agelman

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July 11, 2010
I realize that I haven't been posting much here. We had some plans to use the Applied Statistics blog for other purposes but it didn't really work out, so from now on you can go to my main blog for your statistical entertainment.
July 1, 2010
I've been told that it's zombie day, so I thought I'd link to this research article by Gelman and Romero: The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow…
June 23, 2010
Maggie Fox writes: Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret "real time" brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week. The scans were…
April 27, 2010
See discussion here. I've linked to it from here because ScienceBlogger and investigative journalist Tim Lambert has written some on the topic.
April 12, 2010
Mark Buchanan wrote a cover article for the New Scientist on random matrices, a heretofore obscure area of probability theory that his headline writer characterizes as "the deep law that shapes our reality." It's interesting stuff, and he gets into some statistical applications at the end, so I'll…
April 8, 2010
Felix Salmon comments on a report that econ czar Larry Summers is likely to be leaving the government: But if it's true, where is he leaving to? . . . "Wall Street consulting" is probably a polite way of saying "a return to DE Shaw", which happily paid Larry $5 million for one year of one-day-a-…
April 8, 2010
John discusses an argument by Bruce Bartlett that it made sense for conservatives to support Hillary Clinton in 2008, based on the following reasoning: Surveying the political landscape, I [Barttlett] didn't think the Republican candidate, whoever it might be, was very likely to win against whoever…
April 6, 2010
Sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher claim: Using nationally-representative data from the [1994] General Social Survey, we [Conley and Rauscher] find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive…
April 5, 2010
A few months ago, Yu-Sung and I summarized some survey results from the 1993-1996 General Social Survey. 56% of respondents said they attended an amateur or professional sports event" during the past twelve months, and it turned out that they were quite a bit more Republican than other Americans…
March 24, 2010
Our story begins with this article by Sanjay Kaul and George Diamond: The randomized controlled clinical trial is the gold standard scientific method for the evaluation of diagnostic and treatment interventions. Such trials are cited frequently as the authoritative foundation for evidence-based…
March 24, 2010
Deep in a long discussion, Phil writes, in evident frustration: I don't like argument by innuendo. Say what you mean; how hard is it, for cryin' out loud? Actually, it is hard! I've spent years trying to write directly, and I've often noticed that others have difficulty doing so. I always tell…
March 23, 2010
Kent Holsinger sends along this statistics discussion from a climate scientist. I don't really feel like going into the details on this one, except to note that this appears to be a discussion between two physicists about statistics. The blog in question appears to be pretty influential, with…
March 22, 2010
I came across this news article by Sharon Begley: Mind Reading Is Now Possible: A computer can tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone is thinking about a hammer and not pliers. The article came out in 2008. I'm just wondering what's been happening since in this area.
March 21, 2010
Felix Salmon gives the story. I haven't read the research articles, but it's an interesting story. As Salmon frames the book, it's Freakonomics-the-book vs. Freakonomics-style empirical analysis. P.S. I'm assuming that both numbers above have been rounded to the nearest billion.
March 16, 2010
Jeremy Miles pointed me to this article by Leonhard Held with what might seem like an appealing brew of classical, Bayesian, and graphical statistics: P values are the most commonly used tool to measure evidence against a hypothesis. Several attempts have been made to transform P values to minimum…
March 12, 2010
Sanjay Srivastava writes: Below are the names of some psychological disorders. For each one, choose one of the following: A. This is under formal consideration to be included as a new disorder in the DSM-5. B. Somebody out there has suggested that this should be a disorder, but it is not part of…
March 8, 2010
Brendan Nyhan links to this hilariously bad graph from the Wall Street Journal: It's cute how they scale the black line to go right between the red and blue lines, huh? I'm not quite sure how $7.25 can be 39% of something, while $5.15 is 10%, but I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation…
March 7, 2010
Brendan Nyhan passes along an article by Don Green, Shang Ha, and John Bullock, entitled "Enough Already about 'Black Box' Experiments: Studying Mediation Is More Difficult than Most Scholars Suppose," which begins: The question of how causal effects are transmitted is fascinating and inevitably…
March 4, 2010
This looks interesting: Jean-Luc Thiffeault Mathematics Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison "Do fish stir the ocean?" As fish or other bodies move through a fluid, they stir their surroundings. This can be beneficial to some fish, since the plankton they eat depends on a well-stirred…
February 15, 2010
There 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…
February 14, 2010
Elissa 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…
February 10, 2010
I 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…
February 9, 2010
Tyler 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…
February 8, 2010
Ouch. 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…
February 8, 2010
Eric 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…
January 26, 2010
Following 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…
January 26, 2010
You'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…
January 23, 2010
First 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…
January 23, 2010
Alan 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.…