I think it may have been John D. Cook who first observed that p-values are
linearly correlated with the amount of time remaining on a grant.

Perhaps a suitable transform would reveal an ordinal relationship with
stars.



On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 7:03 AM, Ravi Varadhan <ravi.varadhan@jhu.edu>wrote:

> They are "reaching for the stars".  Pardon my jest, but I couldn't resist.
>
> Ravi
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-devel-bounces@r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces@r-project.org]
> On Behalf Of Uwe Ligges
> Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:01 AM
> To: Frank Harrell
> Cc: r-devel@r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Regression stars
>
>
>
> On 12.02.2013 15:42, Frank Harrell wrote:
> > Uwe I've been consulting for decades and have never once been asked
> > for such stars.
>
> Honestly: last time I have been asked last week.
>
> And when I answered (in another case few months ago) "OK, I can add you
> another 5 stars for p values smaller than 0.5" they did not find it too
> funny.
>
> Best,
> Uwe
>
> > And when a clinical researcher puts a sentence in a study protocol
> > that P<0.05 will be considered "significant" I get them to take it out.
> >
> > Frank
> >
> > Uwe Ligges-3 wrote
> >> On 12.02.2013 14:54, Ben Bolker wrote:
> >>> Duncan Murdoch
> >> <murdoch.duncan <at>
> >>   gmail.com> writes:
> >>>
> >>>     [snip]
> >>>>
> >>>> Regarding stringsAsFactors:  I'm not going to defend keeping it as
> >>>> is, I'll let the people who like it defend it.
> >>>
> >>>     Would someone (anyone) like to come forward and give us a
> >>> defense of stringsAsFactors=TRUE -- even someone who doesn't
> >>> personally like it but would like to play devil's advocate?
> >>
> >> Sure:
> >> I will have to change all my scripts, my teaching examples, my book,
> >> and lots of code examples for research and particularly consulting jobs.
> >>
> >> Personally, I think having stringsAsFactors=TRUE is not too bad for
> >> read.table() but less useful for data.frame().
> >>
> >> And since you ask for the devil's advocate already, related to the
> >> subject line: Removing stars is horrible for consulting: With all
> >> those people from biology, medicine and other fields who even ask us
> >> questions in term of significance stars that are obviously very common
> for them.
> >> Many of them will certainly ask us for the stars, and ask us to
> >> switch to another software product once they do not get it from R.
> >> They may not be interested in being taught about the advantages or
> >> disadvantages of p-values or stars.
> >>
> >> There are different use cases of R, and I want to keep stars for
> >> consulting tasks where things have to be delivered within minutes. I
> >> am happy with or without for teaching, where I have the time and can
> >> easily talk about the sense and nonsense of p-values.
> >>
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> Uwe
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>>> What I will likely do is
> >>>> make a few changes so that character vectors are automatically
> >>>> changed to factors in modelling functions, so that operating with
> >>>> stringsAsFactors=FALSE doesn't trigger silly warnings.
> >>>>
> >>>> Duncan Murdoch
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>    [apologies for snipping context: "gmane made me do it"]
> >>>
> >>> ______________________________________________
> >>>
> >
> >> R-devel@
> >
> >>   mailing list
> >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >>>
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
> >
> >> R-devel@
> >
> >>   mailing list
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -----
> > Frank Harrell
> > Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
> > --
> > View this message in context:
> > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Regression-stars-tp4657795p4658268.html
> > Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
>
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>
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>



-- 
*A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.*
*
*
Howard Skipper<http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/31/9/1173.full.pdf>

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