quantitative scholarship
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Counting is DIFFICULT
Eleven million? or 22 million? A new Yale/MIT study estimates the illegal alien population in the US somewhere in the range of 16.5 to 29.1 million (for us statisticians, that’s 22.8 ± 6.3 million). That’s a margin of error larger than the entire population of Los Angeles (3.99 million). Worse yet, this estimate suggests that Read more
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I Call Bullshit!
I want this course in the catalog at my university. Way better than “critical thinking” or “research methods.” Tip from Open Culture. Read more
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When Bayesian Statistics Broke into History
Wonderful article here about the Mosteller and Wallace analysis of the twelve Federalist Papers, the ones of disputed authorship–was it Madison or Hamilton who wrote them? With a nice, easy-to-understand explanation of the Bayesian methodology they used. Tip from Real Clear Life. Read more
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Calculus as a Microagression
Yesterday I was cautioned by the recounting of an event that occurred in our College of Business. It seems that a lecturer was explaining a concept that required either averaging or the area under a curve, and resorted to writing an integral on the board, by way of illustration. This was NOT a demonstration of Read more
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How many significant figures should I use?
That question gets asked dozens of times every semester in my statistics classes; it’s pretty clear that most of my students have no sense of scale or proportion about numbers. But now I have Dr Rhett Alain’s short answer in his Dot Physics Measurement and Uncertainty Smackdown, wherein he refers to the (extremely) long answer Read more
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How to become a stats-savvy boss…
…in one easy lesson. Go read Alan Downey’s slide presentation “How to be a good consumer of statistical analysis.” Then get yourself some data and start working on those CDF plots. Read more
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The Sad Story of p-values
Wow, it’s jackpot week for statistics videos. I just found this treasure explaining p-values. Tip from William M. Briggs, Statistician to the Stars. Read more
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(Some) Scientists are Frickin’ Liars
Tom Naughton explains the difference between an observational study and a clinical trial, in terms everyone can understand. I’m SO stealing this lecture for my biostatistics courses. Tip from Authority Nutrition via Gary Jones (who you really should be reading). Read more
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Leaping Lizards!
Dealing with an odd-sized year (365.024219 days) is not as easy as you think. Not only do we have the popular Gregorian Calendar (4-year cycles, with “by-years”), but some geek gurus have proposed the Earthian Calendar (33-year! cycles). There’s even a connection to Stonehenge. Update (3 March). A careful look at the Earthian Calendar site Read more
The Random Texan 