Posted inStatistics
Stressed Men Prefer Chubby Chicks
Here's a title for you, "BMI Not WHR Modulates BOLD fMRI Responses in a Sub-Cortical Reward Network When Participants Judge the Attractiveness of Human Female Bodies." How about that? I…
Posted inStatistics
Spanking Good For Future Education, Income: Researchers
Spanked as a child? A new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Pediatrics shows that girls are luckier than boys in avoiding spankings, that those who were spanked as children went…
Posted inStatistics
People Who Believe In Heaven Commit More Crimes
This picture decreases rape rates Some people who really ought to know better---but don't---reported on the peer-reviewed paper "Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates"…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Teaching Journal: Day 9—Hypothesis Testing: Part II
A review. We have sales data from two campaigns, A and B, data in which we choose (as a premise) to quantify our uncertainty with normal distributions. We assume the…
Posted inStatistics
Teaching Journal: Day 8—Hypothesis Testing: Part I
Hypothesis testing nicely encapsulates all that is wrong with frequentist statistics. It is a procedure which hides the most controversial assumption/premise. It operates under a "null" belief which nobody believes.…
Posted inFun Statistics
Personality Predicted By Pedal Extremity Wrappings?
Fats Waller knew which end was up. The mark of mate-ability, he infallibly sang, was to be had by looking down. Shakespeare agreed: he wrote, "Farewell Love and all thy…
Posted inStatistics
How Paranormal Research Differs From Normal Research
Cornell's Daryl Bem case is instructive. He's an academic who has published several notable peer-reviewed articles which claim that (several different versions of) ESP is real. Trouble is, despite the…
Posted inFun Philosophy Statistics
Gloom, Despair, Email Spoofing, And Kahan’s Science Literacy Paper
Somebody spoofed my Yahoo email address which I use for ordering, registrations and the like. Sent hundreds of emails to my contact list yesterday. Now I ordinarily run Linux, which…