Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Sociology category.
A tale of two discussion papers
Over the years I’ve written a dozen or so journal articles that have appeared with discussions, and I’ve participated in many published discussions of others’ articles as well. I get a lot out of these article-discussion-rejoinder packages, in all three of my roles as reader, writer, and discussant. Part 1: The story of an unsuccessful [...]
Against optimism about social science
Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. [...]
Jesus historian Niall Ferguson and the improving standards of public discourse
History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports:
“Tragedy of the science-communication commons”
I’ve earlier written that science is science communication—that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists [...]
Fascinating graphs from facebook data
Yair points us to this page full of wonderful graphs from the Stephen Wolfram blog. Here are a few: And some words: People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also [...]
The Tweets-Votes Curve
Fabio Rojas points me to this excellently-titled working paper by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, and himself: Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this ques- tion using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided [...]
Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” and the measurement of social and political divisions
Following up on our blog discussions a year ago, I published a review of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart,” for the journal Statistics, Politics, and Policy. I invited Murray to publish a response, and he did so. Here’s the abstract to my review: This article examines some claims made in a recent popular book [...]
Exponential increase in the number of stat majors
Joe Blitztein sent around the following graph: (The x-axis goes from 2000 to 2012 and the y=axis goes from 0 to 120.) 100 statistics majors (this combines sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but still, that’s a lot more than the 1 or 2 or 3 a year we’re used to seeing). At first I was like, [...]
Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously
Noam Chomsky elicits a lot of emotional reactions. I’ve talked with some linguists who think Chomsky’s been a real roadblock to research in recent decades. Other linguists love Chomsky, but I think they’re the kind of linguists I wouldn’t spend much time talking with. Many people admire Chomsky’s political activism, but sociologist blogger Fabio Rojas [...]
Subway series
Abby points us to a spare but cool visualization. I don’t like the curvy connect-the-dots line, but my main suggested improvement would be a closer link to the map. Showing median income on census tracts along subway lines is cool, but ultimately it’s a clever gimmick that pulls me in and makes me curious about [...]
Memo to Reinhart and Rogoff: I think it’s best to admit your errors and go on from there
Jeff Ratto points me to this news article by Dean Baker reporting the work of three economists, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, who found errors in a much-cited article by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff analyzing historical statistics of economic growth and public debt. Mike Konczal provides a clear summary; that’s where I [...]
Why girls do better in school
Wayne Folta writes, “In light of your recent blog post on women in higher education, here’s one I just read about on a techie website regarding elementary education”: Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? New research . . . suggests that it’s because [...]
Another Feller theory
My paper with Christian Robert, “Not Only Defended But Also Applied”: The Perceived Absurdity of Bayesian Inference, was recently published in The American Statistician, along with discussions by Steve Fienberg, Steve Stigler, Deborah Mayo, and Wesley Johnson, and our rejoinder, The Anti-Bayesian Moment and Its Passing. These articles revolved around the question of why the [...]
Racism!
I was reading a book of Alfred Kazin’s letters—I don’t know if they’d be so interesting to someone who hadn’t already read a bunch of his stuff, but I found them pretty interesting—and came across this amazing bit, dated August 11, 1957: No, really, Al. Tell us what you really feel. This was in his [...]
“Two Dogmas of Strong Objective Bayesianism”
Prasanta Bandyopadhyay and Gordon Brittan write: We introduce a distinction, unnoticed in the literature, between four varieties of objective Bayesianism. What we call ‘strong objective Bayesianism’ is characterized by two claims, that all scientific inference is ‘logical’ and that, given the same background information two agents will ascribe a unique probability to their priors. We [...]
Likelihood Ratio ≠ 1 Journal
Dan Kahan writes: The basic idea . . . is to promote identification of study designs that scholars who disagree about a proposition would agree would generate evidence relevant to their competing conjectures—regardless of what studies based on such designs actually find. Articles proposing designs of this sort would be selected for publication and only [...]
Retraction watch
Here (from the Annals of Applied Statistics). “Thus, arguably, all of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise.” As with retractions in general, it makes me wonder about the rest of this guy’s work. Dr. Anil Potti would be pooping in his pants spinning in his retirement.
Tibshirani announces new research result: A significance test for the lasso
Lasso and me For a long time I was wrong about lasso. Lasso (“least absolute shrinkage and selection operator”) is a regularization procedure that shrinks regression coefficients toward zero, and in its basic form is equivalent to maximum penalized likelihood estimation with a penalty function that is proportional to the sum of the absolute values [...]
Yes, the decision to try (or not) to have a child can be made rationally
Philosopher L. A. Paul and sociologist Kieran Healy write: Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice. When surprising results surface about the dissatisfaction many parents experience, telling yourself that you knew it wouldn’t be that way for you is simply a rationalization. The same is true [...]
Plaig
This, from Jeremy Duns (previously encountered here), resonates with me: When I asked Thayer why he hadn’t cited Zeigler, he told me very forcefully that he had cited everything, and accused me of libelling him: this means, presumably, that he accused me of libel without checking his article and seeing the ‘citations’ weren’t there. And [...]
Cool GSS training video! And cumulative file 1972-2012!
Felipe Osorio made the above video to help people use the General Social Survey and R to answer research questions in social science. Go for it! Meanwhile, Tom Smith reports: The initial release of the General Social Survey (GSS), cumulative file for 1972-2012 is now on our website. Codebooks and copies of questionnaires will be [...]
Janet Mertz’s response to “The Myth of American Meritocracy”
The following is source material regarding our recent discussion of Jewish admission to Ivy League colleges. I’m posting it for the same reason that I earlier posted a message from Ron Unz, out of a goal to allow the data and arguments to be made as clearly as possible.
Watership Down, thick description, applied statistics, immutability of stories, and playing tennis with a net
For the past several months I’ve been circling around and around some questions related to the issue of how we build trust in statistical methods and statistical results. There are lots of examples but let me start with my own career. My most cited publications are my books and my methods papers, but I think [...]
Different modes of discourse
Political/business negotiation vs. scholarly communication. In a negotiation you hold back, you only make concessions if you have to or in exchange for something else. In scholarly communication you look for your own mistakes, you volunteer information to others, and if someone points out a mistake, you learn from it. (Just a couple days ago, [...]