So, I’m going through the final draft of Regression and Other Stories, adding index entries, cleaning up references, etc., and I noticed this: Yes, I cite myself a lot—sometimes people call it “self-citation” and act like it’s a bad thing—but I think it’s helpful to point people to my earlier writings on various topics. Anyway, […]
They misreport their experiments and don’t fess up when they’ve been caught.
Javier Benitez points us to this paper, “COMPare: Qualitative analysis of researchers’ responses to critical correspondence on a cohort of 58 misreported trials,” by Ben Goldacre, Henry Drysdale, Cicely Marston, Kamal Mahtani, Aaron Dale, Ioan Milosevic, Eirion Slade, Philip Hartley and Carl Heneghan, who write: Discrepancies between pre-specified and reported outcomes are an important and […]
Bayesian Analysis, Bayesian non-parametrics, Books, clustering, completely random measures, Dirichlet mixture priors, discussion paper, hierarchical Bayesian modelling, iris data, Statistics
latent nested nonparametric priors
A paper on an extended type of non-parametric priors by Camerlenghi et al. [all good friends!] is about to appear in Bayesian Analysis, with a discussion open for contributions (until October 15). While a fairly theoretical piece of work, it validates a Bayesian approach for non-parametric clustering of separate populations with, broadly speaking, common clusters. […]
Bank Shot
Tom Clark writes: I came across this paper and thought of you. You might be aware of some papers that have been published about the effect of military surplus equipment aid that is given to police departments. Some economists have claimed to find that it reduces crime. My coauthors and I thought the papers were […]
Addis Abeba, Africa, Canada, conferences, Ethiopia, ethiopian food, Human Rights, LGBT rights, lottery, NeurIPS, pictures, Statistics, Synced, Travel, University life, USA, Vancouver, visa
NeurIPS without visa
I came by chance upon this 2018 entry in Synced that NeurIPS now takes place in Canada between Montréal and Vancouver primarily because visas to Canada are easier to get than visas to the USA, even though some researchers still get difficulties in securing theirs. Especially researchers from some African countries, which is exposed in […]
The State of the Art
Jesse Singal writes: This was presented, in Jennifer Eberhardt’s book Biased, as evidence to support the idea that even positive portrayals of black characters could be spreading and exacerbating unconscious antiblack bias. I did not see evidence to support that idea. I replied: I don’t understand what you’re saying here. I clicked thru and the […]
One of these days I’m going to figure this out
If something is outside your grasp, it’s hard to know just how far outside it is. Many times I’ve intended to sit down and understand something thoroughly, and I’ve put it off for years. Maybe it’s a programming language that I just use a few features of, or a book I keep seeing references to. […]
EU without education is like a bird without wings [apologies to ostriches]
[Reposting a call for keeping education and research in the EU commission denomination:] The candidates for the new EU commissioners were presented last week. In the new commission the areas of education and research are not explicitly represented anymore and instead are subsumed under the “innovation and youth” title. This emphasizes economic exploitability (i.e. “innovation”) […]
Typesetting zodiac symbols in LaTeX
Typesetting zodiac symbols in LaTeX is admittedly an unusual thing to do. LaTeX is mostly used for scientific publication, and zodiac symbols are commonly associated with astrology. But occasionally zodiac symbols are used in more respectable contexts. The wasysym package for LaTeX includes miscellaneous symbols, including zodiac symbols. Here are the symbols, their LaTeX commands, […]
Guinness [local]
“Suppose that you work in a restaurant…”
In relation to yesterday’s post on Monty Hall, Josh Miller sends along this paper coauthored with the ubiquitous Adam Sanjurjo, “A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice,” which begins: Suppose that you work in a restaurant where two regular customers, Ann and Bob, are equally likely to come […]
Challenge of A/B testing in the presence of network and spillover effects
Gaurav Sood writes: There is a fun problem that I recently discovered: Say that you are building a news recommender that lists which relevant news items in each person’s news feed. Say that your first version of the news recommender is a rules-based system that uses signals like how many people in your network have […]
Airline flight number parity
I read in Wikipedia this morning that there’s a pattern to the parity of flight numbers. Among airline flight numbers, even numbers typically identify eastbound or northbound flights, and odd numbers typically identify westbound or southbound flights. I never noticed this. I could see how it might be a useful convention. It would mean that […]
(Excerpts from) ‘P-Value Thresholds: Forfeit at Your Peril’ (free access)
A key recognition among those who write on the statistical crisis in science is that the pressure to publish attention-getting articles can incentivize researchers to produce eye-catching but inadequately scrutinized claims. We may see much the same sensationalism in broadcasting metastatistical research, especially if it takes the form of scapegoating or banning statistical significance. A […]
Dan’s Paper Corner: Can we model scientific discovery and what can we learn from the process?
Jesus taken serious by the many Jesus taken joyous by a few Jazz police are paid by J. Paul Getty Jazzers paid by J. Paul Getty II Leonard Cohen So I’m trying a new thing because like no one is really desperate for another five thousand word essay about whatever happens to be on my […]
ABC, Approximate Bayesian computation, Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, cosmostats, likelihood-free methods, Mountains, pictures, PMC, Statistics, Travel, University life, volcano
ABC in Clermont-Ferrand
Today I am taking part in a one-day workshop at the Université of Clermont Auvergne on ABC. With applications to cosmostatistics, along with Martin Kilbinger [with whom I worked on PMC schemes] Florent Leclerc and Grégoire Aufort. This should prove a most exciting day! (With not enough time to run up Puy de Dôme in […]
Alternative, more intuitive, formulation of Monty Hall problem
Here it is: Three tennis players. Two are equally-matched amateurs; the third is a pro who will beat either of the amateurs, always. You blindly guess that Player A is the pro; the other two then play. Player B beats Player C. Do you want to stick with Player A in a Player A vs. […]
Laplace Calling
Laplace calling to the faraway towns Now war is declared and battle come down Laplace calling to the underworld Come out of the sample, you boys and girls Laplace calling, now don’t look to us Phony Bayesmania has bitten the dust Laplace calling, see we ain’t got no swing Except for the ring of that […]
Andrew Gelman, Books, final exam, forum, geology, København, Read paper, refereeing, Statistics, UCL, unbiased MCMC, University life
No review this summer
A recent editorial in Nature was a declaration by a biologist from UCL on her refusal to accept refereeing requests during the summer (or was it the summer break), which was motivated by a need to reconnect with her son. Which is a good enough reason (!), but reflects sadly on the increasing pressure on […]
Testing Rupert Miller’s suspicion
I was reading Rupert Miller’s book Beyond ANOVA when I ran across this line: I never use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (or one of its cousins) or the χ² test as a preliminary test of normality. … I have a feeling they are more likely to detect irregularities in the middle of the distribution than in […]