agelman
Posts by this author
January 22, 2010
Stephen Dubner reports on an observational study of bike helmet laws, a study by Christopher. Carpenter and Mark Stehr that compares bicycling and accident rates among children among states that did and did not have helmet laws. In reading the data analysis, I'm reminded of the many discussions…
January 22, 2010
I posted a note the other day about the difference between internal and external coherence of political ideology. The basic idea is that, a particular person or small group can have an ideology (supporting positions A, B, C, and D, for example) that is perfectly internally coherent--that is, all…
January 14, 2010
One of the most fascinating things about political ideology is the following juxtaposition:
1. An ideology typically makes complete sense to the person holding the ideology--that is, it is internally coherent.
2. Different people have all sorts of different ideologies; thus, there is external…
January 14, 2010
Interesting.
The numbers should be rounded to the nearest percent--in a survey, you'll never get the precision to say anything like "45.2%"--but otherwise it's a clean display. Follow the link above for context and further discussion.
January 10, 2010
Coblogger John Sides quotes a probability calculation by Eric Lawrence that, while reasonable on a mathematical level, illustrates a sort of road-to-error-is-paved-with-good-intentions sort of attitude that bothers me, and that I see a lot of in statistics and quantitative social science.
I'll…
January 7, 2010
One thing I learned in econ class in 11th grade was that government policy should be counter-cyclical (spending more in recessions and cutting back in boom times), but that there's a lot of pressure to be pro-cyclical, which will tend to exacerbate business cycles. (Except I suppose they didn't say…
January 6, 2010
I got the following bizarre email, subject-line "scienceblogs.com/appliedstatistics/":
Hi,
After looking at your website, it is clear that you share the same concerns about Infections as we do here at Infection.org. Our website is dedicated to sharing the various up to date information regarding…
January 4, 2010
That's the headline in the Daily News:
The research, by Calvin College psychology professor Marjorie Gunnoe, found that kids smacked before age 6 grew up to be more successful . . . Gunnoe, who interviewed 2,600 people about being smacked, told the [London] Daily Mail: "The claims that are made for…
January 4, 2010
This comment by Tyler Cowen on Sarah Palin's poor Scrabble strategy reminds me of my blog a few months ago with six suggested Scrabble reforms. Without further ado:
1. Change one of the I's to an O. We've all had the unpleasant experience of having too many I's in our rack. What's the point?
2.…
January 1, 2010
The newest way to slam a belief you disagree with--or maybe it's not so new--is to call it "religious." For example, "Market Fundamentalism is a quasi-religious faith that unregulated markets will somehow always produce the best possible results," and so is global warming ("The only difference…
December 31, 2009
My colleague Macartan Humphreys recently came out with book, Coethnicity (with James Habyarimana, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein, addresses the question of why public services and civic cooperation tend to be worse in areas with more ethnic variation. To put it another way: people in…
December 30, 2009
There's some psychological/political/sociological phenomenon, I can't remember what it's called, in which you tend to think of yourself and your allies as a diverse coalition, while thinking of the people on the other side as a monolithic bloc. I was thinking about this when I read this comment by…
December 30, 2009
Yesterday I posted this graph, a parallel-coordinates plot showing health care spending and life expectancy in a sample of countries:
I remarked that a scatterplot should be better. Commenter Freddy posted a link to the data, so, just for laffs, I spent a few minutes making a scatterplot…
December 29, 2009
I recently blogged on the following ridiculous (to me) quote from economist Gary Becker:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
In…
December 29, 2009
David Blei points me to this report by Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow, and Itamar Rosenn on an estimate of the proportion of Facebook users who are white, black, hispanic, and asian (or, should I say, White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian).
Facebook users don't specify race/ethnicity,…
December 28, 2009
I recently reviewed Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, for the journal Political Psychology. I wish I thought this book was all wrong, because then I could've titled my review, "The Myth of the Myth of the Rational Voter." But, no, I saw a lot of truth in Caplan's arguments.…
December 21, 2009
Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
Dubner describes this as making "perfect sense…
December 20, 2009
The following is the last paragraph in a (positive) referee report I just wrote. It's relevant for lots of other articles too, I think, so I'll repeat it here:
Just as a side note, I recommend that the authors post their estimates immediately; I imagine their numbers will be picked up right away…
December 19, 2009
Mike Spagat writes:
I hope that this new paper [by Michael Spagat, Andrew Mack, Tara Cooper, and Joakim Kreutz] on serious errors in a paper on conflict mortality published in the British Medical Journal will interest you. For one thing I believe that it is highly teachable. Beyond I think that…
December 15, 2009
Here's the entry from the statistical lexicon:
The "All Else Equal" Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it's not gonna be.
My original note about this fallacy came a couple years ago when New York Times columnist John Tierney made the counterintuitive claim (later…
December 13, 2009
I recently came across some links showing readers how to make their own data analysis and graphics from scratch. This is great stuff--spreading power tools to the masses and all that.
From Nathan Yau: How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools and How to Make an Interactive Area Graph…
December 11, 2009
Jenny quotes Erica Wagner:
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. "If this typewriter doesn't like a story, it refuses to work," he said. "I don't get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the…
December 11, 2009
From Ubs:
How fast is Rickey? Rickey is so fast that he can steal more bases than Rickey. (And nobody steals more bases than Rickey.)
December 11, 2009
From the co-author of the celebrated Scholarpedia article on Bayesian statistics...
December 10, 2009
Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
Dubner describes this as making "perfect sense…
December 9, 2009
A journalist contacted me to ask what I thought about this article by Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, John Dykema, and David Lobell:
Armed conflict within nations has had disastrous humanitarian consequences throughout much of the world. Here we [Burke et al.] undertake the first…
December 5, 2009
Tyler Cowen writes:
Breaking a three-day stalemate, the Senate approved an amendment to its health care legislation that would require insurance companies to offer free mammograms and other preventive services to women.
The vote was 61 to 39, with three Republicans joining 56 Democrats and the two…
December 4, 2009
A few months ago I read Charles Seife's excellent book, "Sun in a bottle: The strange history of fusion and the science of wishful thinking." One thing I found charming about the book was that it lumped crackpot cold fusion, nutty plans to use H-bombs to carve out artificial harbors in Alaska,…
December 4, 2009
Tom Ball writes:
Didn't know if you had seen this article [by Jason Richwine] about political allegiance and IQ but wanted to make sure you did. I'm surprised the author hasn't heard or seen of your work on Red and Blue states! What do you think?
I think the article raises some interesting issues…
December 1, 2009
Steven Levitt writes:
My view is that the emails [extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia] aren't that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? When I told my father that I…