Pawel Sobkowicz writes: How many zombies do you know?’ Using indirect survey methods to measure alien attacks and outbreaks of the undead, Arxiv preprint arXiv:1003.6087, 2010 I hope you would find interesting the following paper, recently posted on arXiv: Aliens on Earth. Are reports of close encounters correct?, arXiv:1203.6805 This is soooooo much better than [...]
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Models, assumptions, and data summaries
I saw an analysis recently that I didn’t like. I won’t go into the details, but basically it was a dose-response inference, where a continuous exposure was binned into three broad categories (terciles of the data) and the probability of an adverse event was computed for each tercile. The effect and the sample size was [...]
News from the sister blog!
US National Academy of Sciences elects 84 new members (Please click through and read the whole thing.)
Google Translate for code, and an R help-list bot
What we did in our Stan meeting yesterday: Some discussion of revision of the Nuts paper, some conversations about parameterizations of categorical-data models, plans for the R interface, blah blah blah. But also, I had two exciting new ideas! Google Translate for code Wouldn’t it be great if Google Translate could work on computer languages? [...]
Selection bias, or, How you can think the experts don’t check their models, if you simply don’t look at what the experts actually are doing
My friend Seth, whom I know from Berkeley (we taught a course together on left-handedness), has a blog on topics ranging from thoughtful discussions of scientific evidence, to experiences with his unconventional weight-loss scheme, offbeat self-experimentation, and advocacy of fringe scientific theories, leavened with occasional dollops of cynicism and political extremism. I agree with Seth [...]
Huff the Magic Dragon
Upon reading this, Susan remarked, “Don’t you think it’s interesting that a guy who promotes smoking has a last name of ‘Huff’? Reminds me of the Dennis/Dentist studies.” Good point. P.S. As discussed in the linked thread, the great statistician R. A. Fisher was notorious for minimizing the risks of smoking. How does this connect [...]
Colorless green facts asserted resolutely
Thomas Basbøll [yes, I've learned how to smoothly do this using alt-o] gives some writing advice: What gives a text presence is our commitment to asserting facts. We have to face the possibility that we may be wrong about them resolutely, and we do this by writing about them as though we are right. This [...]
Modeling y = a + b + c
Brandon Behlendorf writes:
Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias
Via Yalda Afshar, a 2005 paper by Hans-Hermann Dubben and Hans-Peter Beck-Bornholdt: Publication bias is a well known phenomenon in clinical literature, in which positive results have a better chance of being published, are published earlier, and are published in journals with higher impact factors. Conclusions exclusively based on published studies, therefore, can be misleading. [...]
I suppose it’s too late to add Turing’s run-around-the-house-chess to the 2012 London Olympics?
Daniel Murrell writes: I see you have a blog post about turing chess . . . I’ve seen another reference to it but am unable to find a definitive source. Do you know of a source where I could find out about the history of the idea? My reply: You mean the run-around-the-house thing? I [...]
Clueless Americans think they’ll never get sick
Cassie Murdoch points to a report from a corporate survey: Sixty-two percent of U.S. employees say it’s not likely they or a family member will be diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer, a survey indicates. The Aflac WorkForces Report, a survey of nearly 1,900 benefits decision-makers and more than 6,100 U.S. workers, also indicated [...]
Understanding simulations in terms of predictive inference?
David Hogg writes: My (now deceased) collaborator and guru in all things inference, Sam Roweis, used to emphasize to me that we should evaluate models in the data space — not the parameter space — because models are always effectively “effective” and not really, fundamentally true. Or, in other words, models should be compared in [...]
“How to Lie with Statistics” guy worked for the tobacco industry to mock studies of the risks of smoking statistics
Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”: Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid [...]
Bad news about (some) statisticians
Sociologist Fabio Rojas reports on “a conversation I [Rojas] have had a few times with statisticians”: Rojas: “What does your research tell us about a sample of, say, a few hundred cases?” Statistician: “That’s not important. My result works as n–> 00.” Rojas: “Sure, that’s a fine mathematical result, but I have to estimate the [...]
Let’s play “Guess the smoother”!
Andre de Boer writes: In my profession as a risk manager I encountered this graph: I can’t figure out what kind of regression this is, would you be so kind to enlighten me? The points represent (maturity,yield) of bonds. My reply: That’s a fun problem, reverse-engineering a curve fit! My first guess is lowess, although [...]
Modeling probability data
Rafael Huber writes:
Dyson’s baffling love of crackpots
Peter Woit reports on the sympathy that well-known physicist Freeman Dyson has with crackpot theorists. The interesting part is that Dyson has positive feelings for these cranks, even while believing that their theories are completely wrong: In my [Dyson's] career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of [...]
ESPN is looking to hire a research analyst
This is somebody’s dream job, I’m sure . . . ESPN is looking for a statistician to join the HR department as a Research Analyst. The job will consist of analytical research and producing statistics about the people that work at ESPN. Topics of interest will include productivity, efficiency, and retention of employees, among other [...]
Non-Bayesian analysis of Bayesian agents?
Econometrician and statistician Dale Poirier writes: 24 years ago (1988, Journal of Economics Perspectives) I [Poirier] noted cognitive dissonance among some economists who treat the agents in their theoretical framework as Bayesians, but then analyze the data (even in the same paper!) as a frequentist. Recently, I have found similar cases in cognitive science. I [...]
Infographic of the year
This (by Frans Hofmeester) is excellent. What really makes it work, I think, is that it goes slowly enough. 2 minutes and 45 seconds is enough time for me, as a viewer, to feel like I’m living through each stage of development. If the video were sped up to go from 0 to 12 in [...]
“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion [...]
Please stop me before I barf again
Pointing to some horrible graphs, Kaiser writes, “The Earth Institute needs a graphics adviser.” I agree. The graphs are corporate standard, neither pretty or innovative enough to qualify as infographics, not informational enough to be good statistical data displays. Some examples include the above exploding pie chart, which, as Kaiser notes, is not merely ugly [...]
“Gross misuse of statistics” can be a good thing, if it indicates the acceptance of the importance of statistical reasoning
Rick Lightburn writes: I [Lightburn] am also a member of the group Business Analytics on LinkedIn. I am struck by what I perceive as the gross misuse of statistics by the members of this group, including things that (I thought) were taught in Introductory Statistics courses in business schools. I want to suggest to you [...]
Value-added assessment political FAIL
Jimmy points me to a sequence of posts (Analyzing Released NYC Value-Added Data Parts 1, 2, 3, 4) by Gary Rubinstein slamming value-added assessment of teachers. A skeptical consensus seems to have arisen on this issue. The teachers groups don’t like the numbers and it seems like none of the reformers trust the numbers enough [...]
More proposals to reform the peer-review system
Chris Said points us to two proposals to fix the system for reviewing scientific papers. Both the proposals are focused on biological research. Said writes: