In an opinion piece in the Financial Post, Stephen Ziliak goes into the land of hyperbole, declaring that all significance testing is junk science. It starts like this: I want to believe as much as the next person that particle physicists have discovered a Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” one with a mass of […]
Inspired by this post on R-bloggers, I decided to check how BCEA was doing. Unfortunately, it does not feature in the top 100 most downloaded R packages. However, I think it's doing well $-$ considering the book (which is the main medium of advertising...
Thursday afternoon, before the 2013 CAE Faculty Conference, Stuart Klugman should invit us to go and watch the Cubs playing, in Chicago. That should be fun. First baseball game, ever. I will be back in Montréal (and on the blog) next week ! That will be an opportunity to discuss with mathematicians and baseball fans. Actually, a colleague told me that there was a nice anecdote about baseball and mathematics.…
Alberto Cairo tells a fascinating story about John Snow, H. W. Acland, and the Mythmaking Problem: Every human community—nations, ethnic and cultural groups, professional guilds—inevitably raises a few of its members to the status of heroes and weaves myths around them. . . . The visual display of information is no stranger to heroes and [...]The post Against the myth of the heroic visualization appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
There is an idea I have been thinking about for a while now. It re-emerged at the top of my list after seeing this really awesome post on using metadata to identify "conspirators" in the American revolution. My first thought was: … Continue reading →
Phil Plait writes: Earth May Have Been Hit by a Cosmic Blast 1200 Years Ago . . . this is nothing to panic about. If it happened at all, it was a long time ago, and unlikely to happen again for hundreds of thousands of years. This left me confused. If it really did happen [...]The post When’s that next gamma-ray blast gonna come, already? appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
Phil Plait writes: Earth May Have Been Hit by a Cosmic Blast 1200 Years Ago . . . this is nothing to panic about. If it happened at all, it was a long time ago, and unlikely to happen again for hundreds of thousands of years. This left me confused. If it really did happen [...]The post When’s that next gamma-ray blast gonna come, already? appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
This article from my other blog may be of interest to readers of this blog: http://seriousstats.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/using-multilevel-models-to-get-accurate-inferences-for-repeated-measures-anova-designs/
A rather dull puzzle this week: Show that, for any integer y, (√3-1)2y+(√3+1)2y is an integer multiple of a power of two. I just have to apply Newton’s binomial theorem to obtain the result. What’s the point?! Filed under: Books, Kids...
Inattentional and change blindness are two fascinating phenomena that more people should be aware of. The Invisible Gorilla describes them as well as some other interesting and surprising psychological research. This book has been out for over three years, and I’ve been meaning to write a review forever. What brought it back to my attention is a recent news story on the safety implications of voice-controlled systems in cars. Just…
We typically start with the data matrix, a rectangular array of rows and columns. If we type its name on the R command line, it will show itself. But the data matrix is hard to read, even when there are not many rows or columns. The h...
Tyler Cowen links: “I’m writing this book because we need to think about the future for more than just 140 characters or 15 minutes at a time if we want to make real long-term progress,” Mr. Thiel said in a statement. “’Zero to One’ is about learning from Silicon Valley how to solve hard problems [...]The post Peter Thiel is writing another book! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…
There has been a lot of discussion of personalized medicine, individualized health, and precision medicine in the news and in the medical research community. Despite this recent attention, it is clear that healthcare has always been personalized to some extent. For … Continue reading →
Jonathan Robinson writes: I’m a survey researcher who mostly does political work, but I also have a strong interest in economics. I have a question about this graph you commonly see in the economics literature. It is of a concept called the Beveridge Curve [recently in the newspaper here]. It is one of the more [...]The post How to best graph the Beveridge curve, relating the vacancy rate in jobs…
One of the most important steps in analyzing data is to remove noise. First, we have to identify where the noise is, then we find ways to reduce the noise, which has the effect of surfacing the signal. The labor...
Today is the one year anniversary of this blog. First of all, thanks to all the readers. And special thanks to commenters and guest posters. This seems like a good time to assess whether I have achieved my goals for the blog and to get suggestions on how I might proceed in year two. GOALS. […]
In a previous blog post, I described how to use a spread plot to compare the distributions of several variables. Each spread plot is a graph of centered data values plotted against the estimated cumulative probability. Thus, spread plots are similar to a (rotated) plot of the empirical cumulative distribution [...]
Here are some reflections on the repressed memory articles from Richard Gill’s post, focusing on Geraerts, et.al.,(2008). 1. Richard Gill reported that “Everyone does it this way, in fact, if you don’t, you’d never get anything published: …People are not deliberately cheating: they honestly believe in their theories and believe the data is supporting them and […]
I have continued to explore the functionality of the Shiny package released by the Rstudio team and I have been increasingly impressed. The code fits together very clean and easy to manipulate or add to. If you have some knowledge of html o...
We recently uploaded on http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00725090 a revised version of our work, with Ewen Gallic (a.k.a. @3wen) on Visualizing spatial processes using Ripley’s correction: an application to bodily-injury car accident location In this paper, we investigate (and extend) Ripley’s circumference method to correct bias of density estimation of edges (or frontiers) of regions. The idea of the method was theoretical and di#cult to implement. We provide a simple technique – based…
I'm in the process of trying to get together a couple of sessions to submit to ENAR 2014. I'm pretty psyched about the topics and am looking forward to hosting the conference in Baltimore. It is pretty awesome to have … Continue reading →
Aurelian Muntean writes: I have read an article on NPR and the journal article that spun this news. What draw my attention was the discussion in terms of causation implied by one of the authors of the article interviewed in the NPR news, and also by the conclusions of the article itself claiming large effects. [...]The post Folic acid and autism appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
It strikes me that in medicine, we are stuck with simplistic models - models that use one variable only, and are linear in the response. In short, we are told X results in Y, and the more X, the more Y. Real life often does not cooperate, but many people in medical research hold on to their models for dear life. Exhibit 1 is the disappearing of unhelpful data used…
