A prediction (made on Monday, 28 June) verified: Although—and this has nothing to do with the issue at hand—Argentina’s goaltender Sergio Romero stinks, and that’s putting it nicely. Every shot on goal […]
FBI Homicide Statistics: What Are You Most Likely To Be Killed With?
It’s the start of a long weekend and the time for a diversion. It’s the fourth of July weekend and our lesson is: if you older than 50, beware strangers bearing fireworks. […]
Siena Presidential Scholar President Rankings: Are They Biased?
The Siena Research Institute asked 238 presidential scholars to rank each president from 1 (best) to worst (43) in nineteen different categories, plus one overall ranking. A complete list of the rankings […]
In Defense of Dogmatism
In so far as I have a coherent philosophy of statistics, I hope it is “robust” enough to cope in principle with the whole of statistics, and sufficiently undogmatic not to imply […]
Tricky Probability Problem: Chance of Two Sons, One Born on Tuesday?
Thanks to reader Matt Lewis who sent me this link. Martin Gardner, may he rest in peace, gave us a delicious probability problem: Suppose that Mrs Smith has two children, at least […]
Statistics as Beauty; Global Warming Miscellany; SATs Biased?; More
Statistics is Beautiful? From reader Yeah, Yeah comes a link to a Wired article which assures us we should “Learn the Language of Data.” It’s not a pretty language, but it can […]
Last Class
It was the Nines last night. Pizza, beer, and wine, followed by sketchy music. A definite conceit of statistics is its habit of declaring with something-approaching-certainty that this or that hypothesis is […]
What Do You Really Want: Part II
Class is, thank God, rapidly coming to an end. I am sure we are all grateful. Here’s an addendum to yesterday; but only briefly explained. Because of the crush of the end […]
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