You cannot measure a mean

I often say---it is even the main theme of this blog---that people are too certain. This is especially true when people report results from classical statistics, or use classical methods…

Maybe your parents were right

They dropped the charges against that poor eighth-grade kid who was caught with a dollar bag of Skittles somewhere up in Connecticut. I'm not so sure that this is a…

Homework #1

I was reminded of this homework problem that I give my students as I was riding in on the F train this morning. It is a very good problem because…

Homework #1: Answer part II

In part I, we learned that all surveys, and in fact all statistical models, are valid only conditionally on some population (or information). We went into nauseating detail of the…

Tall men in planes

I am off to Spain today, for the conference, to present my unfinished, and unfinishable, talk. Why unfinishable? I am asking people to supply estimates for certain probabilities (see the…