Posts
May 19, 2013
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1:42 PM | Prose is paragraphs, prose is sentences
This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the Index of First Lines,” which is truly the poetic counterpart to Basbøll’s argument in prose:The post Prose is paragraphs, prose is sentences appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
May 18, 2013
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Like Julia Shaw, the twentysomething author of a Slate article published in April, I married young -- a lot younger than my peers. I was 19 years old and a new college graduate when I married Jeff, my college boyfriend, who was one month shy of 22. It seems so young today. In truth, it seemed young even then. And now we're about to celebrate our 40th anniversary.read more
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Seven years ago, to mark the then tenth anniversary of the announcement of the birth of the folkloric Dolly the sheep, and in the still reverberating wake of the South Korean cloning scandal, I practiced my fledgling/intermittent/debatable/wanton science communication skills with the penning of an article on the issue of ‘cloning.’ It being an anniversary with a ’0′ on the end, combined with topical relevance, suggested I might be lucky enough to get it published. And I was thus very...
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Tachibana, M., Amato, P., Sparman, M., Gutierrez, N., Tippner-Hedges, R., Ma, H., Kang, E., Fulati, A., Lee, H., Sritanaudomchai, H. & Masterson, K. (2013). Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.05.006
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1:15 PM | uuuuuuuuuuuuugly
Hamdan Azhar writes: I came across this graphic of vaccine-attributed decreases in mortality and was curious if you found it as unattractive and unintuitive as I did. Hope all is well with you! My reply: All’s well with me. And yes, that’s one horrible graph. It has all the problems with a bad infographic with [...]The post uuuuuuuuuuuuugly appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
May 17, 2013
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5:49 PM | Where do theories come from?
Lee Sechrest sends along this article by Brian Haig and writes that it “presents what seems to me a useful perspective on much of what scientists/statisticians do and how science works, at least in the fields in which I work.” Here’s Haig’s abstract: A broad theory of scientific method is sketched that has particular relevance [...]The post Where do theories come from? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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I received two emails yesterday on related topics. First, Stephen Olivier pointed me to this post by Daniel Lakens, who wrote the following open call to statisticians: You would think that if you are passionate about statistics, then you want to help people to calculate them correctly in any way you can. . . . [...]The post How can statisticians help psychologists do their research better? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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11:27 AM | Newsblast Volume 3 Issue 6
#NetworkScience In this Newsblast you will find the cadet winners of the 2013 Network Science Excellence Awards. The competition is held each year in conjunction with Projects Day at West Point. Click here to see a list of the wide variety of … Continue reading →
May 16, 2013
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This week, I was honored with a Best Life-In-Science Award from ScienceSeeker for my article on the earliest known cases of HIV/AIDS, “The Sea Has Neither Sense Nor Pity: the Earliest Known Cases of AIDS in the Pre-AIDS Era.” There were some serious heavyweight contenders in this inaugural contest and I am beyond delighted that this [...]
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1:59 PM | How do we choose our default methods?
I was asked to write an article for the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) 50th anniversary volume. Here it is (it’s labeled as “Chapter 1,” which isn’t right; that’s just what came out when I used the template that was supplied). The article begins as follows: The field of statistics continues to be [...]The post How do we choose our default methods? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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I made the bed the other day in my younger daughter Samantha’s old room with a quilt I pieced together by hand. The quilt wasn’t supposed to be here in my apartment, dressing up Sam’s girlhood bed. It was supposed to be with Sam, in her grownup home. But things took a different turn than I’d anticipated.read more
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#NetworkScience The Android-controlled, Vulnerable-aware Robot Swarm (AVARS) capstone project team consisting of Cadets Coffey, Miles, Rogacki and Salsman, participated in their final presentation during Projects Day at West Point on 2 May 2013. All four cadets are computer science majors … Continue reading →
May 15, 2013
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Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d [...]The post Does quantum uncertainty have a place in everyday applied statistics? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and
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The year 2018 has recently been declared our new target year for eliminating polio from the world by the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and Rotary International. It is clear that the next five years will pose no small challenge; we have spent over 60 years vaccinating millions of children and adults since Salk and Sabin’s [...]
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Elsa Walsh was 12 years older than I was when she had her baby, and a lot further along in her journalism career—a staff writer for The New Yorker—than I ever was going to be. But she's like me in one way: her thoughts about all the hoopla that surrounds the current round of books and articles about whether women can or can't have it all.read more
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David Kessler, Peter Hoff, and David Dunson write: Marginally specified priors for nonparametric Bayesian estimation Prior specification for nonparametric Bayesian inference involves the difficult task of quantifying prior knowledge about a parameter of high, often infinite, dimension. Realistically, a statistician is unlikely to have informed opinions about all aspects of such a parameter, but may [...]The post Reputations changeable, situations tolerable appeared first on Statistical
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May 14, 2013
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10:30 PM | When a Magazine Stereotypes a Generation
Maybe the best outcome of the brutally stereotypical article about the narcissism of Millennials is this: it's brought out a lot of folks eager to defend young people.read more
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4:25 PM | Grammar and gender
This is the letter that landed 100 academics the inaugural Idler Academy Bad Grammar award. Well, we might pedantically recoil at a missing comma and a misplaced apostrophe in the very first sentence of the clunky first paragraph; and frown quizzically at the unlikelihood of 100 failed cursory proof-readings of an early draft (which suggests to me that most of the signatories did not see the final version). Feel free to pick me up on any grammatical slips here. But... Read more
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Why does it matter if one person decides to tell the world that she’s gotten a double mastectomy? Well, if that one person happens to be Angelina Jolie, it means that there will suddenly be a whole lot more people who now know about the harmful consequences of having a faulty BRCA1 gene, a genetic [...]
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I think it’s part of my duty as a blogger to intersperse, along with the steady flow of jokes, rants, and literary criticism, some material that will actually be useful to you. So here goes. Jarno Vanhatalo, Jaakko Riihimäki, Jouni Hartikainen, Pasi Jylänki, Ville Tolvanen, and Aki Vehtari write: The GPstuff toolbox is a versatile [...]The post GPstuff: Bayesian Modeling with Gaussian Processes appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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#NetworkScience Part 5: The Survey and More Data Collection Mr. Dan Evans and Dr. Charles Thomas visited Kampala, Uganda in support of an ongoing Network Science Center project developing new models of entrepreneurial networks. As additional data sets are collected, … Continue reading →
May 13, 2013
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11:50 PM | Stan!
Guy Freeman writes: I thought you’d all like to know that Stan was used and referenced in a peer-reviewed Rapid Communications paper on influenza. Thank you for this excellent modelling language and sampler, which made it possible to carry out this work quickly! I haven’t actually read the paper, but I’m happy to see Stan [...]The post Stan! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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David Jinkins writes: The objective of this paper is to measure the relative importance of conspicous consumption to Americans and Chinese. To this end, I estimate the parameters of a utility function borrowed from recent theoretical work using American and Chinese data. The main parameter of interest governs the amount that individuals care about peer [...]The post A Structural Comparison of Conspicuous Consumption in China and the United States appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal
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#NetworkScience Congratulations to the 2013 Network Science Center Excellence Award Winners! The following winners were chosen by a panel of judges during Projects Day on May 2. 1st Place: Leveraging Host Protein Network Topology to Identify Cancer-Causing Pathogens. Speaker: CDT Joseph … Continue reading →
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12:09 AM | The Incredible Importance of Mom
Imagine that you’re an infant monkey, and you’ve just been thrown into a cage after several hours in isolation. You’ve been deprived of food, so you’re starving. Facing you are two adult-looking (fake) monkeys, designed to look like each one could potentially be your mother. On the left is a “wire mother,” equipped with a [...]
May 12, 2013
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10:31 PM | OpenData Latinoamerica
Miguel Paz writes: Poderomedia Foundation and PinLatam are launching OpenDataLatinoamerica.org, a regional data repository to free data and use it on Hackathons and other activities by HacksHackers chapters and other organizations. We are doing this because the road to the future of news has been littered with lost datasets. A day or so after every [...]The post OpenData Latinoamerica appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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1:05 PM | Crime novels for economists
Following up on this post by Noah Smith on economics in science fiction, Mark Palko writes on economics in crime fiction. Just as almost all science fiction is ultimately about politics, one could say that just about all crime fiction is about economics. But if I had to pick one crime novelist with an economics [...]The post Crime novels for economists appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
May 11, 2013
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Tom Salvesen asks, is this the worst info-graphic of the year? I say, no. Nobody really cares about these numbers. It’s an amusing feature. The alternative would not be a better display of these data, the alternative would be some photo or cartoon. They’re just having fun. I wouldn’t give it any design awards but [...]The post Actually, I have no problem with this graph appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Recently I’ve been contemplating giving up on the modern
world and moving to a cabin in the woods. I mean – what is with all of this
technology, the 50+ hour work week, and guilt over the simple pleasures like
spending time with friends and family on the weekends? Maybe I would be able to
feel happier and more fulfilled if I turned my back on the world of today and instead
started living a simple life. After all, despite the fact that technology has
made our lives easier over the past […]
Wilson, Timothy D. & Gilbert, Daniel T. (2003). Affective Forecasting, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35 345-411. DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2601(03)01006-2
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May 10, 2013
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8:43 PM | Follow PsySociety on Facebook!
As of today, PsySociety officially has its own Facebook Page! If you use Facebook and would like your News Feed to include updates from PsySociety, links to new pieces, and interesting posts about psychology, pop culture, and current events, please head over to the page and click that “Like” button! You can find the [...]
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1:13 PM | The recursion of pop-econ
Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]The post The recursion of pop-econ appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
