Tag Archives: Statistics

Seeing The Future From The Past

I just finished reading The Signal and the Noise, a book about predictions by the American statistician and blogger turned big time data journalist Nate Silver.  I highly recommend it.  The book came out in 2012 and there was some … Continue reading

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Divorce And Margarine

The correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the per capita consumption of margarine, though compelling, is totally spurious. This is just one of the many such correlations that Tyler Vigen explores on Spurious Correlations, and in his book … Continue reading

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Mona Chalabi’s Datasketches

Hand-drawn data visualizations about farts and penises! If that has you hooked, no need to read any further. Just surf over to Mona Chalabi’s Instagram account and enjoy. I first encountered Chalabi through her “Dear Mona” column at FiveThirtyEight, which … Continue reading

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All the P-values Fit to Print

I feel like I’ve seen news stories or blog posts about p-values every day this month. First, Andrew Gelman reported that the editor of the journal Psychological Science, famous to some for publishing dubious findings on the strength of p<0.05, will be … Continue reading

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Who Is The Anti-vax Movement? Data Science Explains.

It was all theoretical until Jenny McCarthy gave Sidney Crosby the mumps. Then it got real. Ok, I know that’s a sensationalist — not to mention flagrantly untrue — thing to say, but it’s how I suddenly felt a few … Continue reading

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Return of the Statistics Blogs

When I shared a few of my favorite statistics blogs over a year ago, Thomas Lumley self-promoted his blogs in the comments, and I’m so glad he did! He is the ringleader and a contributor to the University of Auckland … Continue reading

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Not-So-Confident Intervals

Here is a test for you. Let’s say 300 mathematicians were polled concerning how many hours of TV they watch per week. What does it mean to say that a 95% confidence interval for the average number of hours of … Continue reading

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