I elaborated a bit on your thoughts over on my blog: http://eagereyes.org/criticism/metaphor-visualization-writing

I take your comment to be a sarcastic remark that this topic (the choice of topics for statistics examples) is unimportant. I agree that this is far less important than world peace, fighting hunger and disease, etc. Nonetheless I don’t think it’s a topic of zero importance. As a teacher, I do think it’s a good idea to use examples that get students interested and involved in the topic.

Yes, but Levitt and I remain in the Empire. He teaches at the University of Chicago and, if he no longer edits the Journal of Political Economy, he did so until recently. And I still teach at Columbia etc etc. For neither of us was there a break with the powers that be.

R. A. Fisher posed the following problem:

The agricultural land of a pre-dynastic Egyptian village is of unequal fertility. Give the height to which the Nile will rise, the fertility of every portion of it is known with exactitude, but the height of the flood affects different parts of the territory unequally. It is required to divide the area, between the several households of the village, so that the yields of the lots assigned to each shall be in pre-determined proportion, whatever may be the height to which the river rises.
Fisher added, “If this problem is capable of a general solution, then … one of the primary problems of uncertain inference will have reached its complete solution.”

Isn’t the highest form of “readability” a form of “art concealing art”? In music, it’s a premeditated piece that sounds like an improvisation.

I also sometimes wonder especially in academic circles, we may confuse effort with rigor so that if an author does a really great job explaining a difficult concept, now the concept sounds so simple one no longer considers it “deep”.

Several of the elites who come to lead rebel movements could be safely described as rogue (they have gone rogue). After all, despite Luke Skywalker’s Imperial lineage, his inclusion in the Rogue Squadron was pivotal for the rebels.

I have a dream that one day Statistics classes will be taught in a way that is perfectly just and fair to absolutely every individual on the planet. That way absolutely everybody and learn and master the discipline. There’s no telling how many budding Einsteins are out there whose genius went to waste because of poorly chosen statistics examples.

Words, however innocent, have consequences. Just imagine the frustration of making it through all the trials and tribulations of life, just to have your super genius stopped cold because there were no in-class statistics examples involving female tennis, soccer, volley ball or track ‘n field.

Still, using examples that students find interesting and intelligible beats the opposite, so long as that’s true.

One way to turn this into something different would be to get the students to measure interest in sport and knowledge about the sport in the class, and then use the data. The students might learn about each other too, not only the existence of some fraction of students who don’t care but usually keep quiet about it, but also oddities such as a cluster of people who aren’t interested but are not completely ignorant because they just remember what is in the news.

Yes, I’ve seen that book. But what I want is more book reviews.

To be fair to Pierpoint, this passage was in the midst of an essay with lots of specific detail; I’m just pulling out the most abstract part. In the context of the longer essay, it all came out naturally.

A few examples: In geology the usual ‘cyclostratigraphy’ analysis uses peridograms (even after MTM-type smoothing) and trawls them for any point rising above the “95% confidence” level (calculated for a single, one-sided test). See the book by Weedon (2003). In climatology and meteorology methods like Torrence & Compo (1998) or Mann & Lees (1996) routinely use 0.05 tests with no accounting for the large number of frequencies examined. Various subfields of astronomy also allow this practice – see Benlloch, Wilms et al. (2001) for discussion. These aren’t isolated examples of flakey papers – they are the norm for their field.

There seems to be a huge gap between stats/time series experts to whom this the problem is obvious, and practitioners or spectral analysis in geology, climatology, astronomy, … who don’t seem to know differently.

Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings

Serious power spectrum work will begin with a multiple-taper quadratic estimate of the spectrum, and use all of the excellent tools that come from this approach, including harmonic F-test statistics for significance, multiple series- or frequency-coherence, and so on. A good reference if you’re interested in learning more about these techniques is to refer to the classic paper in the area: Thomson’s “Spectrum Estimation and Harmonic Analysis”, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1456701. If you don’t have IEEExplore access, Google Scholar will lead you to a link on the web.

There are also excellent analyses done in the climate area using modern, robust techniques. From a brief reading of this paper, it’s not really clear that it has much to do with spectrum estimation at all. Given the crudeness of the data the authors were using, perhaps the interpolation in order to retain the trend is permissible. It certainly seems that there are more sophisticated techniques they could have used in exploring the relationships, as Andrew indicated.

@ Andrew: I’m not sure what you are referring to wrt a hierarchical model for the 600 parameters of a *spectrum*? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone apply hierarchical techniques to spectrum estimation before.

The point about the Paterno example is not whether it’s particularly unusual (in my discussion I was referring both to the rapes committed by the Penn State coach and the assaults committed by his players) but rather that Paterno’s preaching (and practicing) of moral values wasn’t enough. The preaching wasn’t backed up by action, which is more difficult. (Paterno’s political conservatism wasn’t a key part of my story—I only brought that up to connect to my other point that I think Murray would do well to consider conservative as well as liberal elites.)

I’d never heard of that book. Following the links and reading some excerpts, I can see how the book can be useful to people but the presentation seems a bit oversimplified, not seeming to take into account how something can be very readable and popular in one era and unreadable in another.

(By the way, I jumped in on your comment because I was mostly agreeing with you.)

Some reactions are that

1. The overall comment of the paper that the publication bias process (especially sociological/psychological) is just too complex to get a model that is anywhere near helpful was what drove my paper with Detsky – the need to make folks embarrassingly aware of it and force some change…

2. CR Rao’s comment in Iyengar & Greenhouse seemed to make it clear that any Bayesian method would require a highly informative prior that had no hope of being checked and hence forces you back into 1.

3. I believe Mengerson and Wolpert would agree here and Greenland has said so (and hence they clarify the need and risk for such multivariate priors in their current work), while Copas continues to press for some sensible sensitivity type or robust modeling. (see Copas and Lozda_Can .The radial plot in meta-analysis: approximations and applications. JRSSC 2009 and references therein. )

4. For “faced with combining the summaries, a nontrivial technical problem” I did come up with a general MC based solution for this in my thesis. It’s very related to “ABC” methods that have recently become better known and I am trying to draft a half page trivial explanation that I could effortless publish as a note some where (or just unload in a comment here). Though maybe its just better now to use “ABC” methods …

5. The lack of overlap with people I have worked is intriguing but there was one – Laupacis, A. (1997). He was my boss for a couple years and the reason I did not withdraw as an author on Man-Son-Hing M, Laupacis A, O’Rourke K, Molnar F, Mahon J, Chan K, Wells G. Determination of the clinical importance of study results. J Gen Intern Med. 2002. In the paper an “absolution was granted” for editors to refuse to publish a study that was non-significant and of low power (wide confidence interval). I was unable to convince the other authors not to include it. Too bad I did have Andrew’s Sex and Beauty paper as an example why this absolution was such a bad idea.

After reading the wiki entry I’ve decided that understanding cricket may be easier than mastering kickball.

I’ve asked a couple of people around here and they had heard of it so apparently it is not unknown in Canada, just unknown to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickball

I was kinda surpised there was any context around this e.g. the difference between class and wealth, the effect of entailed land ownership, assisted immigration and transportation of the poor etc.

But liberals don’t just preach values. They believe government is the final moral authority and want to enact laws that force people to be virtuous. As in state-sponsoring of contraception and abortion. This violates conservative bedrock values of individual conscience, responsibility and free will. This is fundementally at odds, it appears, with liberal pre-occupation with “social justice.”

Liberals miss the subtleties of shame and honor and how they still resonate today in many peoples throughout the world. Shame and honor, based on thousands of years of human experience and wisdom, are extra-legal but absolutely critical for a healthy, sane society.

Perhaps we could have something like people would not rate this restaurant as highly if they were aware of the underrated restuarants.

I was taught that passive voice was fine just to give writing a sense of variety.