Noon in the stat dept (room 903 School of Social Work, at 122/Amsterdam). He’ll be talking about ways of finding fishy p-values. See here and here for background. This stuff is cool and important.
Archive of posts filed under the Miscellaneous Science category.
Cool one-day miniconference at Columbia Fri 12 Oct on computational and online social science
One thing we do here at the Applied Statistics Center is hold mini-conferences. The next one looks really cool. It’s organized by Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman (Microsoft Research, formerly at Yahoo Research), David Park (Columbia University), and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google). As with our other conferences, one of our goals is to mix the academic [...]
Model checking and model understanding in machine learning
Last month I wrote: Computer scientists are often brilliant but they can be unfamiliar with what is done in the worlds of data collection and analysis. This goes the other way too: statisticians such as myself can look pretty awkward, reinventing (or failing to reinvent) various wheels when we write computer programs or, even worse, [...]
Gregor Mendel’s suspicious data
Howard Wainer points me to a thoughtful discussion by Moti Nissani on “Psychological, Historical, and Ethical Reflections on the Mendelian Paradox.” The paradox, as Nissani defines it, is that Mendel’s data seem in many cases too good to be true, yet Mendel had a reputation for probity and it seems doubtful that he had a [...]
Reproducible science FAIL (so far): What’s stoppin people from sharin data and code?
David Karger writes: Your recent post on sharing data was of great interest to me, as my own research in computer science asks how to incentivize and lower barriers to data sharing. I was particularly curious about your highlighting of effort as the major dis-incentive to sharing. I would love to hear more, as this [...]
More from the sister blog
Anthropologist Bruce Mannheim reports that a recent well-publicized study on the genetics of native Americans, which used genetic analysis to find “at least three streams of Asian gene flow,” is in fact a confirmation of a long-known fact. Mannheim writes: This three-way distinction was known linguistically since the 1920s (for example, Sapir 1921). Basically, it’s [...]
Extreme events as evidence for differences in distributions
I think Lawrence Summers would like this paper by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy (link from Krugman via Palko). Hansen et al. write: The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime [...]
Retractions, retractions: “left-wing enough to not care about truth if it confirms their social theories, right-wing enough to not care as long as they’re getting paid enough”
Two news items. 1. A couple people pointed me to the uncovering of another fraudulent Dutch psychology researcher—this time it was Dirk Smeesters, rather than Diederik Stapel. It’s hard to keep these guys straight—they all pretty much have the same names and do the same things. Stapel and Smeesters also seem to live in the [...]
Steven Pinker’s unconvincing debunking of group selection
Steven Pinker writes: Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare [...]
Decline Effect in Linguistics?
Josef Fruehwald writes: In the past few years, the empirical foundations of the social sciences, especially Psychology, have been coming under increased scrutiny and criticism. For example, there was the New Yorker piece from 2010 called “The Truth Wears Off” about the “decline effect,” or how the effect size of a phenomenon appears to decrease [...]
The unitary nature of consciousness: “It’s impossible to be insanely frustrated about 2 things at once”
Dan Kahan writes: We all know it’s ridiculous to be able to go on an fMRI fishing trip & resort to post hoc story-telling to explain the “significant” correlations one (inevitably) observes (good fMRI studies *don’t* do this; only bad ones do– to the injury of the reputation of all the scholars doing good studies [...]
Cognitive psychology research helps us understand confusion of Jonathan Haidt and others about working-class voters
Here’s some psychology research that’s relevant to yesterday’s discussion on working-class voting. In a paper to appear in the journal Cognitive Science, Andrei Cimpian, Amanda Brandone, and Susan Gelman write: Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of [...]
And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like
This came in the email: Postdoctoral Researcher (3 years) in State-Space Modeling of Animal Movement and Population Dynamics in Universities of Turku and Helsinki, Finland We seek for a statistician/mathematician with experience in ecological modeling or an ecologist with strong quantitative training to join an interdisciplinary research team focusing on dispersal and dynamics of the [...]
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.)
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Story time meets the all-else-equal fallacy and the fallacy of measurement
Alex Tabarrok with a good catch: In Why Don’t Women Patent?, a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. [Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, and David Munroe] present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women. One might think that this is explained by the relative lack of women with science [...]
Multiple comparisons dispute in the tabloids
Yarden Katz writes: I’m probably not the first to point this out, but just in case, you might be interested in this article by T. Florian Jaeger, Daniel Pontillo, and Peter Graff on a statistical dispute [regarding the claim, "Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa"]. Seems directly relevant [...]
Hoe noem je?
Gerrit Storms reports on an interesting linguistic research project in which you can participate! Here’s the description: Over the past few weeks, we have been trying to set up a scientific study that is important for many researchers interested in words, word meaning, semantics, and cognitive science in general. It is a huge word association [...]
Recently in the sister blog
Lingsanity! What the sophisticates thought in September 2008 Political opinions of U.S. military The origin of essentialist reasoning
Difficulties in publishing non-replications of implausible findings
Eric Tassone points me to this news article by Christopher Shea on the challenges of debunking ESP. Shea writes: Earlier this year, a major psychology journal published a paper suggesting that there was some evidence for “pre-cognition,” a form of ESP. Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, is part of a [...]
“Groundbreaking or Definitive? Journals Need to Pick One”
Sanjay Srivastava writes: As long as a journal pursues a strategy of publishing “wow” studies, it will inevitably contain more unreplicable findings and unsupportable conclusions than equally rigorous but more “boring” journals. Groundbreaking will always be higher-risk. And definitive will be the territory of journals that publish meta-analyses and reviews. . . . Most conclusions, [...]
Controversy about average personality differences between men and women
Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article, “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a [...]