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The opinions expressed on this blog are the views of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the American Mathematical Society. The opinions expressed in the posts on this blog are the views of their individual author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the American Mathematical Society
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Recent Posts
Category Archives: Statistics
Un-Junking your Charts
Junk Charts is a blog by Kaiser Fung, who describes himself as “the Web’s first data visualization critic.” People have been criticizing and prescribing solutions for misleading data visualization for a long time. (How to Lie With Statistics was first … Continue reading
Posted in Data Science, Math Communication, Statistics
Tagged charts, data visualization, graphs
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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
Posted in Statistics
Tagged bad statistics, fivethirtyeight, Spurious Correlations, Statistics, Tyler Vigen
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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
How Polling Works…Or Doesn’t Work
From the perpetual pit in my stomach, to the sleepless nights, to the eyes bloodshot from peering at endless forecast models and polling predictions, only one thing can be true: the election is nigh upon us. In a time of … Continue reading
Posted in Events, Statistics, Uncategorized
Tagged Election Forecasting, Mathematical Modeling, Polling
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Beware of Counterintuitive Results: Police Shooting Edition
Last week the New York Times ran the following headline: “Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings.” The article addresses a study currently underway by Roland G. Freyer Jr., a Harvard University economist. … Continue reading
Posted in Statistics, Uncategorized
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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
Hot Hands and Tuesday’s Children
People, especially sports fans, seem to believe that players can get “hot,” that they will hit more baskets (or succeed in whatever metric is of interest in their sport) more after a series of hits than after a series of … Continue reading
Turns Out You Can Be Diverse and Segregated At the Same Time
Well, it’s official, I’m an unrelenting fangirl for Dustin Cable’s Racial Dot Map and everything it stands for. If you’re not yet familiar, it’s one of the coolest data visualization projects to come out of the census data. The map … Continue reading
Posted in Applied Math, Data Science, Statistics
Tagged Diversity, Dustin Cable, Nate Silver, Race, Racial Dot Map, Segregation
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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
Posted in Statistics
Tagged age, Amy Hogan, health, media, percent, reporting, Statistics, Thomas Lumley
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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
