Update See the comments, but thanks to readers’ arguments I believe I was wrong in an essential calculation. I’ve reworked the text to correct my error, which was small in most cases—except […]
Best Statistics Question Ever
Several readers have sent this one in1. One Raymond Johnson (or was it Ryan Grover?) said he found the following picture on this blackboard (I pulled my copy from Flowing Data): Try […]
Statistics Of Loeb’s “Observed Changes In Top-Of-The-Atmosphere Radiation And Upper-Ocean Heating Consistent Within Uncertainty”
The paper is “Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within uncertainty” by Norman Loeb and others in the journal Nature Geoscience. I’m pressed for time, so for background on […]
Can fMRI Predict Who Believes In God? Part VI
Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII The description on the use of the fMRI (how it works, voltages, etc.) appears, to my untutored […]
Autism Caused By Highways?
Epidemiology is nothing if not a productive field. All that is needed for success is a database (larger the better), a disease (any will do), and some minor facility with statistical software. […]
British Judge Rules Against Bayes’s Theorem
A British judge has thrown a use of Bayes’s rule out of his court. Not only that, his honor (Lordship?) ruled “against using similar statistical analysis in the courts in future.” A […]
Randomness And Mysticism. Ithaca Teaching Journal, Day 2
Last night was spent at the storied Chapter House, for our annual first-night ceremony of Deliberate Numbness Induction, much needed after eight straight hours of unmitigated statistical theory. The only weakness to […]
Statistical Significance Does Not Mean What You Think. Climate Temperature Trends. Ithaca Teaching Journal, Day 7
There are a subset of professional statisticians—defined as folks who have had formal training in the field given to them by other professionals—who feel that the field of statistics is useless. That […]
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