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 […]
Tag: statistics
“Thinginess fails”
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 […]
The statistical un-likelihood of Donald Trump [analysis of a Trump-Up analysis]
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 […]
“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 […]