Posted inStatistics
AMS conference report: day 2
The convention center in New Orleans is impossibly overcrowded; the last time I saw lanes of people so thick was at the Ann Arbor Arts Fair many years ago. And…
Posted inStatistics
National Post says statisticians needed too
Canada's National Post, in a piece from a little more than a year ago, made a call for more statisticians to be involved in climate change research, much as the…
Posted inPhilosophy
What can we learn about global warming from poor reporting?
From today's Syndney Morning Herald comes the headline: "Global warming to impact health". First, by impact the reporter almost certainly means influence, a more accurate, but far less energetic and…
Posted inStatistics
A safe, but misleading, prediction about global warming
Reuters's, on 3 January, had this headline, "2008 to be in top 10 warmest years say forecasters." A quote: 2008 will be slightly cooler than recent years globally but will…
Posted inStatistics
Asinine comparison of holocaust deniers and honest scientists
Some guy named Joel Connelly at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has written another one of those "We must do something now" global warming articles. What makes his piece distinct is that…
Posted inBook review
Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you: Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer, Simon and Schuster, New York, 310 pp., ISBN 0-7432-0556-1, $25.00 Should healthy women get regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer? The surprising answer, according to this wonderful…
How many false studies in medicine are published every year?
Many, even most, studies that contain a statistical component use frequentist, also called classical, techniques. The gist of those methods is this: data is collected, a probability model for that…
Posted inPhilosophy
The impossibility of there being no truth.
One of the premises frequently used for the argument that "all cultures are equal" (multiculturalism), or for the argument that you should not be judgmental, is relativism, which is the…