Posts

April 17, 2013

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Xi’an’s Og (aka Christian Robert’s blog) is featuring a very nice presentation of NUTS by Marco Banterle, with discussion and some suggestions. I’m not even sure how they found Michael Betancourt’s paper on geometric NUTS — I don’t see it on the arXiv yet, or I’d provide a link.

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6:25 PM | Data problems, coding errors…what can be done?

This post is by Phil A recent post on this blog discusses a prominent case of an Excel error leading to substantially wrong results from a statistical analysis. Excel is notorious for this because it is easy to add a row or column of data (or intermediate results) but forget to update equations so that [...]

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2:53 AM | Memo to Reinhart and Rogoff: I think it’s best to admit your errors and go on from there

Jeff Ratto points me to this news article by Dean Baker reporting the work of three economists, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, who found errors in a much-cited article by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff analyzing historical statistics of economic growth and public debt. Mike Konczal provides a clear summary; that’s where I [...]

April 16, 2013

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6:43 PM | Libel reform – Lords Amendment 2 rejected

MPs have just voted to reject Lords Amendment 2, which would have required corporate bodies to obtain court permission to bring libel cases against individuals (ie, that requiring that they first demonstrate proof of (likelihood of) financial loss; the only measure that would have prevented Simon Singh being sued by the British Chiropractic Association). The interests of corporations have today overridden individual freedom of speech.

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2:33 PM | My talk in Chicago this Thurs 6:30pm

Choices in Visualizing Data This time, it’s not at the university, it’s at a data science meetup. Here are the slides. I actually prefer the term “statistical graphics” or “visualizing quantitative information” rather than “visualizing data.” I spend a lot of time graphing inferences and fitted models, understanding my fits and doing exploratory model analysis. [...]

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12:30 PM | SIOP 2013: Day 3

Day 3 was the final day of the SIOP conference. Per tradition, sessions were lightly attended – too much late night enjoyment at the end of Day 2, I suspect! I had a slow start myself, only getting to poster sessions a little after 10AM. One that caught my eye explored the effect of organizational [...] Related articles from NeoAcademic: SIOP 2013: Day 1 SIOP 2013: Schedule Planning SIOP 2013: Day 2 SIOP 2011: Schedule Planning SIOP 2012: Scheduling Planning

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10:23 AM | Robotic swarm cadet capstone project team trip to Canada

#NetworkScience The Android-controlled, Vulnerable-aware Robot Swarm (AVARS) capstone project team consisting of Cadets Coffey, Miles, Rogacki and Salsman, along with their advisors, COL Huggins & Dr. Cassagnes; traveled to Quebec City, Canada 24-26 March. The cadets met with research scientists … Continue reading →

April 15, 2013

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10:16 PM | Cooperation after a tragedy: When our hearts know better than our minds.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are [...]

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2:19 PM | How effective are football coaches?

Dave Berri writes: A recent study published in the Social Science Quarterly suggests that these moves may not lead to the happiness the fans envision (HT: the Sports Economist). E. Scott Adler, Michael J. Berry, and David Doherty looked at coaching changes from 1997 to 2010. What they found should give pause to people who [...]

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12:30 PM | SIOP 2013: Day 2

Day 2 of SIOP 2013 was a bit busier for me. After an early breakfast, I headed to my first session of the day at 8:30, a discussion of social media in selection, which ended up really being a discussion of LinkedIn in selection. Like Day 1, this was a bit depressing. Although there was [...] Related articles from NeoAcademic: SIOP 2013: Day 1 SIOP 2013: Schedule Planning SIOP 2010: Planning My Schedule SIOP 2012: Scheduling Planning SIOP 2011: Schedule Planning

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10:39 AM | A Network Model of Cadet Life

#NetworkScience The idea is simple: create a network which connects those who, on a daily basis, are “close enough” to each other. “Close enough” could be considered sharing in an activity or spending time together in the same room. Fortunately, … Continue reading →

April 14, 2013

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9:13 PM | Detecting predictability in complex ecosystems

A couple people pointed me to a recent article, “Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems,” by fisheries researchers George Sugihara, Robert May, Hao Ye, Chih-hao Hsieh, Ethan Deyle, Michael Fogarty, and Stephan Munch. I don’t know anything about ecology research but I could imagine this method being useful in that field. I can’t see the approach [...]

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1:23 PM | Why girls do better in school

Wayne Folta writes, “In light of your recent blog post on women in higher education, here’s one I just read about on a techie website regarding elementary education”: Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? New research . . . suggests that it’s because [...]

April 13, 2013

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1:12 PM | Can you write a program to determine the causal order?

Mike Zyphur writes: Kaggle.com has launched a competition to determine what’s an effect and what’s a cause. They’ve got correlated variables, they’re deprived of context, and you’re asked to determine the causal order. $5,000 prizes. I followed the link and the example they gave didn’t make much sense to me (the two variables were temperature [...]

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12:01 AM | SIOP 2013: Day 1

SIOP 2013 has begun, and Day 1 was a fascinating set of presentations. The day starting with the opening plenary by SIOP President Doug Reynolds, talking about Big Data and I/O Psychology’s role in it. For some reason, we are not leading the way, despite our expertise being in synthesizing, analyzing and interpreting massive datasets [...] Related articles from NeoAcademic: SIOP 2013: Schedule Planning SIOP 2012: Day 2 Live-Blog SIOP 2010: Day 1 Live Blog AOM 2010 Pre-Conference […]

April 12, 2013

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9:42 PM | Stan 1.3.0 and RStan 1.3.0 Ready for Action

The Stan Development Team is happy to announce that Stan 1.3.0 and RStan 1.3.0 are available for download. Follow the links on: Stan home page: http://mc-stan.org/ Please let us know if you have problems updating. Here’s the full set of release notes. v1.3.0 (12 April 2013) ====================================================================== Enhancements ---------------------------------- Modeling Language * forward sampling (random [...]

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4:55 PM | Getting Older Might Not Be So Bad

People think the elderly are sad, unattractive Luddites who feel lonely and financially strapped. But it turns out that people who actually ARE old don't feel nearly as bad as younger people expect. That's the reassuring news for all of us who are aging that came from results of new a poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.read more

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1:28 PM | Too tired to mock

Someone sent me an email with the subject line “A terrible infographic,” and it went on from there: “Given some of your recent writing on infovis, I thought you might get a kick out of this . . . I’m certainly sympathetic to their motivations, but some of these plots do not aid understanding… To [...]

April 11, 2013

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1:28 PM | Continuing conflict over conflict statistics

Mike Spagat sends along a serious presentation with an ironic title: 18.7 MILLION ANNIHILATED SAYS LEADING EXPERT IN PEER–REVIEWED JOURNAL: AN APPROVED, AUTHORITATIVE, SCIENTIFIC PRESENTATION MADE BY AN EXPERT He’ll be speaking on it at tomorrow’s meeting of the Catastrophes and Conflict Forum of the Royal Society of Medicine in London. All I can say [...]

April 10, 2013

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2:13 PM | “Proposition and experiment”

Anna Lena Phillips writes: I. Many people will not, of their own accord, look at a poem. II. Millions of people will, of their own accord, spend lots and lots of time looking at photographs of cats. III. Therefore, earlier this year, I concluded that the best strategy for increasing the number of viewers for [...]

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10:19 AM | Mendeley in den Händen von Elsevier

Nun sind sie also eingezogen. Die Guten bei den Bösen. Die Stars der jungen Szene öffentlicher Wissenschaft, Mendeley, gehören seit vorgestern zu Elsevier. Genau jenem britisch-niederländischen Verlag also, der mit seiner Lobbyarbeit rund um den sogenannten Research Work Act vor gut einem Jahr, einen Boykott der Wissenschaftscommunity provozierte. Insgesamt gilt der Verlag als einer der Preistreiber und Verhinderer der Open Access Bewegung. Entsprechend groß ist das […]

April 09, 2013

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9:57 PM | The guy behind me on line for the train . . .

. . . sounded exactly like a David Mamet character. I mean, exactly. Or like Eric Bogosian doing a David Mamet character. I only wish I had a good ear for dialogue and could get it down for you. OK, we don’t use the word fuck on this blog but I could substitute something like [...]

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4:44 PM | Recently and not-so-recently in the sister blog

Pushback from the elites Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious

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1:45 PM | My talks in DC and Baltimore this week

U.S. Treasury, Office of Financial Research, Tues 9 Apr afternoon (I don’t actually know exactly when or in what room): Parameterization and Bayesian Modeling — Johns Hopkins University, Department of Biostatistics, 4pm Wed 10 Apr, room W2030 School of Public Health: Little data: How traditional statistical ideas remain relevant in a big-data world At the [...]

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11:16 AM | Newsblast Volume 3 Issue 4

#NetworkScience In this Newsblast Dr. Charles Thomas writes about the Hidden Hand of History project that uses network analysis to identify hidden drivers of stability within the Tanzanian People’s Defense Force. He also introduces a new project in which he … Continue reading →

April 08, 2013

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6:36 PM | Come see me speak about benevolent sexism & Kamala Harris TODAY at HuffPostLive!

I am incredibly excited to announce that I will be part of a panel today at HuffPost Live discussing the media uproar over Obama’s recent Kamala Harris compliment. Along the same lines of my last two blog posts, I’ll be explaining what benevolent sexism is, discussing how it might relate to this fiasco, and trying [...]

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2:10 PM | The Supreme Court meets the fallacy of the one-sided bet

Doug Hartmann writes (link from Jay Livingston): Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that “there’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Hartman argues that Scalia is [...]

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10:11 AM | Networking and Generalship Across the Anglosphere

#NetworkScience From 7-21 March I traveled to Canberra, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand, to research social and informational networks among senior military officers (both general and flag officers). It was an incredibly fruitful endeavor, and I was able to interview … Continue reading →

April 07, 2013

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4:06 PM | Scatterplot charades!

What are the x and y-axes here?

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1:52 PM | X on JLP

Christian Robert writes on the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox. I have nothing to add to this beyond my recent comments: To me, the Lindley paradox falls apart because of its noninformative prior distribution on the parameter of interest. If you really think there’s a high probability the parameter is nearly exactly zero, I don’t see the point [...]