Introduction Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That?—incidentally, a blog title infinitely superior to “William M. Briggs, Statistician”—asked me to comment on Joe D’Aleo and Don Easterbrook’s new paper, “Multidecadal tendencies […]
Too Many Kids Go To College: A Fourth Conversation With Myself
Links to the first, second, and third conversation with myself about teaching. William Glum again, eh? What happened this time? Matt In my Algebra Sans Algebra class, I asked a student to […]
Hurricanes have not increased: misuse of running means
Most statistics purporting to show that there has been an increase in hurricanes do not use the best statistical methods. I want to highlight one particular method that is often misused, and […]
What can we learn about global warming from poor reporting?
From today’s Syndney Morning Herald comes the headline: “Global warming to impact health“. First, by impact the reporter almost certainly means influence, a more accurate, but far less energetic and “actionable”, word. […]
How to look at the RSS satellite-derived temperature data
It’s already well known that the Remote Sensing Systems satellite-derived temperature data has released the January figures: the finding is that it’s colder this January than it has been for some time. […]
Statistics’ dirtiest secret
The old saying that “You can prove anything using statistics” isn’t true. It is a lie, and a damned lie, at that. It is an ugly, vicious, scurrilous distortion, undoubtedly promulgated by […]
Do not calculate correlations after smoothing data
This subject comes up so often and in so many places, and so many people ask me about it, that I thought a short explanation would be appropriate. You may also search […]
You cannot measure a mean
I often say—it is even the main theme of this blog—that people are too certain. This is especially true when people report results from classical statistics, or use classical methods when implementing […]
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