Posts
May 14, 2013
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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.
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Two decades ago, a team of researchers led by psychologist John Gottman set out to determine one thing: Why do couples get divorced? Gottman decided to answer this question by trying something very simple: Recording married couples talking for 15 minutes about a recent conflict that they were having in their relationship, and then carefully [...]
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#NetworkScience Part 4: The Survey and 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, and … Continue reading →
May 09, 2013
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9:15 PM | Same old same old
In an email I sent to a colleague who’s writing about lasso and Bayesian regression for R users: The one thing you might want to add, to fit with your pragmatic perspective, is to point out that these different methods are optimal under different assumptions about the data. However, these assumptions are never true (even [...]The post Same old same old appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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1:27 PM | A tale of two discussion papers
Over the years I’ve written a dozen or so journal articles that have appeared with discussions, and I’ve participated in many published discussions of others’ articles as well. I get a lot out of these article-discussion-rejoinder packages, in all three of my roles as reader, writer, and discussant. Part 1: The story of an unsuccessful [...]The post A tale of two discussion papers appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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12:30 PM | Summer 2013 Updates and Posting Schedule
Ah, the end of the academic year. A time for reflection and furiously attempts to get some research done. We are in the midst of Spring semester finals here at ODU, and getting ready to head into the summer. Like last year, I’ll be using a relaxed posting schedule for the semester – so no [...]
Related articles from NeoAcademic:
Summer 2012 Updates and Posting Schedule
SIOP 2013: Schedule Planning
AOM 2012: Schedule Planning
Online Automated Statistics Tutor and Dataset
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10:57 AM | 2013 HS Network Science Workshop
#NetworkScience Last week the IEEE Taskforce on Network Science held their 2013 2nd International Workshop on Network Science here at West Point. At the conclusion of the main part of the workshop Dr. Helen Armstrong from Curtain University in Australia, … Continue reading →
May 08, 2013
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A recently published paper in Scientific Reports has found that climate variability in the form of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has had a significant impact on the occurrence of disease outbreaks in Europe over the past fifty years. Researchers in France and the United Kingdom studied 2,058 outbreaks occurring in 36 countries from 114 infectious [...]
Morand S, Owers KA, Waret-Szkuta A, McIntyre KM & Baylis M (2013). Climate variability and outbreaks of infectious diseases in Europe., Scientific reports, 3 1774. PMID: 23639950
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Everyone has their own collecting quirk. I myself collect animal skulls, inconveniently large earrings and unusual stories of infectious disease cases and outbreaks. To each their own, yes? I’ve decided that, instead of stockpiling these stories away in some recess of my brain, I’ll be sharing them online in a new recurring series on Body [...]
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2010). Gastrointestinal anthrax after an animal-hide drumming event - New Hampshire and Massachusetts, 2009., MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 59 (28) 872-7. PMID: 20651643
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1:57 PM | Of parsing and chess
Gary Marcus writes, An algorithm that is good at chess won’t help parsing sentences, and one that parses sentences likely won’t be much help playing chess. That is soooo true. I’m excellent at parsing sentences but I’m not so great at chess. And, worse than that, my chess ability seems to be declining from year [...]The post Of parsing and chess appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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#NetworkScience A NetSci High group of students, teachers, and mentors from Binghamton, New York City, and Newburgh came to West Point on Projects Day to hear network science presentations and see posters in competition for the Network Science Excellence Award. … Continue reading →
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3:00 AM | Niall Ferguson update
I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors. (I’m posting this one at night, and a new post on an unrelated topic is coming in the morning, so I’m [...]The post Niall Ferguson update appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors. (I’m posting this one at night, and a new post on an unrelated topic is coming in the morning, so I’m [...]The post Like Casper the ghost, Niall Ferguson is not only white. He is also very, very adorable. appeared first on Statistical Modeling,
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May 07, 2013
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8:20 PM | No such thing as ‘Allopathy’
Over at FreethoughtBlogs, an uncharacteristic petit faux pas in the prolifically excellent ‘A Million Gods‘ motivates me into publicly scratching an irritation. The first time I think I heard/read the term ‘allopathy’ was in the context of something discussing homeopathy. And it seemed quite reasonable to me at the time: homeopathy = ‘like cures like’; ‘allopathy’ = err, something other cures it; or it cures something other. Until I got wise on who coined this term, and why? One […]
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When I was younger, I can remember being split into teams in
gym class and different tables in art class and having one question: how many
girls and how many boys are in my group? Depending on the activity, it seemed important
to know this so you could assess your chances for success. More boys on your
team, and you might be more likely to win dodgeball. More girls at your art
table, and you might paint a better mural.
An adult might have told me that was silly - how many
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West, T., Heilman, M., Gullett, L., Moss-Racusin, C. & Magee, J. (2012). Building blocks of bias: Gender composition predicts male and female group members’ evaluations of each other and the group, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (5) 1209-1212. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.04.012
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1:28 PM | Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV?
Mark Palko writes: Salmon is dismissive of the claim that there are fifty million over-the-air television viewers: The 50 million number, by the way, should not be considered particularly reliable: it’s Aereo’s guess as to the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. (Maybe they have [...]The post Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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#NetworkScience Part 3: The Survey and Network Development 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, and … Continue reading →
May 06, 2013
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1:00 PM | Against optimism about social science
Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. [...]The post Against optimism about social science appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
May 05, 2013
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7:42 PM | Cleaning up science
David Hogg pointed me to this post by Gary Marcus, reviewing this skeptics’ all-star issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that features replication culture heroes Jelte Wicherts, Hal Pashler, Arina Bones, E. J. Wagenmakers, Gregory Francis, Hal Pashler, John Ioannidis, and Uri Simonsohn. I agree with pretty much everything Marcus has to say. In addition [...]
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12:07 PM | The New York Times Book of Mathematics
This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the [...]
