Posts
March 04, 2013
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9:32 PM | Libel reform – urgent!
For those not on the Libel Reform Campaign e-mail listing, I reproduce here the text of an e-mail I've just received from the campaign organisers. Your help is needed. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Friends We need your urgent help this week to get the libel reform bill back to the House of Commons. There is the real risk that unless we act it will be dropped. We have all worked hard to win the case for reform – to show the chilling... Read more
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8:28 PM | Stan in L.A. this Wed 3:30pm
Michael Betancourt will be speaking at UCLA: The location for refreshment is in room 51-254 CHS at 3:00 PM. The place for the seminar is at CHS 33-105A at 3:30pm – 4:30pm, Wed 6 Mar. [I think "CHS" stands for "Community Health Sciences," the building of the UCLA school of public health. Here's a map [...]
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2:05 PM | PyStan!
Stan is written in C++ and can be run from the command line and from R. We’d like for Python users to be able to run Stan as well. If anyone is interested in doing this, please let us know and we’d be happy to work with you on it. Stan, like Python, is completely [...]
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12:20 PM | Pink science: It’s a girl thing!
From the moment of birth, when we ask the simple question 'is it a boy or a girl', gender socialization takes off. But already before birth we start gender typing our "children-to-be". Before a child is born, parents (and others) spent hours speculating about if "it" is going to be a boy or a girl, choose different names to anticipate both outcomes, and decorate the baby room in pink or blue. It is quite interesting in this respect to note... Read more
March 03, 2013
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Ruth Rosenholtz of the department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT writes: We mostly do computational modeling of human vision. We try to do on the one hand the sort of basic science that fits in the human vision community, while on the other hand developing predictive models which might actually lend insight into [...]
March 02, 2013
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2:21 PM | Fishing for cherries
Someone writes: I’m currently trying to make sense of the Army’s preliminary figures on their Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme, which I found here. That report (see for example table 4 on p.15) has only a few very small “effect sizes” with p
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12:22 PM | Finally: A few father-friendly commercials.
Five television ads that bust father stereotypes.read more
March 01, 2013
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If you follow all the goings-on in Hollywood, you almost certainly watched the 85th Academy Awards last Sunday. If you didn't, I would be surprised if you have paid attention to the news this week without seeing at least one mention of the best and worst dressed, Jennifer Lawrence’s fall, or Seth MacFarlane’s performance as host. While the gowns and all the famous people in one room may have caught your attention the most, if we move beyond all of the glamour and drama
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The title of this post is silly but I have an important point to make, regarding an implicit model which I think many people assume even though it does not really make sense. Following a link from Sanjay Srivastava, I came across a post from David Funder saying that it’s useful to talk about the [...]
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4:10 AM | Modern Lessons From a Lost Language
Note: This article originally appeared on AiP on December 13, 2010. It won a Research Blogging Award. It’s hard to imagine that knowledge could be lost today. Technology seems to have put the ability to know almost everything within our grasp. So when researchers announce they “found” a previously unknown Peruvian language, it’s a pretty tantalizing [...]
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The yellow press is known for stirring the emotions of the reader – good and bad - not so scientific journals like Nature. But once in a while a nature paper is published whose wider implications are not well received in certain circles and which makes a lot of people angry - for different reasons. Therefore the first author or the senior author finds him- or herself in the eye of the storm. Let's look into in an article that... Read more
February 28, 2013
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Concomitant with airing my recent take on QuackRag WDDTY's clumsy referencing, I proceeded (after previous attempt to contact the corresponding author via the e-mail address provided for the purpose proved fruitless) to post the following as a Reader comment on the cited paper at BMC Cancer: 'Without homeopathic remedies, is care 'homeopathic'? I came across this reference in an article entitled 'Homeopathy is more than placebo' in the latest issue of the magazine 'What Doctor's Don't Tell […]
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2:55 PM | Different modes of discourse
Political/business negotiation vs. scholarly communication. In a negotiation you hold back, you only make concessions if you have to or in exchange for something else. In scholarly communication you look for your own mistakes, you volunteer information to others, and if someone points out a mistake, you learn from it. (Just a couple days ago, [...]
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2:30 PM | The Younger Generation Is Always Right
My daughter Samantha and I did another bit of publicity for our book Twentysomething yesterday: a taping of an upcoming episode of Katie Couric's new afternoon talk show, "Katie." But when Katie asked me what I thought of the Millennials, I gave the wrong answer. Here's what I should have said instead.read more
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10:48 AM | Cadet Chronicles from 2013 ICM
#NetworkScience Submitted by Cadet Calla Glavin The Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) started Friday, January 31st, with cadet teams working through Super Bowl Weekend until the deadline of 8 p.m. Monday, February 4th. Below Cadet Calla Glavin chronicled each day … Continue reading →
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6:37 AM | Cleveland Rocks
I’ve been traveling for work this week, and have spent the last two and a half days in Cleveland, Ohio. It was my first visit, and it offered me a chance to do the things I love most: talk to people, see places through the eyes of others, and discover new things all on my [...]
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“Even as you get near the upper reaches of the normal weight range, you begin to see increases in chronic diseases,” said JoAnn Manson, chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, HMS Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women’s Health, and HSPH professor of epidemiology. “It’s a clear gradient of increase.” [...]
February 27, 2013
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11:19 PM | SWAG: Do the ends justify the means?
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Every Wednesday afternoon, I gather with a bunch of faculty and graduate students at the University of Illinois to discuss a journal article about social psychology, and to eat a snack. This blog post reflects the discussion we had during this week's seminar affectionately called Social Wednesdays and Grub (SWAG).
Are you familiar with Watchmen? The popular graphic novel turned semi-popular summer blockbuster describes a deeply dystopian future in which Richard Nixon has been
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Conway P & Gawronski B (2013). Deontological and utilitarian inclinations in moral decision making: A process dissociation approach., Journal of personality and social psychology, 104 (2) 216-35. PMID: 23276267
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2:32 PM | What is “explanation”?
“Explanation” is this thing that social scientists (or people in their everyday lives, acting like social scientists) do, where some event X happens and we supply a coherent story that concludes with X. Sometimes we speak of an event as “overdetermined,” when we can think of many plausible stories that all lead to X. My [...]
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Recently, there was a brief discussion about online Ph.D. psychology programs on the PSYTEACH listserv. Generally, it was met with disbelief that an online psychology doctoral degree could be rigorous for a variety of reasons – a lack of teaching experience, a lack of lab experience, and a lack of face-to-face interaction with faculty and [...]
Related articles from NeoAcademic:
Grad School: Online or Brick-and-Mortar I/O?
Grad School: Should I Get a Ph.D. or Master’s in I/O
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Following up on our previous post, Andrew Wilson writes: I agree we are in a really exciting time for statistics and machine learning. There has been a lot of talk lately comparing machine learning with statistics. I am curious whether you think there are many fundamental differences between the fields, or just superficial differences — [...]
February 26, 2013
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David Duvenaud writes: I’ve been following your recent discussions about how an AI could do statistics [see also here]. I was especially excited about your suggestion for new statistical methods using “a language-like approach to recursively creating new models from a specified list of distributions and transformations, and an automatic approach to checking model fit.” [...]
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#NetworkScience Submitted by Dr. Chris Arney This 4-day contest involves undergraduate teams of 3 students, who research, model, analyze, solve, write, and submit solutions to specified open-ended interdisciplinary modeling problems. Over its 15 years, ICM has shown its interdisciplinarity with … Continue reading →
February 25, 2013
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9:40 PM | Plaig
“‘The distortion of a text,’ says Freud in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces.’” — James Wood, in The Fun Stuff (2012).
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Dear [MP], Thank you for your e-mail of 20 February 2013, as provided by your Caseworker, XXX, in response to mine of 12 February. May I commence by stating that this response is disappointing? With the exception of the brief final paragraph, it is copy-pasted entirely from the text of a letter from Lord McNally of 18 July 2012, forwarded to me by yourself, following my previous communications (e-mails: 11 and 18 June 2012) to you on the Libel Reform... Read more
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Alex Hoffman points me to this interview by Dylan Matthews of education researcher Thomas Kane, who at one point says, Once you corrected for measurement error, a teacher’s score on their chosen videos and on their unchosen videos were correlated at 1. They were perfectly correlated. Hoffman asks, “What do you think? Do you think [...]
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Policy Studies Organization has announced the new Journal of Policy and Complex Systems, published twice a year starting October 1, 2013. The following is the 1st call for papers:Aims and ScopePromote professional and public understanding of the relationship between policy studies and complex systems thinking, evolving greater understanding and engagement.Establish a venue for reporting results of exploring, developing, and evaluating policies using cutting edge computational
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1:33 AM | Rcpp class in Sat 9 Mar in NYC
Join Dirk Eddelbuettel for six hours of detailed and hands-on instructions and discussions around Rcpp, RInside, RcppArmadillo, RcppGSL and other packages . . . Rcpp has become the most widely-used language extension for R. Currently deployed by 103 CRAN packages and a further 10 BioConductor packages, it permits users and developers to pass “whole R [...]
February 24, 2013
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2:19 PM | F-f-f-fake data
Tiago Fragoso writes: Suppose I fit a two stage regression model Y = a + bx + e a = cw + d + e1 I could fit it all in one step by using MCMC for example (my model is more complicated than that, so I’ll have to do it by MCMC). However, I [...]
