Eric Schulman and Daniel Debowy write: Contrary to what you might have heard recently (“Get ready for President Trump, says election whiz who’s scary accurate“) from a statistics-driven political scientist, Donald Trump will not “almost certainly become President of the United States” if he wins the Republican nomination. The mainstream media are helping spread that […]
Tag: statistics
“The truth behind India’s new GDP numbers”
Pramit Bhattacharya writes, in the Hindustan Times: The truth behind India’s new GDP numbers It is an open secret that India’s new gross domestic product (GDP) series has flummoxed most observers of the Indian economy. The new numbers seem completely out of sync with other economic indicators… As an analysis of 189 nations over 33 […]
Plush Dissected Knit Creatures and Other Scientific Wonders
For several years, people have been able to experience the joys of plush microbes (these are awesome), plush subatomic particles, and even plush statistical distributions. Well, for people who are more into anatomy — or who want a soft way of learning about it — you can also get plush versions of dissected animals (and […]
What was that Again?: Decay of Attention in Science
The only thing in science than may be even more prominent than the data deluge is the paper deluge: there is an increasingly large number of scholarly (and “scholarly”) journals, and an ever-increasing wealth of papers to fill them. Clearly, this calls for a paper to analyze the situation. In a new study on the […]
Flaccid Mechanics: From Penis-Size Statistics to Penis-Size Physics
As recently discussed in this blog and elsewhere, a team of UK researchers have published a new study with the scintillating title of Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15521 men. The first sentence of the paper’s introduction sums things […]
“Beware The Man of One Study”
The Slate Star Codex blog has a curious essay called “Beware The Man of One Study“. Here’s how it begins: Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease. After […]
Pop music: extant and market taxonomized
Pop music – does it really exist? Yes it does. For a statistical analysis, see: Does pop music exist? Hierarchical structure in phonographic markets by Andrzej Buda of the Uniwesytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Poland, and reproduced in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 391, Issue 21, 1 November 2012, Pages 5153–5159 “I find […]
Rating tiddlywinks (statistically)
Dr. Patrick Barrie, PhD, MRSC, CEng, MIChemE, Cchem, MA, BA, of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at Cambridge University, UK, presents A new sports ratings system: The tiddlywinks world ratings in the Journal of Applied Statistics Volume 30, Issue 4, 2003 “After each tournament, a ‘tournament rating’ is calculated for each player based […]
Extensions of Differences in Differences (statistics) 1985 – 2011
The Difference-in-Differences (DiD) statistical method has now been in use for almost 30 years. see: ‘Using the Longitudinal Structure of Earnings to Estimate the Effect of Training Programs‘ by Orley Ashenfelter; David Card, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 67, No. 4. (Nov., 1985), pp. 648-660. (page 5 in the .pdf). And the Difference-in-Differences […]
Faces in the crowd can make Big Data more valuable
Your ability to spot a weird face might be worth big money in this, the dawning era of Big Data. A statistical technique called “Chernoff faces” transforms mulivariate data — numbers that tend to make people feel numb — into quirky/goofy cartoon faces. Oddball items in the data stand out. You’ll more likely to recognize an […]