Pollster: Who will you vote for? Civilian: Oh, I don’t know; that guy, the tall one. Pollster: I’ll put you down for Obama. The elections in Iowa are over and the results […]
73.2% of Likely Voters Believe Poll Results
Oil prices through time: a well-done graph
Source: Wall Street Journal This image, shrunk 50% from it’s original size, is a very well-done statistical graph. It shows, in the pale green line, the inflation-adjusted price of a barrel of […]
Frank Furedi on the global warming apocalypse
Frank Fuerdi, of Spiked Online, has a delightful article on the daily barrage of panic we hear, in which he says, “In the past year, the threat of doom ? from weather, […]
Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you: Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer, Simon and Schuster, New York, 310 pp., ISBN 0-7432-0556-1, $25.00 Should healthy women get regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer? The surprising answer, according to this wonderful new book […]
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 […]
Were the cannonballs on or off the road first?
There’s something of a controversy whether photographer Roger Fenton placed cannon balls in a road and then took pictures of them. He also took a picture of the same road cleared of […]
Will Smith on reprogramming Hitler
Roger Kimball, in his blog, has an entry on the actor Will Smith’s “Reprogramming Hitler” comments. The subject is benevolence. It is well worth reading. A quote: “The Australian philosopher David Stove […]
How many false studies in medicine are published every year?
Many, even most, studies that contain a statistical component use frequentist, also called classical, techniques. The gist of those methods is this: data is collected, a probability model for that data is […]
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