Posted inStatistics
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…
Posted inStatistics
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…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
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…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
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,…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
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…
Posted inStatistics
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…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
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…
Posted inStatistics
What Do You Really Want? Modern Statistics. Lesson n+2
Only a couple of days left, everybody. Then back to more interesting subjects. Incidentally: when is the best time to contact a statistician? Before you begin to collect data. You…