Posts

March 25, 2013

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10:05 AM | Applying Social Network Analysis to Islamists in Mali

#NetworkScience Submitted by Dr. Luke Gerdes On March 21, West Point welcomed Olivier J. Walther, who currently serves as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University to speak for the second time. Dr. Walther spoke to cadets about the role that … Continue reading →

March 23, 2013

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4:53 PM | Can You Put a Price on March Madness?

I originally published versions of this post at IonPsych on 3/9/11 and at my WordPress blog on 3/11/12. You can see the original posts by clicking here for the 2011 post, or by clicking the From The Archives icon for the 2012 post. This is the first post in a March Madness series that I [...]

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1:34 PM | In which I disagree with John Maynard Keynes

In his review in 1938 of Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data, by H. Gray Funkhauser, for The Economic Journal, the great economist writes: Perhaps the most striking outcome of Mr. Funkhouser’s researches is the fact of the very slow progress which graphical methods made until quite recently. . . . In [...]

March 22, 2013

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1:27 PM | Likelihood Ratio ≠ 1 Journal

Dan Kahan writes: The basic idea . . . is to promote identification of study designs that scholars who disagree about a proposition would agree would generate evidence relevant to their competing conjectures—regardless of what studies based on such designs actually find. Articles proposing designs of this sort would be selected for publication and only [...]

March 21, 2013

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1:13 PM | 2.15

Jake Hofman writes that he saw my recent newspaper article on running (“How fast do we slow down? . . . For each doubling of distance, the world record time is multiplied by about 2.15. . . . for sprints of 200 meters to 1,000 meters, a doubling of distance corresponds to an increase of [...]

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10:28 AM | Network Science and STEM Education

#NetworkScience The National Center for Science and Civic Engagement hosted its annual Washington Symposium and Capitol Hill Poster Session last week. The symposium, held in the National Academies buildings, provided an opportunity for educators to share work done around the … Continue reading →

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12:23 AM | How to End a Bad Relationship for Good

Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships that make us miserable more than they make us happy, relationships that we know in our hearts are not right, yet still have a hold on us. If this sounds like you, or someone you care about, here are some research-based strategies you may not have considered before for ending it for good and getting on with your life. Read More->

Aron, A. (2005). Reward, Motivation, and Emotion Systems Associated With Early-Stage Intense Romantic Love, Journal of Neurophysiology, 94 (1) 327-337. DOI: 10.1152/jn.00838.2004

Schweiger Gallo I & Gollwitzer PM (2007). Implementation intentions: a look back at fifteen years of progress., Psicothema, 19 (1) 37-42. PMID: 17295981

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March 20, 2013

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5:15 PM | Suck It: The Ins and Outs of Mouth Pipetting

If you ever find yourself working in an infectious disease laboratory, whether it’s of the diagnostic or research variety, the overarching goal is not to put any microbes in your eye, an open wound or your mouth. Easy enough, right? Wear gloves, maybe goggles, work in fume hoods and don’t mouth pipette. When working with [...]

HILL, N. (1999). Laboratory-acquired Infections: History, Incidence, Causes and Preventions, 4th edition. Eds. C. H. Collins and D. A. Kennedy. Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford 1999. Pp. 324. ISBN 0 7506 4023 5., Epidemiology and Infection, 123 (1) 181-181. DOI: 10.1017/S0950268899002514

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1:30 PM | Textual Harassment at Work: Romance and Sexual Harassment on Social Media

Textual harassment, which is sexual harassment occurring via social media, is on the rise and potentially a nightmare for human resources professionals. In traditional sexual harassment, human resource professionals can generally assume that the harassment they are concerned with takes place within the boundaries of the office. However, just as social media blur the line [...] Related articles from NeoAcademic: New Research Links Social Media Marketing and Purchase Intentions Clear Link […]

Mainiero, L. & Jones, K. (2013). Sexual Harassment Versus Workplace Romance: Social Media Spillover and Textual Harassment in the Workplace, Academy of Management Perspectives, DOI: 10.5465/amp.2012.0031

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1:12 PM | Stan at Google this Thurs and at Berkeley this Fri noon

Michael Betancourt will be speaking at Google and at the University of California, Berkeley. The Google talk is closed to outsiders (but if you work at Google, you should go!); the Berkeley talk is open to all: Friday March 22, 12:10 pm, Evans Hall 1011. Title of talk: Stan: Practical Bayesian Inference with Hamiltonian Monte [...]

March 19, 2013

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4:20 PM | “Ronald Reagan is a Statistician and Other Examples of Learning From Diverse Sources of Information”

That’s the title of my talk at Montana State University this Thursday (21 Mar). For those of you who happen to be in the area, it’s 3:30-5:00pm in the Procrastinator Theater. I’m also speaking in the statistics seminar from 11-12:15 in the Byker Auditorium in the Chemistry building. Topic: Causality and Statistical Learning. P.S. My [...]

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1:48 PM | Retraction watch

Here (from the Annals of Applied Statistics). “Thus, arguably, all of Section 3 is wrong until proven otherwise.” As with retractions in general, it makes me wonder about the rest of this guy’s work. Dr. Anil Potti would be pooping in his pants spinning in his retirement.

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2:12 AM | Meet Your Mites

Just two months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of acting not as a science scholar but as a research participant. Instead of having my face in a book, I willingly offered it to a woman who diligently scraped my forehead in search of Demodex mites. I know that it’s everyone’s humble dream to contribute [...]

March 18, 2013

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11:53 PM | Mertz’s reply to Unz’s response to Mertz’s comments on Unz’s article

Here. And here’s the story so far: Ron Unz posted a long article on college admissions of Asians and Jews with some numbers and comparisons that made their way into some blogs (including here) and also a David Brooks NYT column which was read by many people, including Janet Mertz, who’d done previous research on [...]

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6:55 PM | Stalin, Mother Teresa, and Rob Portman: What do they have in common?

Rob Portman, Republican senator from Ohio and one-time contender for Romney’s would-be VP slot, announced on Friday that he has reversed his very public stance against gay marriage. As the well-known conservative stated in an Op-Ed piece on Friday, he now believes that “if two people are prepared to make a lifetime commitment to love [...]

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2:55 PM | Tibshirani announces new research result: A significance test for the lasso

Lasso and me For a long time I was wrong about lasso. Lasso (“least absolute shrinkage and selection operator”) is a regularization procedure that shrinks regression coefficients toward zero, and in its basic form is equivalent to maximum penalized likelihood estimation with a penalty function that is proportional to the sum of the absolute values [...]

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2:36 PM | Libel reform – latest…

Please see here for update from The Libel Reform Campaign.

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10:32 AM | Finding Adversaries Attacking a Mobile Network

#NetworkScience Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) represent an attractive and cost effective solution for providing connectivity in areas where a fixed infrastructure is not available or not a viable option. There are numerous military situations where this has been shown … Continue reading →

March 17, 2013

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7:59 PM | On Equilibrium & Balance in Your Microbial Universe

Two recent studies that shed light on the inner workings of our bacterial ecosystems, otherwise known as our microbiome, have me musing on the nature of disease and pathology, of harmony and balance. The first study caused a stir in the media with its admittedly unorthodox solution to a brutal bacterial infection; I’m speaking of [...]

van Nood, E., Vrieze, A., Nieuwdorp, M., Fuentes, S., Zoetendal, E., de Vos, W., Visser, C., Kuijper, E., Bartelsman, J., Tijssen, J. & Speelman, P. (2013). Duodenal Infusion of Donor Feces for Recurrent Clostridium difficile., New England Journal of Medicine, 368 (5) 407-415. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1205037

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1:52 PM | The disappearing or non-disappearing middle class

Despite the title, this post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics. It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of a graph that seems to show a bimodal income distribution but [...]

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1:08 AM | “Nightshifts Linked to Increased Risk for Ovarian Cancer”

Zosia Chustecka writes: Much of the previous work on the link between cancer and nightshifts has focused on breast cancer . . . The latest report, focusing on ovarian cancer, was published in the April issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. This increase in the risk for ovarian cancer with nightshift work is consistent with, [...]

March 16, 2013

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1:10 PM | Recently in the sister blog

1. New Italian production of Life on Mars. 2. Psychological essentialism in everyday thought.

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10:18 AM | Internet Bad Neighborhoods

Don’t venture too far on the internet: bad neighborhoods were located! Internet bad neighborhoods are those geographical areas where the majority of spam and phishing mails originate from. Interestingly, some regions specialize in spam, while others focus on phishing for ...

Giovane C. M. Moura, Anna Sperotto, Ramin Sadre & Aiko Pras (2013). Evaluating Third-Party Bad Neighborhood Blacklists for Spam Detection, IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, Other: Link

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March 15, 2013

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9:14 PM | The Clinical Utility of Pharmacogenomics for The Public Health Systems in Developing Countries

Pharmaceutical companies develop drugs to treat diseases and at best to cure them. Currently, most drugs are developed and tested in Europe and North America, where they are licensed with efficacy rates as low as 30%. Drugs are usually marketed worldwide without any idea of how effective or safe they are in different population groups, and certainly without any regard for differences in SNP patterns or of other genomic variation that may correlate to differential drug responses between these […]

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1:14 PM | How do I make my graphs?

Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: I’ve been following your blog a long time and enjoy your posts on visualization/statistical graphics matters. I don’t recall however you ever describing the details of your setup for plotting. I’m a new R user (convert from matplotlib) and would love to know your thoughts on the ideal [...]

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4:07 AM | Network Science and Big Data: Making Sense of Army Patrol Reports

#NetworkScience Submitted by MAJ Nick Howard The Network Science Center hosted 6 researchers from the University of Illinois and the City University of New York with expertise in Natural Language Processing. The goal was to see if their algorithms could … Continue reading →

March 14, 2013

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3:00 PM | PYM Enters the Terrible Twos!

Two years ago today, this blog was born. Thanks to you, PYM readers, this once tiny blog venture has been an overwhelming success--both in terms of outreach, and I think, in terms of fun (at least for the bloggers)! Let's check out some of the PYM blog stats after the jump. Read More->

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1:50 PM | Everyone’s trading bias for variance at some point, it’s just done at different places in the analyses

Some things I respect When it comes to meta-models of statistics, here are two philosophies that I respect: 1. (My) Bayesian approach, which I associate with E. T. Jaynes, in which you construct models with strong assumptions, ride your models hard, check their fit to data, and then scrap them and improve them as necessary. [...]

March 13, 2013

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6:53 PM | The Trickiness of Adjectives

People in their sixties, the graying Baby Boom generation so often cast in opposition to Millennials, are having a crisis of identity these days -- or, at least, a crisis of adjectives. Is there a way to describe them collectively without offending them? Would they balk at being called "old"? And do twentysomethings mind being called "young"?read more

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5:13 PM | Lame Statistics Patents

Manoel Galdino wrote in a comment off-topic on another post (which I erased): I know you commented before about patents on statistical methods. Did you know this patent (http://www.archpatent.com/patents/8032473)? Do you have any comment on patents that don’t describe mathematically how it works and how and if they’re any different from previous methods? And what [...]

March 25, 2013

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