Check out comment #9 here. All we need is for Steven Levitt, David Runciman, and some Reader in Management somewhere to weigh in and we’ll be all set.
Archive of posts filed under the Zombies category.
Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
A friend/colleague sent me some comments on my recent article with Kaiser Fung on Freakonomics. My friend gave several reasons why he thought we were unfair to Levitt. I’ll give my reply (my friend preferred that I not quote his email, but you can get a general sense of the questions from my answers). But [...]
Latest in blog advertising
I received the following message from “Patricia Lopez” of “Premium Link Ads”: Hello, I am interested in placing a text link on your page: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/07/super_sam_fuld/. The link would point to a page on a website that is relevant to your page and may be useful to your site visitors. We would be happy to compensate [...]
This guy has a regular column at Reuters
Gregg Easterbrook: Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 [...]
Reading a research paper != agreeing with its claims
A journalist wrote to me recently: I was going to include your deconstruction of the beautiful daughters paper, but ran out of space. The author, incidentally, stands by that paper — and emailed me that you’d advised him on a later paper, implying that meant you now accepted the thesis! I responded: I know that [...]
Not quite getting the point
I gave this talk the other day and afterwards, a white guy came up to me and said he thought it was no coincidence that the researcher who made the mistake was “Oriental.” He then went on for about 5 minutes explaining his theory. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing—I had to start coughing into [...]
“The difference between . . .”: It’s not just p=.05 vs. p=.06
The title of this post by Sanjay Srivastava illustrates an annoying misconception that’s crept into the (otherwise delightful) recent publicity related to my article with Hal Stern, he difference between “significant” and “not significant” is not itself statistically significant. When people bring this up, they keep referring to the difference between p=0.05 and p=0.06, making [...]
Freakonomics: What went wrong?
Kaiser and I tell the story. Regular readers will be familiar with much of this material. We kept our article short because of space restrictions at American Scientist magazine. Now I want to do a follow-up with all the good stories that we had to cut. P.S. Let me remind everyone once again that Freakonomics [...]
Timing is everything!
A colleague emailed me with a question about the methods used by Groseclose and Milyo in their study of media bias. Before getting to the question, I just wanted to comment that Groseclose has had really bad timing with this project. First off, his article came out in 2005 when everybody was hating Bush. Even [...]
Absolutely last Niall Ferguson post ever, in which I offer him serious advice
I made the mistake of reading this article by Niall Ferguson summarizing his notorious new book. Here’s the best bit:
Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy
Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of [...]
Going Beyond the Book: Towards Critical Reading in Statistics Teaching
My article with the above title is appearing in the journal Teaching Statistics. Here’s the introduction: We can improve our teaching of statistical examples from books by collecting further data, reading cited articles and performing further data analysis. This should not come as a surprise, but what might be new is the realization of how [...]
Robert H. Frank and P. J. O’Rourke present . . .
I suppose if I can write an article with George Romero, there’s no reason that a noted economist and a legendary humorist can’t collaborate (link from Felix Salmon). I wonder how they got together in the first place?
The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports, “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, [...]
Picking on Gregg Easterbrook
I don’t want to make a habit of this, but . . . I was curious what Easterbrook would write as a follow-up to his recent Huntsman puff, and here’s what he came up with: Tired of cookie-cutter political contests between hauntingly similar candidates? Then you’re going to like the upcoming race for one of [...]
A qualified but incomplete thanks to Gregg Easterbrook’s editor at Reuters
Dear Reuters editor: Thanks for reading my blog and correcting the erroneous numbers in Easterbrook’s column from the other day. I’m pretty sure you got the corrections from my blog because in your corrections you used the exact same links that I posted. I think your readers will like that you gave links to the [...]
The most clueless political column ever—I think this Easterbrook dude has the journalistic equivalent of “tenure”
I don’t know when I’ve seen political writing quote so misinformed as this. It’s a bizarre mixture of cliches, non-sequitors, and outright mistakes. The author is Gregg Easterbrook and he’s writing for Reuters. First, the cliches: Right now Romney seems to be the frontrunner, which, of course, is a mixed blessing. His aura of experience [...]
Why it doesn’t make sense to chew people out for not reading the help page
Karl Broman writes: Barry Rowlingson gave an interesting talk at UseR 2011, “Why R-help must die!” He suggested the Q-and-A type sites Stack Overflow (on programming) and Cross Validated (on statistics), both part of Stack Exchange. I haven’t used R-help recently but I do occasionally send people there. Just to see what was going on [...]
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes:
W’man < W’pedia, again
Blogger Deep Climate looks at another paper by the 2002 recipient of the American Statistical Association’s Founders award. This time it’s not funny, it’s just sad.
“It was the opinion of the hearing that the publication of the article had brought the School into disrepute.”
Here’s the story. P.S. Some sociologists discuss the case here.
Nooooooooooooooooooo!
Michael Axelrod writes:
Wiley Wegman chutzpah update: Now you too can buy a selection of garbled Wikipedia articles, for a mere $1400-$2800 per year!
Someone passed on to a message from his university library announcing that the journal “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” is no longer free. Librarians have to decide what to do, so I thought I’d offer the following consumer guide: Wiley Computational Statistics journal Wikipedia Frequency 6 issues per year Continuously updated Includes articles from Wikipedia? [...]
“Income can’t be used to predict political opinion”
What really irritates me about this column (by John Steele Gordon) is not how stupid it is (an article about “millionaires” that switches within the very same paragraph between “a nest egg of $1 million” and “a $1 million annual income” without acknowledging the difference between these concepts) or the ignorance it displays (no, it’s [...]
Top 10 blog obsessions
I was just thinking about this because we seem to be circling around the same few topics over and over (while occasionally slipping in some new statistical ideas):