agelman | February 15, 2010There are a few things that the French love, but all Americans--liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats--love to hate. In particular, I'm thinking of
1. Mimes
2. Jerry Lewis
3. Postmodern philosophy
I can't do much for you about items 1 and 2, but here's some French philosophizin' for ya (based on joint work with Cosma Shalizi).
agelman | February 14, 2010Elissa Brown sends these in. They're actually pretty good, with a quite reasonable Ogden-Nash-style rhythm and a certain amount of statistical content. It's good to know that the kids today are learning useful skills in their graduate programs.
You are perfect; I'd make no substitutions
You remind me of my favorite distributions
With a shape and a scale that I find reliable
You're as comforting as a two parameter Weibull
When I ask you a question and hope you answer truly
You speak as clearly as a draw from a Bernoulli
Your love of adventure is most influential
Just like the constant hazard…
agelman | February 10, 2010I just finished grading my final exams--see here for the problems and the solutions--and it got me thinking about a few things.
#1 is that I really really really should be writing the exams before the course begins. Here's the plan (as it should be):
- Write the exam
- Write a practice exam
- Give the students the practice exam on day 1, so they know what they're expected to be able to do, once the semester is over.
- If necessary, write two practice exams so that you have more flexibility in what should be on the final.
The students didn't do so well on my exam, and I totally blame myself,…
agelman | February 9, 2010Tyler Cowen quotes Barbara Demick as writing, "North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow." So do we, no? But in our case, they seem to come from 1930s B-movies
I wonder if there are almost as many words for prison in Russia, Turkmenistan, and the other leaders on the list. Apparently North Korea is off the charts, so perhaps they have ten times as many words for prison/jail as we do.
P.S. America includes a bunch of Inuits, so I guess we have multiple words for snow also!
agelman | February 8, 2010Ouch.
Here's the story (which Kaiser forwarded to me). The English medical journal The Lancet (according to its publisher, "the world's leading independent general medical journal") published an article in 1998 in support of the much-derided fringe theory that MMR vaccination causes autism. From the BBC report:
The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers were "false".
It comes after Dr Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have broken research rules by the General Medical Council. . . . Dr Wakefield was in the pay of solicitors…
Helping people fill out financial aid forms (at H&R Block!) increases the rate of college attendance
agelman | February 8, 2010Eric Bettinger, Bridget Terry Long, Philip Oreopoulos, and Lisa Sanbonmatsu write:
Growing concerns about low awareness and take-up rates for government support programs like college financial aid have spurred calls to simplify the application process and enhance visibility.
Here's the study:
H&R Block tax professionals helped low- to moderate-income families complete the FAFSA, the federal application for financial aid. Families were then given an estimate of their eligibility for government aid as well as information about local postsecondary options. A second randomly-chosen group of…
agelman | January 26, 2010Following up on our recent discussion (see also here) about estimates of war deaths, Megan Price pointed me to this report, where she, Anita Gohdes, Megan Price, and Patrick Ball write:
Several media organizations including Reuters, Foreign Policy and New Scientist covered the January 21 release of the 2009 Human Security Report (HSR) entitled, "The Shrinking Cost of War." The main thesis of the HRS authors, Andrew Mack et al, is that "nationwide mortality rates actually fall during most wars" and that "today's wars rarely kill enough people to reverse the decline in peacetime mortality that…
agelman | January 26, 2010You've all heard about how you can predict all sorts of things, from movie grosses to flu trends, using search results. I earlier blogged about the research of Yahoo's Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, Sebastien Lahaie, David Pennock, and Duncan Watts in this area. Since then, they've written a research article.
Here's a picture:
And here's their story:
We [Goel et al.] investigate the degree to which search behavior predicts the commercial success of cultural products, namely movies, video games, and songs. In contrast with previous work that has focused on realtime reporting of current trends,…
agelman | January 23, 2010First the scientific story, then the journalist, then my thoughts.
Part 1: The scientific story
From the Daily News:
Spanking makes kids perform better in school, helps them become more successful: study
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 not spanking children fail to hold up. I think of spanking as a dangerous tool, but then there are times when there is a job big…
agelman | January 23, 2010Alan Turing is said to have invented a game that combines chess and middle-distance running. It goes like this: You make your move, then you run around the house, and the other player has to make his or her move before you return to your seat. I've never played the game but it sounds like fun. I've always thought, though, that the chess part has got to be much more important than the running part: the difference in time between a sprint and a slow jog is small enough that I'd think it would always make sense just to do the jog and save one's energy for the chess game.
But when I was…
agelman | January 22, 2010Stephen 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 Bob Erikson and I have had about the importance, when fitting time-series cross-sectional models, of figuring out where your identification is coming from (this is an issue that's come up several times on this blog)--but I have no particular reason to doubt the estimates, which seem plausible enough…
agelman | January 22, 2010I 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 these positions make sense given the underlying ideology--while being incoherent with other ideologies (for example, those people who support positions A, B, not-C, and not-D). What's striking to me is how strongly people can feel that their beliefs on a particular issue flow from their being a…
agelman | January 14, 2010One 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 incoherence.
To put it another way, one person might strongly believe in A & B, while somebody else equally strongly feels that A & not-B go together. The logic of ideology is not fully determined by what goes into it.
I remember thinking about this several years ago regarding positions on…
agelman | January 14, 2010Interesting.
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.
agelman | January 10, 2010Coblogger 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 repeat Lawrence's note and then explain what bothers me.
Here's Lawrence:
In today's Wall Street Journal, Nate Silver of 538.com makes the case that most people are "horrible assessors of risk." . . . This trickiness can even trip up skilled applied statisticians like Nate Silver. This passage from his…
agelman | January 7, 2010One 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 "exacerbate" in 11th grade.) At a personal level, too, it's natural to spend more when we have more and cut back when we aren't doing so well. Every now and then you hear about a "rainy day fund" but my general impression is that these are never big enough to counter the business cycle.
Political…
agelman | January 6, 2010I 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 Infection, and we would love to share it to you and your readers.
I would like to discuss possible partnership opportunities with you. Please contact me if you are interested. Thank you.
June Smith
Assistant Editor
Infection.org
June.Infection@gmail.com
Just the "Assistant Editor," huh? I'm assuming…
agelman | January 4, 2010That'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 not spanking children fail to hold up. I think of spanking as a dangerous tool, but then there are times when there is a job big enough for a dangerous tool. You don't use it for all your jobs."
From the Daily Mail article:
Professor Gunnoe questioned 2,600 people about being smacked, of whom a…
agelman | January 4, 2010This 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. Change one of the L's to an H. And change them both to 2-point letters. The H is ridiculously overvalued.
3. V is horrible. Change one of them to an N and let the remaining V be worth 6 points.
4. Regarding Q: Personally, I'd go the Boggle way and have a Qu tile. But I respect that Scrabble…
agelman | January 1, 2010The 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 between the religions right and the religious left, is that the religious right worships a man, and the religious left worships . . . Mother Nature"). As is evidence-based medicine ("as religious as possible . . . just another excuse, really--to sneer at people"). And then there's the religion of…