Kkonty

Me, yesterday, on how Donald Trump is likely to attack rising star Marco Rubio: "The obvious route for Trump is to mock Rubio's inability to balance his own checkbook, but I'm hoping for something more original."

Trump, today: "He is a disaster with credit cards. All you have to do is look." And: "He certainly lives above his means — there is no question about that."

That's really disappointing. Trump also went after Rubio on immigration and for not showing up to vote in the Senate. Bo-o-o-o-ring.

There's just no creativity here anymore. Remember when he called Jeb Bush "low energy"? That was great. Or that he couldn't imagine anyone voting for Carly Fiorina's ugly mug? Good times. It makes me wonder if Trump is really giving his all for America these days. Even the cover of his new book looks phoned in. I mean, is that supposed to be Blue Steel or Le Tigre? I can't tell.

Leonid Schneider writes:

I am cell biologist turned science journalist after 13 years in academia. Despite my many years experience as scientist, I shamefully admit to be largely incompetent in statistics.

My request to you is as follows:

A soon to be published psychology study set on to reproduce 100 randomly picked earlier studies and succeeded only with 39. This suggests that the psychology literature is only 39% reliable.

I tried to comment on the website Retraction Watch that one needs to take into account that the replication studies may not be reliable themselves, given the incidence of poor reproducibility in psychology. Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch disagreed with me, citing Zeno’s paradox.

Basically, this was my comment:

39% of studies are claimed to have been reproduced by other psychologists. But: if this is indeed the ratio of reproducibility among psychological research, then only 39% of the reproduction studies are potentially reproducible themselves. My statistics skills are embarrassingly poor, but wouldn’t this mean only 15% of the originally tested psychology studies can indeed be considered as successfully reproduced?

These 15% are certainly completely wrong and obtained by my incompetence, but are the 39% indeed solid, unless we can fully trust the results of the reproducibility project? I wrote to Ivan next:

Only if a third study would confirm same 39 studies reproduced can we trust the previous result. Otherwise, we know that at least 61% of what psychologists publish is wrong or fake, so if we ask these or other psychologists to perform any study, we should be aware of their reliability.

We never agreed. I still have the feeling the proper number must be lower than 39%, unless the psychologists who obtained it are 100% honest and reliable.

Thus, can I ask for your professional view about the true reliability of psychology studies and how to approximate it in this context?

Hey, I know about that replication project! Indeed, I was part of it and was originally going to be one of the many many authors of the paper. But I ended up not really doing anything but commenting in some of the email exchanges among the psychologists on this project, so it didn’t make sense for me to be included as an author.

Anyway, I think there are a few things going on. The first is that the probability that a study can be replicated will vary: Stroop will get replicated over and over, whereas ESP and power pose don’t have such a good shot. So you can’t simply multiply the probabilities. The second issue is that replicability depends on measurement error and sample size, and these will not necessarily be the same in a replication as in the original study.

But, really, the big thing is to move beyond the idea of a study as being true or false, or being replicated or non-replicated. I think the authors of this replication paper have been pretty careful to avoid any claims of the form, “the psychology literature is only 39% reliable.” Rather, it’s my impression that the purpose of this exercise is more to demonstrate that attempted replications can be done. The idea is to normalize the practice of replication, to try to move various subfields of psychology onto firmer foundations by providing guidelines for establishing findings with more confidence, following the debacles of embodied cognition and all the rest.

The post Unreplicable appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

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All cultures engage in some form of ball play. Ball games are a basic way for us to hone what computational neuroscientist Beau Cronin calls “the quotidian spatiotemporal genius of the human brain,” and over the past two hundred years, they have come to dominate the popular imagination, with huge swaths of airtime and large volumes of ink given over to the dramas of soccer, basketball, baseball, American football, tennis, golf, rugby, cricket—the list goes on.¹ All ball sports are aleatoric structures organized, to greater or lesser degrees, around bounce. Aleatoric structures—structures of planned chance—produce a reliable kind of uncertainty. We don’t know who will win and who will lose, but we know that at the end of the day, there will be a winner and a loser. A ball introduces a second, more uncertain, kind of uncertainty into the fray. Its bounce dances along the edge of our predictive capacity, always almost but never fully under control. At least in the Anglophone world, this second kind of chance—the chance of the ball—seems to be especially important to our contemporary understanding of play.² While other kinds of contests are raced, run, rowed, and swum; wrestled, fenced, fought, and boxed; timed, weighed, measured, and judged; ball games are played. And only an athlete who contends with balls (or pucks, or shuttlecocks, or other third objects) earns the title “player.” We become players in and through bounce.

This is hardly the biggest problem American Apparel has right now, but:

American Apparel issued a public apology Thursday after the company posted a stylized picture to its Tumblr page of the space shuttle Challenger disaster thinking it was fireworks.

The company was immediately hammered with negative feedback.

In its apology, the company said it was an honest mistake by the social media manager, who was born after the 1986 explosion that killed all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

In related news, I would like to apologize on behalf of my entire generation for using that picture of a dirigible on fire earlier this week. I thought it was a still from the latest Transformers movie.

Nathan Pyle has recently written an illustrated handbook for living in—or, perhaps even more crucially, visiting—New York. NYC (Basic Tips and Etiquette) contains such valuable tips as

• Beware of the empty train car, it’s empty for a reason.
• Bring cash to group dining events.
• 12% chance you have spotted a celebrity. 88% chance you have spotted someone who vaguely resembles a celebrity. 100% chance you are awkwardly staring at someone while you argue about it.

These will, I think we agree, apply to any good-sized city.

Yesterday, two of Pyle’s tips were very much on my mind. The weather had, abruptly, turned brutal: cold, with high winds and lashing rain. This weather! This weather! This weather! everyone chanted. Pyle is absolutely right in his assertion that “one $20 umbrella will outlast four $5 umbrellas.” I went for my hardiest number, which is, incidentally, patterned with cheerful zebras on a red ground.

The problem is, good, sturdy umbrellas do not give way easily on the street—they dominate all in their path. And I could not master mine. The same characteristics that allowed my Zebra to stand tough in gusts that blew out Beta umbrellas were those that made him a bully. So strong was he that I was helplessly pulled in his wake like a reject nanny out of Mary Poppins. I was protected, yes, but only from the elements. Everyone hated me, either out of jealousy or because under the force of my huge, heavy umbrella I was weaving all over the street.

Things did not improve when I reached the narrower streets of Chinatown, where the approaching Zebra sent packs of tourists scuttling and, when challenged by a group of children on the sidewalk, had to be held as far above the fray as my shaking, short arms could manage. You are always in someone’s way, Pyle reminds us, in an exhortation to speed. But I could not. My spinnaker would not allow it. In the space of a few blocks, I’d gone from sub-Poppins to Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

So I closed the umbrella, and I was wet, and cold, and uncomfortable. But I realized a part of me—a small part, granted—was relishing it. The weather had been beautiful for days—aggressively, gaudily beautiful. After the long winter, the warm sun and the flowering trees felt like a balm. Everyone beamed at each other and soaked up every ray we could find. But it was almost too much; just as in perverse moments one’s worst nature ruins a too-perfect day with a fight, the happiness felt unsustainable. Maybe it was something superstitious in me, but I was slightly relieved to have the beauty alleviated, even to know that blossoms were being knocked from the trees.

 

Glenn Greenwald's Snowden files are like a the bottomless mimosas of cyber-security scares. The latest dispatch from The Intercept describes how the National Security Agency exploited Silicon Valley by disguising itself as a fake Facebook server in order to infect targeted computers with malware.

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After years of lawsuits and changing ownership, the assisted living facility at 1 Prospect Park West that was a Building of the Day has announced it will shut down in 90 days, NBC reported. The owners said they cannot afford an increased tax bill. If the current owner, which appears to be real estate firm The Copper Group, decides to sell, we’re sure developers will leap at the chance to bid on the extra-prime property, located in Park Slope across the street from Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Public Library. It last traded for $40,097,437 in 2006. As property values in Brooklyn rise dramatically, churches, businesses and homes — anywhere a double wide or bigger plot can be assembled — are quickly giving way to apartment towers. This 1925 Classical Revival building is not landmarked; the recently expanded Park Slope Historic District ends right at the nursing home’s property line. As… Read More

Somebody points me to this horrifying exposé by Paul Raeburn on a new series by the Washington Post where they reprint press releases as if they are actual news. And the gimmick is, the reason why it’s appearing on this blog, is that these are university press releases on science stories. What could possibly go wrong there?

After all, Steve Chaplin, a self-identified “science-writing PIO from an R1,” writes in a comment to Raeburn’s post:

We write about peer-reviewed research accepted for publication or published by the world’s leading scientific journals after that research has been determined to be legitimate. Repeatability of new research is a publication requisite.

I emphasized that last sentence myself because it was such a stunner. Do people really think that???

So I guess what he’s saying is, they don’t do press releases for articles from Psychological Science or the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. But I wonder how the profs in the psych dept at Chaplin’s university feel about being singled out like that???

To be serious for a moment, yes, we have a press office at Columbia. And, yes, I love it when they publicize my work. I have no problem with press releases. But it’s the job of a serious journalist to read the press release and use it in a story, not just to reprint it!

P.S. It seems that one of the editors of the Post’s science section is named Pooh Shapiro. How cool is that?

The post The Washington Post reprints university press releases without editing them appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

This week has brought continued outcry over Howard Hughes Corporation's redevelopment plans for the Seaport and Pier 17, especially about the proposed 50-story tower. But why heed neighbors' concerns when you can go to the top? A senior Howard Hughes exec revealed that the developer reached out to Bill de Blasio and his advisers for advice on how to make the plan more palatable, and the answer is... affordable housing. The housing might have to be in the tower, or it could be built off-site and used as a bargaining chip of sorts. [Downtown Express; previously]

First, PS 87 on the Upper West Side banned them—now Brooklyn's PS 107 has put the kibosh on Rainbow Loom bracelet-making kits, because students are way too invested in making their own rubbery accessories. Principal Eve Litwack told DNAinfo, "It's an addiction... It was like the kids couldn't live without it. It was just getting to the point where it was really crazy." [ more › ]

Milan Valasek writes:

Psychology students (and probably students in other disciplines) are often taught that in order to perform ‘parametric’ tests, e.g. independent t-test, the data for each group need to be normally distributed. However, in literature (and various university lecture notes and slides accessible online), I have come across at least 4 different interpretation of what it is that is supposed to be normally distributed when doing a t-test:

1. population
2. sampled data for each group
3. distribution of estimates of means for each group
4. distribution of estimates of the difference between groups

I can see how 2 would follow from 1 and 4 from 3 but even then, there are two different sets of interpretations of the normality assumption.
Could you please put this issue to rest for me?

My quick response is that normality is not so important unless you are focusing on prediction.

The post I’ll say it again appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

See, this is what happens when you try to eat healthy. An unpleasant stomach bug plowing its way through the states, leaving in its wake victims crippled by chills, fever and explosive diarrhea, has finally been traced back to a culprit: Pre-packaged salad mixes. [ more › ]