-
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
Subscribe to Blog via Email
-
Recent Posts
Category Archives: Statistics
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
2 Comments
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
e is for Ebola
A recent NPR blog features a few quotes emphasizing a math word that is lamentably absent from many readers’ vocabularies: “It’s spreading and growing exponentially,” President Obama said Tuesday. “This is a disease outbreak that is advancing in an exponential … Continue reading
Posted in Applied Math, Biomath, Math Education, Mathematics and Computing, people in math, Statistics
Tagged Amy Greer, Basic Reproduction Ratio, Caitlyn Rivers, computational epidemiology, David Hartley, Ebola, Effective Reproduction Ratio, Ellsworth Campbell, Exponential growth, IDEA, SIR model
Leave a comment
