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Spirling on ``Bargaining Power in Practice: US Treaty-Making with American Indians, 1784--1911"

Please join us this Wednesday when Arthur Spirling, Department of Government, will present ``Bargaining Power in Practice: US Treaty-making with American Indians, 1784--1911". Arthur provided the following overview for his talk:

I will discuss a new data set of treaties signed 1784--1911 between the United States government and American Indian tribes, and comment on some early findings using kernel methods to analyze these texts. I particularly welcome feedback and suggestions from the ASW on the appropriateness of the techniques given the problem at hand....

SPM Career Achievement Award

The Society for Political Methodology has announced the winner of its inaugural Career Achievement Award. The first recipient will be Chris Achen, currently the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University. The award will be presented at the APSA meeting this summer at the society's business meeting. Chris was chosen to receive the award by a committee consisting of Simon Jackman, Mike Alvarez, Liz Gerber and Marco Steenbergen, and their citation does a fine job of summarizing...

Spring break, blog break

This week is spring break for both Harvard and MIT, so as per usual, we will be posting less this week. Enjoy the (sort of) spring sunshine!

Posted by Amy Perfors at March 27, 2006 6:00 AM

Stata 10 announced

Yesterday, StataCorp announced that Stata 10 will be available from June 25. Apart from a bunch of new routines, a main attraction will be their new graph editor which might well resolve major nightmares for users. Also it appears that there is now a way to copy...

Creative Instruments

Sebastian Bauhoff

In a recent presentation at Harvard, Caroline Hoxby outlined a paper-in-process on estimating the causal impact of higher education on economic growth in the US states (Aghion, Boustan, Hoxby and Vandenbussche (ABHV) "Exploiting States' Mistakes to Identify the Causal Impact of Higher Education on Growth", draft paper August 6, 2005).

ABHV's paper is interesting for the model and results, and you should read it to get the full story. But the paper is...

State Failure

This article in World Politics on forecasting state failure that Langche Zeng (who by the way is moving this week from GW to UCSD) and I wrote a few years ago seems relevant to what is presently happening in New Orleans. Here are the opening sentences of the article: "`State failure' refers to the complete or partial collapse of state authority, such as occurred in Somalia and Bosnia. Failed states have little political authority or ability to impose the rule of law [on its citizens]." We normally associate state...

Statistical Discrimination in Health Care

Sebastian Bauhoff

This blog has frequently written about testing for discrimination (see for example here, here, and here). This is also a hot issue in health care. In health care there is a case for 'rational' discrimination' where physicians respond to...

Statistical Humor

14 April 2006

You, Jong-Sung

"When she told me I was average, she was just being mean".
“Old statisticians never die-- they just become insignificant. - Gary Ramseyer, First Internet Gallery of Statistical Jokes
"Three statisticians go deer hunting with bows and arrows. They spot a big buck and take aim. One shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the right. The second shoots and his arrow flies off three meters to the left. The third statistician jumps up and...

Statistical porridge and other influences on the American public

In this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Scott Stossel covers a book by Sarah E. Igo, a professor in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania. The Averaged American – which I haven’t read but plan to pick up soon – discusses how the development of statistical measurement after World War I impacted not only social science, but also, well, the average American. According to the review, Igo argues that statistical groundbreakers like the Gallup poll and the Kinsey...

Statistics and baseball

Mike Kellermann

With the World Series about to get underway, featuring the rubber match between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals (Round 1 went to the Cardinals in 1934, Round 2 to the Tigers in 1968, but maybe this is a best of five and we won't see the end until 2076), it is worth reflecting on the influence baseball has had on statistics and vice versa. I mentioned Frederick Mosteller's analysis after the 1946 World Series in a...

Statistics and Detection of Corruption

You, Jong-Sung

Duggan and Levitt's (2002) article on "corruption in sumo wrestling" demonstrates how statistical analysis may be used to detect crime and corruption. Sumo wrestling is a national sport of Japan. A sumo tournament involves 66 wrestlers participating in 15 bouts each. A wrestler with a winning record rises up the official ranking, while a wrestler with a losing record falls in the rankings. An interesting feature of sumo wrestling is...

Statistics and the law

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Elmer Elhauge from Harvard Law School has a post about the future of empirical legal studies, comparing the law today to baseball before the rise of sabermetrics. From the post:

In short, in law, we are currently still largely in the position of the baseball scouts lampooned so effectively in Moneyball for their reliance on traditional beliefs that had no empirical foundation. But all this is changing. At Harvard Law School, as traditional a place as you can get, we now...

Statistics and the Death Penalty

A few days ago, the AP moved a story reporting on academic studies of the deterrent effect of the death penalty on potential murderers. Many media outlets picked up the story under headlines such as "Studies say death penalty deters crime", "Death penalty works: studies", and my favorite...

statistics meets itunes

The lectures for the (arguably) best statistics class I've ever taken are now available via itunes. To whet your appetite, this happened in lecture a few years ago.

Posted by Richard Nielsen at January 17, 2012 7:14 PM

Stats Games

Jens Hainmueller

January is exam period at Harvard. Since exams are usually pretty boring, I sometimes get distracted from learning by online games. Recently, I found a game that may even be (partly) useful for exam preparation, at least for an intro stats class. Yes, here it is a computer game about statistics: StatsGames. StatsGame is a collection of 20 games or challenges designed to playfully test and refine your statistical thinking. As the author of StatsGames, economist...

Stats of the Union

Dr. King, Esteemed Faculty, Members of the Advisory Board, My Fellow Stats Brats:

The rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour when decisions are hard and courage is needed. We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors under way and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined reviewers, and the wisdom to face them together.

We’re not the first to come here with allegiances divided between structural equation modeling and proper counterfactual reasoning and Bayesian uncertainty...

Statz Rap

Amy Perfors

A friend emailed this to me;apparently the teaching assistants at the University of Oregon have creative as well as statistical talents. It's pretty funny. Perhaps every intro to statistics class could begin with a showing... video here

Posted by Amy Perfors at June 18, 2006 4:21 PM

Steenburgh on "Substitution Patterns of the Random Coefficients Logit"

We hope you will join us this Wednesday, March 3rd at the Applied Statistics workshop when we will be happy to have

Stefano Iacus on "Stochastic Differential Equations and Applied Statistics"

Please join us this Wednesday, October 8th when Stefano Iacus, Department of Economics, Business and Statistics, University of Milan (yes, in Italy) will be presenting his work on Stochastic differential equations and applied statistics. Stefano provided the following abstract:

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) arise naturally in many fields of science. Solutions of SDEs are continuous time processes and are usually proposed as alternative models to standard time series. While continuous time modeling seems better in describing the natural evolving nature of the underlying...

Stories and statistics

Lately I've been thinking a lot (and writing a little) about ways to combine the qualitative and quantitative empirical traditions in political science, so I was quite interested to read a new post on the philosophy blog at the New York Times written by mathematician John Paulos. He contrasts the logic of story-telling with the logic of statistics to draw out some interesting implications for how each mode of understanding colors the ways we think about the world.

In a sentence that could have...

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