¡Bemsha SWING!: Cherry Picking

6 jun 2011

Cherry Picking

Suppose you tested a classroom of 30 kids for about 40 separate variables. Chances are you would find that some of those variables would line up by sheer chance. In other words, you could find a strong correlation between two independent variables. If you came up with even more variables you could find even stronger correlations. Four of the five kids who wore glasses also had names beginning with J. This is a little like shooting bullets at a barn and then going and drawing targets around the bullet holes, the Texas Marksman's Fallacy. Correlation is not causation, but sometimes correlation is not even correlation.

2 comentarios:

Andrew Shields dijo...: Thanks for teaching me about the Texas Markman's Fallacy. I'd heard the joke before, but I hadn't heard of the fallacy.; 1:52 a. m.
Shedding Khawatir dijo...: This is actually true of all statistical tests, which is why you should always be skeptical if an article uses a lot of them on the same sample (and even more so if the sample is small). You are supposed to correct the level of significance (making it lower, and thus less likely to be significant by chance) with an increased number of tests. Unfortunately, this isn't always done, and readers aren't always aware of how this affects the claims of the research.; 9:07 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

6 jun 2011

Cherry Picking

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