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### Favorite Color

A text file consists of records with fields. Each field is a name/value record of the form name: value with the field name followed by a colon, a space, and the value. Records consist of one or more fields separated by a blank line. In a particular database one field is named favoritecolor. Your task […]

### Illegal Business Controls America

The other day I wrote: After encountering the Chicago-cops example I was going to retitle this post, “The psych department’s just another crew” in homage to the line, “The police department’s just another crew” from the rap, “Who Protects...Show More Summary

### On deck this week

Mon: Illegal Business Controls America Tues: The history of MRP highlights some differences between political science and epidemiology Wed: “Patchwriting” is a Wegmanesque abomination but maybe there’s something similar that could be...Show More Summary

### Learning about Stochastic Processes the Almost Sure Way

George Lowther at Almost Sure has written a terrific series of posts explaining stochastic processes and the stochastic calculus. Stochastic calculus is widely used in physics and finance, so there are many informal introductions that get across the main ideas … Continue reading ?

### “Differences Between Econometrics and Statistics” (my talk this Monday at the University of Pennsylvania econ dept)

Differences Between Econometrics and Statistics:  that’s the title of the talk I’ll be giving at the econometrics workshop at noon on Monday. At 4pm in the same place, I’ll be speaking on Stan. And here are some things for people toShow More Summary

### Why I’m not posting on this topic

A colleague writes: Following our recent article (on which you commented favourably...), are you maybe planning a blog post on this? Both and have extensively analysed the statistical methods used in the original article, and found them wanting. Show More Summary

### Scientists behaving badly

By “badly,” I don’t just mean unethically or immorally; I’m also including examples in this the individual scientists are not clearly violating any ethical rules but are acting in a way as to degrade, rather than increase, our understanding of the world. Show More Summary

### Statshot: Money, Super PACs and Running in the Cold

This week in Statshot: money may not buy happiness, but countries with growing economies, as well as more stable politics, tend to have more satisfied citizens; runners in colder American cities are somewhat more likely to move their runs indoors over the winter, but they are even more likely to skip that jog entirely; and more.

### Gaussian Integers, Part 2

We continue today with our study of Gaussian integers. The greatest common divisor of two Gaussian integers is computed by Euclid’s algorithm: repeatedly replace dividend and divisor with divisor and remainder until the divisor is zero, at which point the dividend is the greatest common divisor. One Gaussian integer divides another if the remainder is […]

### Debate over kidney transplant stats?

Dan Walter writes: A few years ago, in a post about Baysian statistics, you referred to a book that I wrote about a study on catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation: The Chorus of Ablationists I am writing a story on the transplant...Show More Summary

### Just imagine if Ed Wegman got his hands on this program—it could do wonders for his research productivity!

Brendan Nyhan writes: I’d love to see you put some data in here that you know well and evaluate how the site handles it. The webpage in question says: Upload a data set, and the automatic statistician will attempt to describe the final column of your data in terms of the rest of the data. Show More Summary

### Discretised wave equations

The wave equation is usually expressed in the form where is a function of both time and space, with being the Laplacian operator. One can generalise this equation in a number of ways, for instance by replacing the spatial domain with some other manifold and replacing the Laplacian with the Laplace-Beltrami operator or adding […]

### Integral Octonions (Part 7)

Greg Egan just showed that $\mathrm{E}_{10}$: is the lattice of $2 \times 2$ self-adjoint matrices with integral octonions as entries! Here's the proof.

### “The Firth bias correction, penalization, and weakly informative priors: A case for log-F priors in logistic and related regressions”

Sander Greenland sent me this paper that he wrote with Mohammad Ali Mansournia, which discusses possible penalty functions for penalized maximum likelihood or, equivalently, possible prior distributions for Bayesian posterior mode estimation, in the context of logistic regression. Show More Summary

### A (not so well-known) theorem of Fouvry, and a challenge

A few weeks ago, as already mentioned, I was in Oxford for the LMS-CMI summer school on bounded gaps between primes. My mini-course on this occasion was devoted to the ideas and results underlying Zhang’s original approach, based on expanding the exponent of distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions to large moduli. In the first […]

### Social research is not the same as health research: Macartan Humphreys gives new guidelines for ethics in social science research

In reaction to the recent controversy about a research project that interfered with an election in Montana, political scientist Macartan Humphreys shares some excellent ideas on how to think about ethics in social science research: Social...Show More Summary

### Gaussian Integers, Part 1

Gaussian integers are complex numbers of the form a + b i where both a and b are integers. They obey the normal laws of algebra for addition, subtraction and multiplication. Division works, too, but is a little bit complicated: Addition: (a + b? i) + (x + y?i) = (a + x) + (b […]

### My talk today at the University of Michigan, 4pm at the Institute for Social Research

Generalizing from sample to population Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics, Columbia University We’ve been hearing a lot about “data” recently, but data are generally a means to an end, with the goal being to learn about some population of interest. Show More Summary

### On deck this week

Mon: My talk today at the University of Michigan, 4pm at the Institute for Social Research Tues: Social research is not the same as health research: Macartan Humphreys gives new guidelines for ethics in social science research Wed: “The...Show More Summary

### On deck this month

My talk today at the University of Michigan, 4pm at the Institute for Social Research Social research is not the same as health research: Macartan Humphreys gives new guidelines for ethics in social science research “The Firth bias correction,...Show More Summary