http://www.research-live.com/4007408.article

http://deepclimate.org/2011/10/04/said-and-wegman-2009-suboptimal-scholarship/#conclusion

Here’s a complete discussion of the 2009 WIREs Comp Stat article by Said & Wegman, “Roadmap to Optimation”

http://deepclimate.org/2011/10/04/said-and-wegman-2009-suboptimal-scholarship

And here’s a discussion of the latest shenanigans, where the editors of WIREs Comp Stat allowed the authors to do over “Roadmap” and another article. Of course, it helps when the editors and authors are one and the same (or more precisely two and the same).

http://deepclimate.org/2012/03/16/wiley-coverup-complete-wegman-and-said-redo-hides-plagiarism-and-errors/

Then we have the curious duo of misconduct decisions at GMU, where the *same* text was considered plagiarism in one obscure paper, but not when copied into a related congressional report.

http://deepclimate.org/2012/02/22/gmu-contradictory-decisions-on-wegman-plagiarism-in-csda-but-not-in-congressional-report/

Here is small part of the congressional report (known as the Wegman Report) side-by-side with the Wikipedia article it was copied from (at least three text books were also copied), that was found *not* to be plagiarized by GMU. Cyan highlighted text is identical, with trivial changes in yellow.

http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/wegman-social-networks-v-2-1.pdf

Just wanted to say thanks for the inspiration

On the other hand I know the country has become more polarized over the years so not sure if B makes sense in light of that…

I aim to amaze. Also, it’s a political science class not a statistics class. Also, the exam covers topics we’d already discussed in class.

‘T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet.’

This was at George Mason U.

Examples include Amazon reviews, Google page-rank (via link farms, the logical equivalent of this citation cartel thing).

I think the general message is that like any calculated statistics, one should always ask how it is computed.

That’s right, the question is not self-contained. It referred to one of the readings from our course during the semester.

—-

Please consider this actual example. A scholar receives a letter from the managing editor of a journal saying his article has been accepted for publication. Some time later, the author receives a follow-up letter from the senior editor of the same journal directing the author to add citations from his journal before publication. Specifically the editor writes, “you only use one (name of my journal) source which is unacceptable. Please add at least five more relevant-(name of my journal) sources.”

Notice that this citation request does not mention omitted content, insufficient attribution, or shortcomings in the manuscript’s analysis; it simply asks the authors to cite articles from the editor’s journal.

This practice is controversial. Some view it as inappropriate behavior, padding citations and diluting the value of the reference list. Others see it as a legitimate way to introduce readers to past literature in the editor’s journal. This study investigates this issue and we need your help. Would you please take a moment to complete the following survey?—it will take only a few minutes. If you consent to this survey just follow the link provided below.

As required by our Institutional Review Board, individual identities will not be revealed or linked to specific responses. IRB contact information: irb@uah.edu

Thank you for your help.

Link to survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QIZ

From page 101:
“… self-identified gay or bisexual individuals are currently (or have recently been) serving in the military at the same rates as their representation in the U.S. civilian population—3.7 percent. Among young men who have ever served in the military, 2.2 percent fall into our gay/bisexual category, compared with 3.2 percent of civilian men. In contrast, self-identified lesbian or bisexual women are more common among military personnel than in the civilian population of U.S. young adults—10.7 percent compared with 4.2 percent.”

Thanks for the info. Could you give the direct quote from the Statistics Canada guide?

But now that I think about it, I realise that it’s more complicated than that. There will probably be a tipping point (or, more realistically, a series of tipping points in each sub-demographic) where people no longer feel the need to pretend that they’re going to Church, and this will be linked very closely to how many people are actually going. If 70% of the public are going to Church, then there’s a strong incentive for the other 20% to hint that they are as well. If 30% of the public are going, that incentive becomes much weaker for the non-Churchgoers.

This means that if Churchgoing fell from 70% to 20% over a long time frame at a consistent rate, it may well look as though the fall started off gently, then got much faster and then slowed down again even though the truth of the matter is that it had remained steady.

In other words, the over-reporting should have no impact on the DIRECTION of the trend, but may have a significant impact on the MAGNITUDE of the trend.

“A lot o’ people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch o’ unconnected incidents ‘n things. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice o’ coincidence that lays on top o’ everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o’ shrimp” out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”

I will certainly admit that most people aren’t very good at reasoning about probabilistic patterns (including the intellectuals who denounce stereotyping), but people are not at all bad at picking up statistical differences.

The assumption is that p(say you attend church | you don’t) is reasonably constant.

I was not talking about P(flood | earthquake) in isolation, but I failed to make that clear. I agree that the statement of the problem should be made better so as to be very sure the subjects are not making this confusion, but as in my reply above to Daniel Lakeland, I think the classic Linda example shows this same artifact without nearly as much effect from wording. I’m convinced, at least, that this is a real effect and that conjunction fallacy permeates evolved human cognition. I’m fairly a nobody though, so my believing that doesn’t count for much

P(flood follows earthquake within the next year) must be smaller than P(flood happens within the next year). There have been other experiments with this same setup but not involving the flood example. Some are listed in Kahneman’s recent book, others are in the Kahneman/Tvsersky papers. Maybe one of them is to your liking.

But even when the question has been more explicitly phrased as “Is P(flood follows earthquake within the next year) greater than or less than P(flood happens within the next year)?” people still report larger estimates for the first. Consider the famous “Linda” example, of being a bankteller who is a feminist vs. being just a bank teller. Even grad students of probability and stats ordered the probability of those events incorrectly: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy ).

In re-reading that article, it relates to this post’s title in that Gigerenzer criticized the legitimacy of the Linda experiment. FWIW, I find Gigerenzer’s criticisms lacking. He misses the point; it’s not framing.. it’s that humans substitute intuitive plausibility when needing to estimate probability, because intuitive plausibility is easier and our brains are empirically lazy. Conjunction fallacy is an example of the substitution effect, answering a different question because it requires less cognitive effort.

I agree that Hastie might have a political agenda, but it seems more likely that he is just capitalizing on the financial crisis to spruik his own work, even if it is only tangentially related. I’m sure Booth has a PR office that tries to make opportunities for faculty to get their names into media outlets like Bloomberg.

That said, I like Hastie’s conclusion, but for an altogether different reason. I think that the various bad-actors narratives are appealing because they offer the false sense of security that we could all still be on the golden escalator to risk-free prosperity if not for those bad-actors. The (probably correct, in my opinion,) explanation, that the economy is extremely complex and vulnerable to catastrophic events that no one really understands, is too scary for most people. They’d rather think that disasters are the work of angry gods that can be appeased by worship, sacrifice and punishment of the wicked. I don’t think that wishing for human agency over that which is currently beyond our control is exactly the same as narrative fallacy.

Your review is interesting, but, to be fair, many of the experiments of Kahneman, Tversky, and that crew are pretty bullet-proof. They and their psychologist colleagues are well aware of Grice’s principle and other issues involved in these measurements. This is not to say that everything K&T said was correct, but they did avoid a lot of the obvious flaws that a casual reader would think of. Remember, this work has survived decades of peer review and replication. Topics such as the availability heuristic have been studied all over the place.

When I was a Boy Scout during the 2/9/1971 Sylmar earthquake in California, we mobilized to help evacuate the west half of the San Fernando Valley because of fears that the Van Norman dam would collapse.

In general, I find Kahneman’s book pretty aspergery. My review is of the book is here:

http://takimag.com/article/the_irrational_agent/print#axzz1utcF9Nuo