agelman | November 9, 2009I just received the following auto-reply:
I currently have no home internet service, and so may not be able to answer your message swiftly. Thank you for your patience.
This is sort of funny, partly because of the implied expectation that everyone has home internet service, and partly because I send him the message at around noon in his time zone on a Monday, so I wouldn't expect him to be at home anyway!
This also reminds me that I'm toying with the idea of removing myself from the internet for a period of three days each week, so I can get more work done. I have enough backlog blog entries…
agelman | November 9, 2009This graph that Brendan Nyhan posted the other day got some attention from my coblogger John Sides and others.
For example, Kevin Drum describes the chart as "pretty cool" and writes, "I think I'm more interested in the placement of senators themselves. Democrats are almost all bunched into a single grouping, with only four outliers. Republicans, by contrast, are spread through considerably more space on both the economic and social dimensions."
Matthew Yglesias also labels the chart as "cool" and answers Drum by describing the pattern as "an illustration of the importance of setting the…
agelman | November 6, 2009Michel Guillot says:
In the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, ethnic Russians have exhibited higher adult mortality than native ethnic groups (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, etc.) in spite of their higher socioeconomic status. The mortality disadvantage of ethnic Russians at adult ages appears to have even increased since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The most common explanation for this paradox, which we term the "Russian mortality paradox," is that deaths are better reported among ethnic Russians. In this study, we use detailed mortality data from Kyrgyzstan between 1959 and 1999 to…
agelman | November 6, 2009Frank Benford pointed me to this news article listing Statistician as the third best job in America. The article came out in January, so I assume this has already been spread and debunked many times by now.
What really interested me, though, was seeing Lumberjack in the last position. I remember thinking about lumberjacks when reading the work of Peter Dorman, who discussed the fact that, contrary to the usual theory of the "risk premium," risky jobs typically pay less than safe jobs. Lumberjack is about the riskiest job there is, and it doesn't pay well. (I discuss the topic a bit in our…
agelman | November 5, 2009Slipperiness of the term "risk aversion"
Med School Interview Questions
How to think about how to think about causality
agelman | November 4, 2009Aleks sends along this amusing news article by Jennifer Levitz:
A new study found that rates of marriage outside the faith were sharply curbed among young Jews who have taken "birthright" trips to Israel . . . Over the past decade, Taglit-Birthright Israel, a U.S. nonprofit founded by Jewish businessmen, has sponsored nearly 225,000 young Jewish adults for free 10-day educational tours of Israel as a way to foster Jewish identity. . . .
A study [by Brandeis University researcher Leonard Saxe and partly funded by Taglit-Birthright] showed that 72% of those who went on the trip married within…
agelman | November 4, 2009I learned about this from Aleks's Twitter feed.
It's got a slider bar at the bottom that lets you move continuously from the scale of a coffee bean to the scale of a carbon atom. Beyond its inherent coolness, this display answers a question I asked last year:
When I took science in 9th grade, I remember being disturbed by a gap in the story. From one direction, we were told about atoms and subatomic particles and how they clustered into molecules. From the other, we were told about cells--single-celled animals and single human cells, then multicelled animals, then larger things such as…
agelman | November 2, 2009Really we need the data on babies born 30 years ago, but this is still pretty stunning:
Argentina: MatÃas, #3; Mateo, #13
Australia/New South Wales: Matthew, #21
Australia/Victoria: Matthew, #21
Austria: Matthias, #19
Belgium: Mathis, #9; Matteo, #22; Mathias, #23; Mathéo, #35; Mats, #89; Mathieu, #90; Matthias, #97
Brazil: Matheus, #4
Canada/Alberta: Matthew, #8
Canada/British Columbia: Matthew, #6
Canada/Ontario: Matthew, #2
Canada/Quebec: Mathis, #11; Mathieu, #35; Mathias, #47; Matthew, #76; Mathys, #78; Matis, #84
Canada/Saskatchewan: Matthew, #10
Chile: Matias, #4
Czech Republic: Matej…
agelman | October 29, 2009I like paperback books that fit in my pocket. Unfortunately, about 25 years ago they pretty much stopped printing books in that size. Usually the closest you can get are those big floppy "trade paperbacks" or, in the case of the occasional Stephen King-type bestseller, a thick-as-a-brick paperback with big printing and fat pages.
It's not my place to question book marketers. My best theory is that book prices went up, for whatever reason, and then people wanted to feel like they're getting their money's worth: instead of a little pocket book for $2.95, you get the trade paperback for $16.…
agelman | October 29, 2009We started our Statistical Modeling blog in 2004 as a way that I could share information with students, postdocs, and others in my research group. The idea was that we would post ideas and use the blog to comment on them. The blog was open to the world so that outsiders could hear about what we were doing and comment also. (We also set up a wiki but we found it awkward to use, and then it got hacked, so we abandoned that idea.)
But I soon realized that the blog was really more of a place for me to throw out ideas--a convenient notebook where I could write things down and no longer have to…