Posts

April 25, 2013

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2:03 PM | Call Me Maybe: Social Media & the Spread of STDs

April! We’ve passed the vernal equinox and spring is springing, flowers are blooming, we’re shedding our sweaters and jackets and all will be warm once again. We can put our winter blues to rest and bask in the knowledge that summer will soon be upon us. To my delight, I recently discovered that this month, [...]

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1:29 PM | Fascinating graphs from facebook data

Yair points us to this page full of wonderful graphs from the Stephen Wolfram blog. Here are a few: And some words: People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also [...]

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1:22 PM | It’s binless! A program for computing normalizing functions

Zhiqiang Tan writes: I have created an R package to implement the full likelihood method in Kong et al. (2003). The method can be seen as a binless extension of so-called Weighted Histogram Analysis Method (UWHAM) widely used in physics and chemistry. The method has also been introduced to the physics literature and called the [...]

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12:30 PM | Overemphasis on Theory Development Is Damaging Organizational Psychology

In a recent article appearing in Organizational Psychology Review, Pillutla and Thau[1] make some very strongly worded arguments about the role of theory development in psychological science. I’ll start exploring their paper with a quote in their own words: The state of [industrial/organizational psychology] and its obsession with novel theoretical contributions is antithetical to the goals of [...] Related articles from NeoAcademic: Recent Cheating Scandal at U of Flordia Highlights […]

Pillutla, M. & Thau, S. (2013). Organizational sciences' obsession with "that's interesting!": Consequences and an alternative, Organizational Psychology Review, 3 (2) 187-194. DOI: 10.1177/2041386613479963

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April 24, 2013

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8:12 PM | Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop pharmaceutical statistician stops mugger

Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in [...]

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7:29 PM | Another comment on BMC Cancer, WDDTY and homeopathy

Well, I don’t know what bugs are at play in the BMC Cancer system. Almost three weeks since submitting the latest re-worked version of my comment (which I append below so it may be read by somebody), not only has it not appeared under the paper in question, but the continued lack of response (excepting one message informing me that – again – my query has been forwarded to the Editorial team) to my interim e-mails to the relevant provided... Read more

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6:16 PM | My talk midtown this Friday noon

At the City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th street), room 6002. The topic: causality and statistical learning. Announcement is here (scroll down). It says that if you would like to attend any event, please respond by emailing datamining@gc.cuny.edu

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4:06 PM | 28 Geeks Later: Lessons Learned from Zombies at the Cambridge Science Festival

So I recently worked at the Cambridge Science Festival. More specifically, I worked in the ‘social media’ part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Even more specifically, I ran around Cambridge Science Festival with a swanky piece of kit to record … Continue reading →

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1:15 PM | The Tweets-Votes Curve

Fabio Rojas points me to this excellently-titled working paper by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, and himself: Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this ques- tion using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided [...]

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1:01 PM | Parenting a Twentysomething

I was desperate in my twenties for my parents to think of me as a co-adult, especially during one night that's seared in my memory. I was 22 years old, two and a half years out of college, and had just started working as a reporter for a small magazine for which I was traveling on my first-ever business trip. read more

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10:36 AM | How to Identify Key Players in Terrorist Networks

#NetworkScience Submitted by Dr. Luke Gerdes On April 15, Dr. Luke M. Gerdes spoke to the Social Network Analysis Club (SNAC) about the impact that data transformation has on node-level centrality. He demonstrated that efforts to find “highly central” individuals … Continue reading →

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4:26 AM | Come see PsySociety at its new home!

As many of you have likely realized by now…we’ve moved! PsySociety has officially transitioned over to the new Scientific American MIND blog network. Launched just last month, the MIND network now features all of the brain- and psych-related blogs from … Continue reading →

April 23, 2013

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9:23 PM | Foundation for Open Access Statistics

Now here’s a foundation I (Bob) can get behind: Foundation for Open Access Statistics (FOAS) Their mission is to “promote free software, open access publishing, and reproducible research in statistics.” To me, that’s like supporting motherhood and apple pie! FOAS spun out of and is partially designed to support the Journal of Statistical Software (aka [...]

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1:27 PM | Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” and the measurement of social and political divisions

Following up on our blog discussions a year ago, I published a review of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart,” for the journal Statistics, Politics, and Policy. I invited Murray to publish a response, and he did so. Here’s the abstract to my review: This article examines some claims made in a recent popular book [...]

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11:21 AM | Libel reform – Lords Amendment 2 reinstated…?

Ping Pong today sees the Defamation Bill back with the Lords, who will hopefully extract the fascistic spanner hurled into its works last week. Scroll down here to Motion B Lords Amendment No. 2 to see the moves to (re-)insert reparative clauses/wording. But that wording… still includes ‘… or is/are likely to cause…’. Which I still find somewhat specious.

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11:17 AM | Biological Networks Brown Bag

#NetworkScience Submitted by Dr. Ken Wickiser At the Brown Bag on April 10th, Dr. Ken Wickiser presented on the study of Biological Networks, which involves the analysis of the change in levels of genes and metabolites as individual cells, tissues, … Continue reading →

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5:08 AM | Installation of WRS package (Wilcox’ Robust Statistics)

Some users had trouble installing the WRS package from R-Forge. Here’s a method that should work automatically and fail-safe: ?View Code RSPLUS# first: install dependent packages install.packages(c("MASS", "akima", "robustbase")) # second: install suggested packages install.packages(c("cobs", "robust", "mgcv", "scatterplot3d", "quantreg", "rrcov", "lars", "pwr", […]

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1:37 AM | Body Horrors: Big Things Have Small Beginnings

Hello everyone! I’m stepping out from behind the curtain to share some very big news: Body Horrors has a brand new home at Discover Magazine! I know. I know! It’s terribly exciting! I’m elated and nervous and so very humbled to have my blog hosted by this fine institution, not to mention having this incredible opportunity [...]

April 22, 2013

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10:55 PM | Welcome to Body Horrors!

Hey ya’ll! Welcome to Body Horrors at Discover! My name is Rebecca and I am a microbiologist-epidemiologist-public health scholar, your modern Renaissance lady. For my graduate dissertation two years ago, I began Body Horrors as an experiment in writing about the public health of infectious diseases and parasites – an experiment that is still running today, a carefully cultured [...]

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2:25 PM | Goal: Rules for Turing chess

Daniel Murell has more thoughts on Turing chess (last discussed here): When I played with my brother, we had it that if you managed to lap someone while running around the house, then you got an additional move. This means that if you had the option to take the king on your additional move, you [...]

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2:00 PM | The nature-nurture dichotomy

Two major strands of explanations exist to explain sex differences (i.e., differences between men and women). The first set of explanations is usually referred to as "nature" and contains that biological factors underlie alleged sex differences. Conversely, explanations that are usually referred to as "nurture" contain that sex differences in (social) behavior arise from the distribution of men and women in different social roles within society. BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL ESSENTIALISM Although these […]

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10:44 AM | Social Movements, Religion, and Political Expression in Africa

#NetworkScience Submitted by Dr. Charlie Thomas Dr. Charles Thomas attended the 13th Annual University of Texas Africa Conference in Austin, Texas in the last week of March. The conference’s theme was Social Movements, Religion, and Political Expression in Africa. Dr. … Continue reading →

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4:08 AM | Choice, Control, Freedom and Car Ownership

Cars have long been symbols for personal freedom. With the open road before you you can go anywhere—from behind the wheel you really take control of your destiny. In this regard, cars are empowering. Ownership means that you have the means to be independently mobile, that you own not just a vehicle but choice as [...]

April 21, 2013

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7:16 PM | More on Bayesian model selection in high-dimensional settings

David Rossell writes: A friend pointed out that you were having an interesting philosophical discussion on my paper with Val Johnson [on Bayesian model selection in high-dimensional settings]. I agree with the view that in almost all practical situations the true model is not in the set under consideration. Still, asking a model choice procedure [...]

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1:30 PM | Exponential increase in the number of stat majors

Joe Blitztein sent around the following graph: (The x-axis goes from 2000 to 2012 and the y=axis goes from 0 to 120.) 100 statistics majors (this combines sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but still, that’s a lot more than the 1 or 2 or 3 a year we’re used to seeing). At first I was like, [...]

April 20, 2013

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6:07 PM | SWAG: Racial Bias in Pain Perception

Tom Brady is no stranger to pain (source) 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). This week in SWAG we read an article about racial biases in perceptions of others’ pain. The American medical field has a long […]

Trawalter S, Hoffman KM & Waytz A (2012). Racial bias in perceptions of others' pain., PloS one, 7 (11) PMID: 23155390

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3:55 PM | A mess with which I am comfortable

Having established that survey weighting is a mess, I should also acknowledge that, by this standard, regression modeling is also a mess, involving many arbitrary choices of variable selection, transformations and modeling of interaction. Nonetheless, regression modeling is a mess with which I am comfortable and, perhaps more relevant to the discussion, can be extended [...]

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1:47 PM | Displaying inferences from complex models

David Williams writes: I am completing my doctoral dissertation dealing with modeling adverse birth outcomes. The models are complex with 9 risk factors, 5 area level variables and 4 individual level variables. I used hierarchical logistic regression (SAS glimmix) to analyze the data. I am now faced with reporting the results. Can you please recommend [...]

April 19, 2013

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11:02 PM | Grad students: Participate in an online survey statistics education

Joan Garfield, a leading researcher in statistics education, is conducting a survey of graduate students who teach or assist with the teaching of statistics. She writes: We want to invite them to take a short survey that will enable us to collect some baseline data that we may use in a grant proposal we are [...]

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1:49 PM | Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously

Noam Chomsky elicits a lot of emotional reactions. I’ve talked with some linguists who think Chomsky’s been a real roadblock to research in recent decades. Other linguists love Chomsky, but I think they’re the kind of linguists I wouldn’t spend much time talking with. Many people admire Chomsky’s political activism, but sociologist blogger Fabio Rojas [...]