Posted inStatistics
Just What Is Signal And What Is Noise?
There are two senses of Signal and Noise (SN). The first is obvious: a signal, some known phenomenon, is corrupted by outside forces, where these caused corruptions are the noise.…
Posted inStatistics
Number 1 Book In Epistemology & In Logic! Get It While It’s Hot!
It's probably gone by now, but for a little while my new book, Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics, was "#1 New Release in Epistemology" then "#1 New…
Posted inStatistics
The Deadly Sin Of Reification Strikes Again!
https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/725150630441000960 If you can't see the tweet, and tweets are ephemeral, the screen shot is also given. Now I do not give a damn about the election, so please not…
Posted inStatistics
The Four Errors in Mann et al’s “The Likelihood of Recent Record Warmth”
Michael E. Mann and four others published the peer-reviewed paper "The Likelihood of Recent Record Warmth" in Nature: Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/srep19831). I shall call this authors of this paper…
Posted inCulture Statistics
FiveThirtyEight Weighs In With Some Odd Affirmative Action Statistics
FiveThirtyEight ran the piece "Here's What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action In College Admissions" that ran some dicey stats. Affirmative Action is, as all know, the practice of rewarding…
Posted inStatistics
Keenan’s $100-Grand Climate Challenge & Randomness
Lots of people are asking me about Douglas Keenan's challenge to identify which time series meets a certain criterion. If our betters are as good as they say at identifying…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Data Do Not Have Means: Or, The Deadly Sin of Reification Strikes Again!
No, data do not have means. Nor do they have variances, autocorrelations, partial or otherwise, nor moments; nor do they have any other statistical characteristic you care to name. Data…
Posted inStatistics
Tide Gauge Locations And Sea Level Rise, Some Statistical Concerns
Marcel Crok asked me to comment on the peer-reviewed paper "Tide gauge location and the measurement of global sea level rise" Beenstock (yes) and others in the journal Environmental and…