Wegman: “It’s not reprinted 100 percent like you had it.” Wikipedia guy: “No, you added another paragraph at the end and you changed the headline. . . . You even copied the typos that I’ve corrected on my website. It was taken verbatim and reprinted in your paper.” The original author got a check for [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Zombies category.
Picking on Stephen Wolfram
Shalizi. But this one is still my favorite.
Related to z-statistics
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Another day, another plagiarist
This one isn’t actually new, but it’s new to me. It involves University of Michigan business school professor Karl Weick. Here’s the relevant paragraph of Weick’s Wikipedia entry (as of 13 Apr 2012): In several published articles, Weick related a story that originally appeared in a poem by Miroslav Holub that was published in the [...]
Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal. It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals [...]
Attention pollution
I just got called by a robo-poll. I really think there should be a law that anyone who wants to call like this should be a real person and supply their home phone number. This sort of one-way contact is nothing more than harassment. As well as poisoning the well by reducing the inclination of [...]
Same old story
In a review of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” William Saletan writes: You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong. . . . Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s [...]
A kaleidoscope of responses to Dubner’s criticisms of our criticisms of Freaknomics
Jonathan Cantor pointed me to a new blog post by Stephen Dubner in which he expresses disagreement with what Kaiser and I wrote in our American Scientist article, “Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?”. In response, I thought it would be interesting to go “meta” here by considering all the different ways ways that I could reply [...]
A personal bit of spam, just for me!
Hi Andrew, I came across your site while searching for blogs and posts around American obesity and wanted to reach out to get your readership’s feedback on an infographic my team built which focuses on the obesity of America and where we could end up at the going rate. If you’re interested, let’s connect. Have [...]
Plagiarists are in the habit of lying
Amy Hundley writes in the New Yorker about a notorious recent case of unacknowledged literary quilting: I [Hundley] was the editor at Grove/Atlantic to whom Quentin Rowan’s novel “Appearance and the Park” was submitted (“The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, February 13th & 20th). Widdicombe writes that the editor in question thought that “its plot [...]
A quick suggestion
Next time Stephen Wolfram is on the phone, maybe he could call the head of Human Resources at his company and get this guy fired?
I’m officially no longer a “rogue”
In our Freakonomics: What Went Wrong article, Kaiser and I wrote: Levitt’s publishers characterize him as a “rogue economist,” yet he received his Ph.D. from MIT, holds the title of Alvin H. Baum Professor at the University of Chicago, and has served as editor of the completely mainstream Journal of Political Economy. Further “rogue” credentials [...]
Joshua Clover update
Surfing the blogroll, I found myself on Helen DeWitt’s page and noticed the link to the Joshua Clover, alias Jane Dark. I hadn’t checked out Clover for awhile (see my reactions here and here), so I decided to head on over. Here’s what it looked like: “The case against the Federal minimum wage,” huh? That [...]
If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?
Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover [...]
Charles Murray [perhaps] does a Tucker Carlson, provoking me to unleash the usual torrent of graphs
Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson, that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve [...]
What is a prior distribution?
Some recent blog discussion revealed some confusion that I’ll try to resolve here. I wrote that I’m not a big fan of subjective priors. Various commenters had difficulty with this point, and I think the issue was most clearly stated by Bill Jeffreerys, who wrote: It seems to me that your prior has to reflect [...]
“Turn a Boring Bar Graph into a 3D Masterpiece”
Jimmy sends in this. Steps include “Make whimsical sparkles by drawing an ellipse using the Ellipse Tool,” “Rotate the sparkles . . . Give some sparkles less Opacity by using the Transparency Palette,” and “Add a haze around each sparkle by drawing a white ellipse using the Ellipse Tool.” The punchline: Now, the next time [...]
Web equation
Aleks sends along this app which, while cute, is not quite “killer” for me. I find it more difficult to write the equation using the trackpad than to simply type it in using Latex! But I suppose it could be useful to beginners who want their papers to look more like science.
Suggested resolution of the Bem paradox
There has been an increasing discussion about the proliferation of flawed research in psychology and medicine, with some landmark events being John Ioannides’s article, “Why most published research findings are false” (according to Google Scholar, cited 973 times since its appearance in 2005), the scandals of Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel, two leading psychology professors [...]
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 [...]
Fight! (also a bit of reminiscence at the end)
Martin Lindquist and Michael Sobel published a fun little article in Neuroimage on models and assumptions for causal inference with intermediate outcomes. As their subtitle indicates (“A response to the comments on our comment”), this is a topic of some controversy. Lindquist and Sobel write: Our original comment (Lindquist and Sobel, 2011) made explicit the [...]
A model rejection letter
Howard Wainer sends in this rejection letter from Sir David Brewster of The Edinburgh Journal of Science to Charles Babbage: It is no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of the opinion that I have no [...]