The 2012 election process is in full swing, but almost no one seems happy about it. When pollsters recently asked Americans about the election, 7 out of 10 said that they couldn’t wait for it to be over. In part, the electorate’s malaise stems from the fact that none of the G.O.P.’s candidates are generating much enthusiasm from Republican voters, and President Obama’s approval rating continues to hover at less than 50%. People aren’t excited about their options, and as the election process grinds on many voters may be thinking that no matter who wins the presidency in November, he (or she) will not be the sort of leader that we really want.
But exactly what kind of leader is that? What do people look for when picking a president?
Everyone holds a set of expectations, assumptions, and beliefs about what a “good” leader is like. Social and organizational psychologists…
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5th Moment
I don’t really know what to say about this. It appears to be a band comprised of statistics graduate students at North Carolina State who sing about statistics to the tune of popular songs. I’m really, truly speechless.
Here are the lyrics:
The Fifth Moment’s performance at the 2012 International Dinner! We are the original NCSU Graduate Statistics band! Follow us on Twitter, @TheFifthMoment. Lyrics below:
Vocals / Keyboard: Bradley Turnbull and Kristin Linn
Lead Guitar: Sidd Roy
Rhythm Guitar: Joe Usset
Bass : Kyle WhiteLyrics by Kristin Linn.
Original: Super Bass by Nicki Minaj and Baby by Justin Bieber
(We of course do not own any part of this song hybrid – thanks to Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber for creating the parts.)This one is for the boys with the distributions
on their parameters, they be prior choosin’
and over model space, they be samplin’ up
Markov chains with reversible jump.And he cool, got tools, he might have a rule
that minimizes risk and when I see him at school,
I trip, I flip, wanna kiss him on the lip
’cause with a Bayes factor, he’s so freakin’ hip.Conjugate or not not, do you think I’m hot hot?
Based on my posterior, do I have a shot? Oh!
You’re the kinda guy I was lookin’ for
’cause your unknowns are random, yo.I said, excuse me, you’re a heck of a guy,
I mean, my my my my, MCMC is fly, I mean,
You’re not shy ’round empirical types,
and your estimates perform like a frequentist’s might, oh!Yes I did, yes I did.
I need an introduction cause I aint Sidd
I am Kristin Linn, I love statistics, I take limits.Multiply my likelihood by your prior.
Be my conjugate and I’ll take you higher.
Don’t you love those bay bay bay bay bay bay bay bay Bayesians, super Bayes,
bay bay bay bay bay bay bay bay Bayesians, super Bayes.You have an unknown
you want to find.
Give it a prior,
and multiply by
the likelihood
of your data.
Ignore that constant denominator.Now you have it,
a posterior.
How will you use it?
The choice is yours.
Forget your p-values tonight.
I’m 95% sure you’ll be alright!Bayes rule it will set you free.
No more p-values and finally,
don’t need that crazy closed form density.
Sample from it using MCMC, yeahIf objective is the way to go,
under transformation one can show,
there’s a prior invariant and so,
thank you Jeffreys, you are my hero, ohWhen I was 22, I had my first love.
His name was Bayes, no it wasn’t just a phase,
and we used to stay up all night using WinBUGS.
Sampling with MCMC, oh I was star struck.
He woke me up daily, don’t need no Starbucks!
We’d go on random walks,
diagnose all our problems of convergence with
autocorrelation plots.
He was really good at minimizing his risk.
He knew he had me dazing
cause he was so amazing.
Freq 3:16 is fading
’cause now I keep on saying…Bayes rule it will set you free.
No more p-values and finally,
don’t need that crazy closed form density.
Sample from it using MCMC, yeahBayesians ’round the world agree
both objective and subjectively.
it makes sense to update prior beliefs.
Bayes I love you, you’re the one for me, me.
Cheers.
HaRRy PotteR
The title of this post is supposed to be HaRRy PotteR, but unfortunately the blog style capitalizes all of the letters
A very brief introduction to R….in terms of harry potter.
Cheers.
“Rethinking my Science” – Society for Personality and Social Psychology
An interesting article by Charles Stangor: “Rethinking my Science”
And a quote from it:
First is the paper by Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) on the use of WEIRD samples. These authors argue that our usual college student samples (White, Educated, Intelligent, Rich, and Democratic) are just terrible – that we cannot expect them to generalize very far, and that we desperately need to expand them.
I was trained, and have always trained my students, that “since we can’t get a representative sample of the population of interest (everyone), then we might as well study college students as they are convenient.” This belief was so dear to me that I fully expected to find that the many respected scientists who responded to the target paper would buy into this logic – it just seems so reasonable! But with some exceptions (e.g. Gaertner, Sedikides, & Brown, 2010), they did not. It appears that many – even most – scientists agree that samples used by social psychologists are flawed and that our conclusions are therefore invalid.
Cheers.
NCAA Basketball Rankings – 2/27/2012
Rankings as of 11:16am on 2/27/2012. Sagarin Ratings for games though 2/26/2012.
Previous rankings are here.
Breakdown by conference: 2, 4, 5, 3, 0, 3, 2, 2, 4
ACC Big East Big Ten Big 12 Pac 12 SEC MWC MVC Other
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | AP | Sagarin |
| Syracuse | 1 | – | 29-1 | 2 | 5 |
| Kentucky | 2 | – | 28-1 | 1 | 1 |
| Duke | 3 | ↑1 | 25-4 | 4 | 9 |
| Michigan St. | 4 | ↑1 | 24-5 | 5 | 3 |
| Kansas | 5 | ↓2 | 24-5 | 3 | 4 |
| Marquette | 6 | ↑2 | 24-5 | 8 | 13 |
| North Carolina | 7 | ↑2 | 25-4 | 6 | 6 |
| Ohio St. | 8 | ↓2 | 23-6 | 10 | 2 |
| Baylor | 9 | ↑2 | 23-5 | 9 | 12 |
| Missouri | 10 | ↓7 | 25-4 | 7 | 7 |
| Wichita St. | 11 | – | 25-4 | 15 | 10 |
| Georgetown | 12 | – | 20-6 | 11 | 14 |
| Indiana | 13 | ↑3 | 22-7 | 18 | 11 |
| Creighton | 14 | ↑3 | 25-5 | 25 | 30 |
| Wisconsin | 15 | ↓1 | 21-8 | 14 | 8 |
| Louisville | 16 | ↓3 | 22-7 | 19 | 19 |
| Michigan | 17 | ↓2 | 20-8 | 13 | 24 |
| Murray St. | 18 | ↑1 | 25-1 | 12 | 43 |
| Florida | 19 | ↓1 | 22-7 | 16 | 15 |
| Gonzaga | 20 | ↑3 | 23-5 | 26 | 31 |
| Temple | 21 | ↓1 | 22-6 | 23 | 34 |
| St. Mary’s-CA | 22 | ↑5 | 23-5 | 28 | 36 |
| UNLV | 23 | ↑5 | 22-6 | 17 | 20 |
| San Diego St. | 24 | ↑8 | 20-6 | 21 | 49 |
| Vanderbilt | 25 | ↓1 | 20-9 | 30 | 26 |
26-35:Virginia, Alabama, Purdue, Memphis, Southern Miss, Iowa State, Notre Dame, Florida State, New Mexico, California
BCS: My offer still stands…….if you want to contact me you can send me a tweet @StatsInTheWild.
Cheers.
European Debt: Graphically viewed as piles of Euros
The European Super Highway of Debt via chartporn.org
Cheers.
Move it, Compute it, Save it
Here is a quote from the blog post “The core components” on BigDataApps.com:
People call this business logic, which is a phrase that is frustrating to me since its just a series of if then else’s, but marketing needs something to do.
Cheers.
Stats in the Wild 