiment in an attempt to get out in front of the curve. [sent-7, score-1.893]
8 The 1,000 top girl names accounted for only 67 percent of all girl names last year, down from 91 percent in 1960 and compared with 79 percent for boys last year. [sent-8, score-2.504]
9 And you’ll probably enjoy these graphs, if you didn’t see them when they came out : It’s like that y’all. [sent-9, score-0.16]
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same-blog 1 1.0 2212 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-15-Mary, Mary, why ya buggin
Introduction: In our Cliff thread from yesterday, sociologist Philip Cohen pointed to his discussions in the decline in the popularity of the name Mary. One thing that came up was the traditional trendiness of girls’ names. So I thought I’d share my thoughts from a couple of years ago, as reported by David Leonhardt: Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing. By the 1990s, of course, not many girls from the 1880s were still around, and that era’s names could seem fresh again. This search for youthfulness makes girls’ names more volatile — and increasingly so, as more statistics about names become available and parents grow more willing to experiment
2 0.40779817 2211 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-14-The popularity of certain baby names is falling off the clifffffffffffff
Introduction: Ubs writes: I was looking at baby name data last night and I stumbled upon something curious. I follow the baby names blog occasionally but not regularly, so I’m not sure if it’s been noticed before. Let me present it like this: Take the statement… Of the top 100 boys and top 100 girls names, only ___% contain the letter __. I’m using the SSA baby names page, so that’s U.S. births, and I’m looking at the decade of 2000-2009 (so kids currently aged 4 to 13). Which letters would you expect to have the lowest rate of occurrence? As expected, the lowest score is for Q, which appears zero times. (Jacqueline ranks #104 for girls.) It’s the second lowest that surprised me. (… You can pause and try to guess now. Spoilers to follow.) Of the other big-point Scrabble letters, Z appears in four names (Elizabeth, Zachary, Mackenzie, Zoe) and X in six, of which five are closely related (Alexis, Alexander, Alexandra, Alexa, Alex, Xavier). J is heavily overrepresented, especial
3 0.25739279 2071 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-21-Most Popular Girl Names by State over Time
Introduction: The following should be catnip for Andrew. It combines (a) statistics on baby names, (b) time series, and (c) statistics broken down by state. All in one really fun animated visualization by Reuben Fischer-Baum : Sixty Years of the Most Popular Names for Girls As Mark Liberman commented in his re-post on Language Log , this data cries out for some multilevel modeling.
4 0.2219597 1919 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-29-R sucks
Introduction: I was trying to make some new graphs using 5-year-old R code and I got all these problems because I was reading in files with variable names such as “co.fipsid” and now R is automatically changing them to “co_fipsid”. Or maybe the names had underbars all along, and the old R had changed them into dots. Whatever. I understand that backward compatibility can be hard to maintain, but this is just annoying.
5 0.21520738 2141 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-20-Don’t douthat, man! Please give this fallacy a name.
Introduction: Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m always on the lookout for new items for the lexicon . It’s been a good month on that front. In addition to the Garden of Forking Paths, I’ve encountered two entirely new (to me) fallacies. The first of the two new fallacies has a name that’s quite a mouthful; I’ll hold off on telling you about it right now, as Eric Loken and I are currently finishing a paper on it. Once the paper’s done, I’ll post it in the usual place (or here , once it is scheduled to be published) and I’ll add it to the lexicon as well. What I want to talk about today is a fallacy I noticed a couple days ago. I can’t think of a good name for it. And that’s where you, the readers, come in. Please give this fallacy a name! Here’s the story. The other day on the sister blog I reported on a pair of studies involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely
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Introduction: In our Cliff thread from yesterday, sociologist Philip Cohen pointed to his discussions in the decline in the popularity of the name Mary. One thing that came up was the traditional trendiness of girls’ names. So I thought I’d share my thoughts from a couple of years ago, as reported by David Leonhardt: Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing. By the 1990s, of course, not many girls from the 1880s were still around, and that era’s names could seem fresh again. This search for youthfulness makes girls’ names more volatile — and increasingly so, as more statistics about names become available and parents grow more willing to experiment
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Introduction: Ubs writes: I was looking at baby name data last night and I stumbled upon something curious. I follow the baby names blog occasionally but not regularly, so I’m not sure if it’s been noticed before. Let me present it like this: Take the statement… Of the top 100 boys and top 100 girls names, only ___% contain the letter __. I’m using the SSA baby names page, so that’s U.S. births, and I’m looking at the decade of 2000-2009 (so kids currently aged 4 to 13). Which letters would you expect to have the lowest rate of occurrence? As expected, the lowest score is for Q, which appears zero times. (Jacqueline ranks #104 for girls.) It’s the second lowest that surprised me. (… You can pause and try to guess now. Spoilers to follow.) Of the other big-point Scrabble letters, Z appears in four names (Elizabeth, Zachary, Mackenzie, Zoe) and X in six, of which five are closely related (Alexis, Alexander, Alexandra, Alexa, Alex, Xavier). J is heavily overrepresented, especial
3 0.67587781 2333 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-13-Personally, I’d rather go with Teragram
Introduction: This one stunned me but perhaps will be no surprise to those of you who are under 30. Laura Wattenberg writes : I live in a state where a baby girl is more likely to be named Margaret than Nevaeh. Let me restate that: I live in the only state where a baby girl is more likely to be named Margaret than Nevaeh. Wow. But I guess you can’t really use the name Teragram for a baby girl, it will make it sound like she’s fat.
4 0.67033684 739 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-31-When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
Introduction: That cute picture is of toddler FDR in a dress, from 1884. Jeanne Maglaty writes : A Ladies’ Home Journal article [or maybe from a different source, according to a commenter] in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago. Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s . . . When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, w
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Introduction: I was flipping through the paper yesterday and noticed something which I think is a bit of innumeracy–although I don’t have all the facts at my disposal so I can’t be sure. It came in an item by Robert Woletz, society editor of the New York Times, in response to the following letter from Max Sarinsky ( click here and scroll down): The heavy majority of couples typically featured in the Sunday wedding announcements either attended elite universities, hold corporate management positions or have parents with corporate management positions. It’s nice to learn about the nuptials of the privileged, but Times readers would benefit from learning about a more representative sampling of weddings in our diverse city. I [Sarinksy] am curious as to how editors select which announcements to publish, and why editors don’t make a sustained effort to include different types of couples. Woletz replied: The Weddings/Celebrations pages are truly open to everyone, and The Times persistentl
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Introduction: In our Cliff thread from yesterday, sociologist Philip Cohen pointed to his discussions in the decline in the popularity of the name Mary. One thing that came up was the traditional trendiness of girls’ names. So I thought I’d share my thoughts from a couple of years ago, as reported by David Leonhardt: Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing. By the 1990s, of course, not many girls from the 1880s were still around, and that era’s names could seem fresh again. This search for youthfulness makes girls’ names more volatile — and increasingly so, as more statistics about names become available and parents grow more willing to experiment
Introduction: A reporter emailed me the other day with a question about a case I’d never heard of before, a company called Herbalife that is being accused of being a pyramid scheme. The reporter pointed me to this document which describes a survey conducted by “a third party firm called Lieberman Research”: Two independent studies took place using real time (aka “river”) sampling, in which respondents were intercepted across a wide array of websites Sample size of 2,000 adults 18+ matched to U.S. census on age, gender, income, region and ethnicity “River sampling” in this case appears to mean, according to the reporter, that “people were invited into it through online ads.” The survey found that 5% of U.S. households had purchased Herbalife products during the past three months (with a “0.8% margin of error,” ha ha ha). They they did a multiplication and a division to estimate that only 8% of households who bought these products were Herbalife distributors: 480,000 active distributor
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Introduction: Ubs writes: I was looking at baby name data last night and I stumbled upon something curious. I follow the baby names blog occasionally but not regularly, so I’m not sure if it’s been noticed before. Let me present it like this: Take the statement… Of the top 100 boys and top 100 girls names, only ___% contain the letter __. I’m using the SSA baby names page, so that’s U.S. births, and I’m looking at the decade of 2000-2009 (so kids currently aged 4 to 13). Which letters would you expect to have the lowest rate of occurrence? As expected, the lowest score is for Q, which appears zero times. (Jacqueline ranks #104 for girls.) It’s the second lowest that surprised me. (… You can pause and try to guess now. Spoilers to follow.) Of the other big-point Scrabble letters, Z appears in four names (Elizabeth, Zachary, Mackenzie, Zoe) and X in six, of which five are closely related (Alexis, Alexander, Alexandra, Alexa, Alex, Xavier). J is heavily overrepresented, especial
4 0.93791866 1801 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-13-Can you write a program to determine the causal order?
Introduction: Mike Zyphur writes: Kaggle.com has launched a competition to determine what’s an effect and what’s a cause. They’ve got correlated variables, they’re deprived of context, and you’re asked to determine the causal order. $5,000 prizes. I followed the link and the example they gave didn’t make much sense to me (the two variables were temperature and altitude of cities in Germany, and they said that altitude causes temperature). It has the feeling to me of one of those weird standardized tests we used to see sometimes in school, where there’s no real correct answer so the goal is to figure out what the test-writer wanted you to say. Nonetheless, this might be of interest, so I’m passing it along to you.
5 0.93559456 1245 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-03-Redundancy and efficiency: In praise of Penn Station
Introduction: In reaction to this news article by Michael Kimmelman, I’d like to repost this from four years ago: Walking through Penn Station in New York, I remembered how much I love its open structure. By “open,” I don’t mean bright and airy. I mean “open” in a topological sense. The station has three below-ground levels–the uppermost has ticket counters (and, what is more relevant nowadays, ticket machines), some crappy stores and restaurants, and a crappy waiting area. The middle level has Long Island Rail Road ticket counters, some more crappy stores and restaurants, and entrances to the 7th and 8th Avenue subway lines. The lower level has train tracks and platforms. There are stairs, escalators, and elevators going everywhere. As a result, it’s easy to get around, there are lots of shortcuts, and the train loads fast–some people come down the escalators and elevators from the top level, others take the stairs from the middle level. The powers-that-be keep threatening to spend a coupl
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