Statistics an be compiled about anything, independent of the question: is there any point in gathering statistics about this thing? The following study may be good fodder for teachers who wish to discuss that question with students: “The Temporal Making of a Great Literary Corpus by a XX-Century Mystic: Statistics of Daily Words and Writing […]
Chernoff Faces, perhaps the most human way of presenting statistical data— the method was invented by Herman Chernoff, thus the name— gained extra expression in this later paper by Bernhard Flury and Hans Riedwyl: “Graphical Representation of Multivariate Data by Means of Asymmetrical Faces.” Bernhard Flury and Hans Riedwyl, Journal of the American Statistical Association, […]
When statisticians are confronted with sets of data, they occasionally find there are data missing. This phenomenon has been given the name ‘Missingness’. Sometimes, a decision is taken that these missing data can be ignored, in which case they are classed as ‘Ignorable Missingness’. But on occasion, some missing data just can’t be ignored. In […]
Some things might help in preventing cancer. Some things might be found to be causing cancer. And yet other things might be ‘associated’ with cancer – that’s to say they might occur along with rising cancer rates, and yet may, or may not, be a cause. For example, could there be a previously overlooked statistical […]
Even statistics researchers find that statistics can be— and sometimes are—tricky to use. A recent study by two mathematically-inclined marketing professors demonstrated that many statisticians get confused about (or ignore) some supposedly simple things: “Statistical Significance and the Dichotomization of Evidence,” Blakeley B. McShane [pictured here, pouring coffee] and David Gal, Journal of the American Statistical […]
The belief that “statistics is like spaghetti” is a good starting point from which to savor this new study about statistics and spaghetti: “Exploration of Experimental Design and Statistical Methods Using the Stick-on-the-Wall Spaghetti Rule,” Simone Montangero, Francesca Vittone, Sally Olderbak, and Oliver Wilhelm, Teaching Statistics, epub 2018. The authors, at Universität Ulm, Germany, explain: […]
Do people delude themselves about prizing — or even recognizing — recognizing the taste of their favorite beer? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published taste-this-beer, taste-that-beer study. Yale/MIT/Harvard biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas lends his voice, and his scientific expertise, […]
Comparisons of selfies and sharks, and of pretty much any pair of things, come out differently depending on how careful you are in making — or judging — the comparison. Gary Smith, of Ponona College, explains: We are now told that selfies are more than dangerous than sharks, with 8 deaths this year from shark […]
The Still Not Significant blog lists lots of ways to mutter, in professional language, if your research findings are statistically marginal. Among them: What to do if your p-value is just over the arbitrary threshold for ‘significance’ of p=0.05? … The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as […]
Brian Hayes wrote, in American Scientist, in 2002, about Lewis Fry Richardson‘s book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels: An interesting lesson of Richardson’s exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that […]