agelman
Posts by this author
December 1, 2009
Commenter RogerH pointed me to this article by Welton, Ades, Carlin, Altman, and Sterne on models for potentially biased evidence in meta-analysis using empirically based priors. The "Carlin" in the author list is my longtime collaborator John, so I really shouldn't have had to hear about this…
November 28, 2009
Mark Rank and Thomas Hirschl recently published an estimate that 50% of American kids are on food stamps at some point during their first twenty years of life. Their estimate is based on an analysis of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, from 1968 through 1997.
This news article by…
November 27, 2009
. . . where shooting someone in the head gets you four months in jail and a $1200 fine. Not a biggie, though--apparently it was only a "warning shot."
More generally, I don't know that prison is the solution to this sort of problem. If you put a violent criminal behind bars, he very well might be…
November 27, 2009
If this stuff is for real, it's really impressive. (Link from Aleks's twitter.)
November 26, 2009
Julien Emile-Geay writes about a postdoc opportunity for a postdoc in climate
dynamics, applied statistics, or applied mathematics:
"Beyond the Hockey Stick: new approaches to paleoclimate reconstruction"
In 1998, a seminal study by Mann, Bradley and Hughes took advantage of climate signals…
November 25, 2009
This is all standard physics. Consider the two-slit experiment--a light beam, two slits, and a screen--with y being the place on the screen that lights up. For simplicity, think of the screen as one-dimensional. So y is a continuous random variable.
Consider four experiments:
1. Slit 1 is open…
November 23, 2009
I added a few entries recently. Currently, we have the following (in no particular order):
Mister P
The Secret Weapon
The Superplot
The Folk Theorem
The Pinch-Hitter Syndrome
Weakly Informative Priors
P-values and U-values
Conservatism
WWJD
Theoretical and Applied Statisticians
The Fallacy of the…
November 22, 2009
Seth reports on a report, funded by the sugar industry, that found bad effects of a diet soda additive called Splenda.
The background of the study is a delightful tangle. Seth reports:
One of the authors of the Duke study is a professor of psychiatry, Susan Schiffman. An earlier study of hers had…
November 22, 2009
A colleague sent me an article by Harry Selker and Alastair Wood about the rules for comparative effectiveness research ("evidence-based medicine") in the House and Senate versions of the health-care bill. The key point:
The [Senate] Finance Committee bill also includes language requested by…
November 22, 2009
Christopher Nelson writes:
Check out the GDP chart under "The New Triad" here:
It's supposed to compare GDP in China, India, and the US for three time periods but for my money, it's composed wrong. The bars should be for the years, not the countries. That way we could see total GDP in each year…
November 21, 2009
Jimmy points me to this article, "Why most discovered true associations are inflated," by J. P. Ioannidis. As Jimmy pointed out, this is exactly what we call type M (for magnitude) errors. I completely agree with Ioannidis's point, which he seems to be making more systematically than David…
November 18, 2009
Mark Thoma links to a report by Michael Shear on a leaked memo from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an assortment of national business groups opposed to President Obama's health-care reform effort are collecting money to finance an economic study that could be used to…
November 16, 2009
The other day I commented on an article by Peter Bancel and Roger Nelson that reported evidence that "the coherent attention or emotional response of large populations" can affect the output of quantum-mechanical random number generators.
I was pretty dismissive of the article; in fact elsewhere I…
November 15, 2009
I've been ranting lately about how I don't like the term "risk aversion," and I was thinking it might help to bring up this post from last year:
This discussion from Keynes (from Robert Skidelsky, linked from Steve Hsu) reminds me of a frustrating conversation I've sometimes had with economists…
November 12, 2009
A reporter contacted me to ask my impression of this article by Peter Bancel and Roger Nelson, which reports evidence that "the coherent attention or emotional response of large populations" can affect the output of quantum-mechanical random number generators.
I spent a few minutes looking at the…
November 11, 2009
Steve Levitt links to this article by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer on an educational innovation to improve the education of ethnic minority children. Dobbie and Fryer write:
Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) is arguably the most ambitious social experiment to alleviate poverty of our time. We [Dobbie…
November 11, 2009
Jonathan Raban writes:
For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one's own and full of pitfalls and 'false friends'. The word nature, for instance, means something different here - so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications…
November 10, 2009
From blog commenter Lemmus comes this list of the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages in 2009.
The thing that I find hard to believe is that the number of hits on most of these articles is so low. For example, if I google "World War II," the Wikipedia entry comes up first. But according to the list…
November 10, 2009
One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the…
November 9, 2009
I 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…
November 9, 2009
This 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…
November 6, 2009
Michel 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…
November 6, 2009
Frank 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…
November 5, 2009
Slipperiness of the term "risk aversion"
Med School Interview Questions
How to think about how to think about causality
November 4, 2009
Aleks 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…
November 4, 2009
I 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…
November 2, 2009
Really 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…
October 29, 2009
I 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…
October 29, 2009
We 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…