Posted inStatistics
Uncertainty Is An Impossible Sell
I've never seen the show, but I've heard that the protagonist on the X Files used to have a desk sign which read, "I want to believe." That sentiment characterizes…
Posted inStatistics
Please Don’t Smooth Your (Social Media) Data!
Don't Don't smooth your data and then use that smoothed data as input to other analysis. You will fool yourself. You will make over-confident decisions. It is the wrong thing…
Posted inStatistics
Time Series And Causality: Global Warming Example
Temperature causes Here is an atmospheric monthly average temperature series: T = (61, 69, 69, 70, 72, 65, 63) (all F). What caused the temperature to take the value T1…
Posted inStatistics
Topographical Data Analysis Next Great Hope
Everybody who remembers how neural nets were going to save the world, raise your hands. Little higher. Make sure everybody sees. Well, you were wrong, weren't you. They've all but…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Should Philosophers Of Statistics Do?
A while back, far longer than it should have been, D.G. Mayo asked me to stop by her place and comment on a couple of posts. But laziness and excessive…
Posted inFun
Top 20 Posts Of All Time: Reader’s Choice
Start of long weekend, where the Nation trips happily outside into the warm summer sun. Well, sun anyway---more or less. Not really summer, either. Turns out the climate change forecasts…
Posted inStatistics
Why Do Statisticians Answer Silly Questions That No One Ever Asks?
Julian Champkin, editor of Significance magazine somehow came across the percipient insights of yours truly and asked me to write l'article controversé. Which I did. And with gusto. Champkin, a…
Posted inFun Statistics
Interest In On-Line Statistics Courses?
You might have heard what happened to when Stanford professor Andrew Ng put his machine learning (a practical kind of statistical modeling) on line. He expected mild interest. One hundred…