Some project opportunities for Ph.D. students!

Hey! My collaborators and I are working on a bunch of interesting, important projects where we could use some help. If you’d like to work with us, send me an email with your CV and any relevant information and we can see if there’s a way to fit you into the project. Any of these could be part of a Ph.D. thesis. And with remote collaboration, this...

12h

coffee-study-lower-dying-risk.html

Paul Alper points to this news article reporting on an observational study of 170,000 British people, finding that “Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period [approximately seven years] than those who didn’t drink coffee.” A reduction of mortality...

15h

Recursive plagiarism!

Paul Alper points us to this news article by Daniel Victor with an amusing story: A writer’s personal essay explaining why she plagiarized portions of what was to have been her debut novel was removed from a literary website on Monday after the essay itself was also found to have included plagiarized material. The next step, of course, would be a...

1d

How to win the Sloan Sports hackathon

Stan developer Daniel Lee writes: I walked in with knowing a few things about the work needed to win hackathons: – Define a problem. If you can clearly define a problem, you’ll end up it the top third of the competition. It has to be clear why the problem matters and you have to communicate this effectively. – Specify a solution. If you’re able...

2d

Using large language models to generate trolling at scale

This is Jessica. Large language models have been getting a lot of negative attention–for being brittle and in need of human curation, for generating socially undesirable outputs–sometimes even on this blog. So I figured I’d highlight a recent application that cleverly exploits their ability to generate toxic word vomit: using them to speculate about...

3d

Essentialism!

This article by Albert Burneko doesn’t directly cite the developmental psychology literature on essentialism—indeed, it doesn’t cite any literature at all—but it’s consistent with a modern understanding of children’s thought. As Burneko says it: Have you ever met a pre-K child? That is literally all they talk and think about. Sorting things into categories...

3d

Bets as forecasts, bets as probability assessment, difficulty of using bets in this way

John Williams writes: Bets as forecasts come up on your blog from time to time, so I thought you might be interested in this post from RealClimate, which is the place to go for informed commentary on climate science. The post, by Gavin Schmidt, is entitled, “Don’t climate bet against the house,” and tells the story of various public bets in the past...

4d

Bayesian inference continues to completely solve the multiple comparisons problem

Erik van Zwet writes: I saw you re-posted your Bayes-solves-multiple-testing demo. Thanks for linking to my paper in the PPS! I think it would help people’s understanding if you explicitly made the connection with your observation that Bayesians are frequentists: What I mean is, the Bayesian prior distribution corresponds to the frequentist sample...

5d

Weak separation in mixture models and implications for principal stratification

Avi Feller, Evan Greif, Nhat Ho, Luke Miratrix, and Natesh Pillai write: Principal stratification is a widely used framework for addressing post-randomization complications. After using principal stratification to define causal effects of interest, researchers are increasingly turning to finite mixture models to estimate these quantities. Unfortunately,...

6d

Just show me the data, baseball edition

Andrew’s always enjoining people to include their raw data. Jim Albert, of course, does it right. Here’s a recent post from his always fascinating baseball blog, Exploring Baseball Data with R, 49 seasons of the designated hitter. The post “just” plots the raw data and does a bit of exploratory data analysis, concluding that the apparent trends...

1w