statistics

IHS Jane’s used satellite imagery to estimate the size of the crowd at this week’s inauguration.  Sweet! Read more

Kyoshi Ito, inventor of the stochastic integral, has left the building.  His work is classic. Sayonara, sensei. Tip from Mahalanobis. Read more

And what better way to improve my statistics lectures than an animation package for R?  Just install and load the package animation. Tip from the Social Science Statistics Blog. Read more

For those of you confused by the recent election polls, Iowahawk explains non-sampling error in terms a frat boy can understand. If you’re not a frat boy, and would like a more detailed explanation of what can go wrong in surveys and opinion polls, Weisberg’s The Total Survey Error Approach is the book to read. … Read more

In statistics, validity is a property of measurement; it says that what you’re measuring is strongly related to what you want to measure.  A simple example is measuring body-mass index (a combination of height and weight) as an indicator of obesity.  Here are two viewpoints on the validity of political speech.  First is Martin Krzywinski’s… Read more

Black Swan author Nicholas Taleb is at it again with a timely article on long-tailed distributions and how the mindless application of basic statistics has exacerbated problems in our financial sector.  My buddy Rudy Kittliz–the Cowboy Statistician–has been talking about this stuff for years.Tip from the Geek Press. Read more

The US traffic fatality rate is down, as is the total number of traffic fatalities.  The NHTSA wants you to know. Tip from the Drudge Report. Read more

Some recent research suggests that teaching math with concrete examples only muddies the waters: …many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State… Read more

Robert Kosara has an excellent introductory tutorial on treemaps over at EagerEyes.org.  Check it out. Read more

Who says stats geeks don’t have a sense of humor?  Check these out at Flowing Data. Read more