andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2229 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Govind Manian writes: I wanted to pass along a fragment from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books — which I am finding to be great stone soup — that reminded me of God is in Every Leaf : To the wise man nothing is great and nothing small…I believe he could write treatises on keyholes that sounded as weighty as a jus naturae and would be just as instructive. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown… (Notebook B, 33)
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree
Introduction: Govind Manian writes: I wanted to pass along a fragment from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books — which I am finding to be great stone soup — that reminded me of God is in Every Leaf : To the wise man nothing is great and nothing small…I believe he could write treatises on keyholes that sounded as weighty as a jus naturae and would be just as instructive. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown… (Notebook B, 33)
2 0.24631359 2153 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-29-“Statistics Done Wrong”
Introduction: Govind Manian points me to this online textbook by Alex Reinhart. It’s hard for me to evaluate because I am so close to the material. But on first glance it looks pretty reasonable to me.
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Introduction: I want a graph-paper-style notebook, ideally something lightweight—I’m looking to make notes, not art drawings—and not too large. I’m currently using a 17 x 22 cm notebook, which is a fine size. It also has pretty small squares, which I like. My problem with the notebook I have now is that the ink is too heavy—that is, the lines are too dark. I want very faint lines, just visible enough to be used as guides but not so heavy that to be overwhelming. The notebooks I see in the stores all have pretty dark lines. Any suggestions?
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Introduction: Burak Bayramli writes: I wanted to inform you on iPython Notebook technology – allowing markup, Python code to reside in one document. Someone ported one of your examples from ARM . iPynb file is actually a live document, can be downloaded and reran locally, hence change of code on document means change of images, results. Graphs (as well as text output) which are generated by the code, are placed inside the document automatically. No more referencing image files seperately. For now running notebooks locally require a notebook server, but that part can live “on the cloud” as part of an educational software. Viewers, such as nbviewer.ipython.org, do not even need that much, since all recent results of a notebook are embedded in the notebook itself. A lot of people are excited about this; Also out of nowhere, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation dropped a $1.15 million grant on the developers of ipython which provided some extra energy on the project. Cool. We’ll have to do that ex
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Introduction: I have this great talk on the above topic but nowhere to give it. Here’s the story. Several months ago, I was invited to speak at IEEE VisWeek. It sounded like a great opportunity. The organizer told me that there were typically about 700 people in the audience, and these are people in the visualization community whom I’d like to reach but normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to encounter. It sounded great, but I didn’t want to fly most of the way across the country by myself, so I offered to give the talk by videolink. I was surprised to get a No response: I’d think that a visualization conference, of all things, would welcome a video talk. In the meantime, though, I’d thought a lot about what I’d talk about and had started preparing something. Once I found out I wouldn’t be giving the talk, I channeled the efforts into an article which, with the collaboration of Antony Unwin, was completed about a month ago. It would take very little effort to adapt this graph-laden a
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same-blog 1 0.95294827 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree
Introduction: Govind Manian writes: I wanted to pass along a fragment from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books — which I am finding to be great stone soup — that reminded me of God is in Every Leaf : To the wise man nothing is great and nothing small…I believe he could write treatises on keyholes that sounded as weighty as a jus naturae and would be just as instructive. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown… (Notebook B, 33)
2 0.78447217 886 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-02-The new Helen DeWitt novel
Introduction: I read the excerpt in n+1. As one would expect of DeWitt, it was great, while being nothing at all like her other book. THe new book reminded me a bit of Philip K. Dick. Here’s a brief excerpt (which is not actually particularly PKD-like) of the main character talking to himself: “I don’t have what it takes,” he said. He had never said it before because saying it would be like admitting he couldn’t make the grade. I’m not pulling out this quote to sell you on the book. The lines just struck me because of the exquisite distinctions, the idea that “don’t have what it takes” is somehow different than “couldn’t make the grade,” the idea that this character, who expresses his thoughts in empty phrases, ends up assigning to these phrases a set of precise meanings that make sense only to him. One reason Lightning Rods was so fun and refreshing to read is that it’s a non-formula novel that, unlike ChabonFranzenLethemBakerEtc—and, for that matter, unlike Virginia Woolf—is about c
3 0.76654595 1457 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Retro ethnic slurs
Introduction: From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.
Introduction: Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover some technical material that he was too lazy to rewrite; rather, he put together an entire novel out of others’ material. Rowan writes (as part of a longer passage that itself appears to be dishonest; see the November 15, 2011 5:36 AM comment later on in the thread): I [Rowan] sat there with the books [by others] on my kitchen table and typed the passages up word for word. I had a plot in mind, initially, and looked for passages that would work within that context. People told me the initial plot was dull (spies being killed all over Europe – no one knows why), so I changed it to be more like the premise of McCarry’s “Second Sight” which was a whole lot
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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
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same-blog 1 0.94380635 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree
Introduction: Govind Manian writes: I wanted to pass along a fragment from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books — which I am finding to be great stone soup — that reminded me of God is in Every Leaf : To the wise man nothing is great and nothing small…I believe he could write treatises on keyholes that sounded as weighty as a jus naturae and would be just as instructive. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown… (Notebook B, 33)
2 0.93619752 471 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-17-Attractive models (and data) wanted for statistical art show.
Introduction: I have agreed to do a local art exhibition in February. An excuse to think about form, colour and style for plotting almost individual observation likelihoods – while invoking the artists privilege of refusing to give interpretations of their own work. In order to make it possibly less dry I’ll try to use intuitive suggestive captions like in this example TheTyranyof13.pdf thereby side stepping the technical discussions like here RadfordNealBlog Suggested models and data sets (or even submissions) would be most appreciated. I likely be sticking to realism i.e. plots that represent ‘statistical reality’ faithfully. K?
3 0.9358294 1437 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-31-Paying survey respondents
Introduction: I agree with Casey Mulligan that participants in government surveys should be paid, and I think it should be part of the code of ethics for commercial pollsters to compensate their respondents also. As Mulligan points out, if a survey is worth doing, it should be worth compensating the participants for their time and effort. P.S. Just to clarify, I do not recommend that Census surveys be made voluntary, I just think that respondents (who can be required to participate) should be paid a small amount. P.P.S. More rant here .
Introduction: Jouni Kerman did a cool bit of research justifying the Beta (1/3, 1/3) prior as noninformative for binomial data, and the Gamma (1/3, 0) prior for Poisson data. You probably thought that nothing new could be said about noninformative priors in such basic problems, but you were wrong! Here’s the story : The conjugate binomial and Poisson models are commonly used for estimating proportions or rates. However, it is not well known that the conventional noninformative conjugate priors tend to shrink the posterior quantiles toward the boundary or toward the middle of the parameter space, making them thus appear excessively informative. The shrinkage is always largest when the number of observed events is small. This behavior persists for all sample sizes and exposures. The effect of the prior is therefore most conspicuous and potentially controversial when analyzing rare events. As alternative default conjugate priors, I [Jouni] introduce Beta(1/3, 1/3) and Gamma(1/3, 0), which I cal
5 0.92735934 240 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-29-ARM solutions
Introduction: People sometimes email asking if a solution set is available for the exercises in ARM. The answer, unfortunately, is no. Many years ago, I wrote up 50 solutions for BDA and it was a lot of work–really, it was like writing a small book in itself. The trouble is that, once I started writing them up, I wanted to do it right, to set a good example. That’s a lot more effort than simply scrawling down some quick answers.
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