Phil and I have been waiting almost 30 years for this one! I’ll have to say, though, that Munroe’s framing of the decision problem is more sophisticated than ours.
Phil and I have been waiting almost 30 years for this one! I’ll have to say, though, that Munroe’s framing of the decision problem is more sophisticated than ours.
Some trivia: the 1996 paper by Price Nero and German was published in the journal Health Physics which my university library didn’t have. However another nearby (and much larger) University had it in their medical school library. Unlike their main library however the med school library only had swipe card access and I had to follow someone to get in the front door and then beg a librarian to let me look up and photocopy the article. It took a further two swipes of her access card and the photocopier to get the job done.
I didn’t have to pay the photocopy charges however so I probably owe Phil and Andrew a copyright royalty.
Aaah Gelman not German!
I hate autocorrect. See
https://www.reddit.com/r/dadjokes/comments/gph70s/a_priest_a_rabbit_and_a_minister_walk_into_a_bar/
I think the best thing to come out of my radon work was this decision analysis paper with Andrew (and a grad student and a psychology professor):
https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/research/published/lin.pdf
Howard, I hope Price, Nero, Gelman (1996) was of some use to you. Man, that was a long time ago. I think that paper just used Minnesota as a case study, so you must have been really interested in radon on Minnesota, or I suppose really interested in Bayesian hierarchical modeling.
It was for a graduate class in Bayesian statistics I was teaching back in the 1990s. I thought it was a nice application which might motivate students. However I don’t know whether it did or not – it was the crazy swipe card security that stuck in my mind.
Not the direction you are going in/thinking about, but I couldn’t help think FLORIDA when reading this.
Amusingly, apparently the Florida real estate market is holding up, so folks who have the good sense to get out, still can.