statistics

The New York Times has a great article on how Philadelphia and St Louis reacted to the 1918 Spanish flu (to the detriment of Philadelphia). The conclusion is a downer: What these results mean for a future epidemic is not clear. “If avian flu became a pandemic tomorrow,” Dr. Ferguson said, “we would start a… Read more

A new, improved intergovernmental report on Global Warming is coming out, and France will mark the occasion by turning off the lights on the Eiffel Tower for 5 minutes. Wouldn’t it be more useful to replace the incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones?Tip from the Drudge Report. Thanks to Lileks for the picture. Update (4 February). … Read more

Survey respondents using linear scales–like continuous Likert scores–tend to rank on the left-hand side, inducing biased responses.  I think I just figured out how to raise my teaching evaluations! Tip from the Geek Press. Read more

Ishbadiddle has this delightful graphic on the many possible catastrophes lurking in our  future.  For some of the events –"robots taking over" or "black hole swallows Earth "–  the probabilities are what a Bayesian would call subjective*,  so not very reliable. I was disappointed that solar flares,  nanotech "gray goo," and mass suicide  induced by… Read more

…is some stuff about psychometrics.  Flynn and Murray had a debate at the AEI, and it’s all on the web. Tip from Derbyshire at The Corner. Read more

Amy Perfors has some good advice about using math in a slide presentation.  However, it takes some fancy work with LaTeX to emphasize and dim parts of equations.  Sounds like a little project for Christmas vacation. Read more

Check out this short history of computer graphics and animation at OSU — dazzling!Tip from the Harvard IQSS Social Sciences Statistics Blog. If you do graphics in R or Mathematica, read the full post–there are more goodies. Read more

Two mathematicians at Iowa State have devised a neural net that detects steganographic messages in digital images.  Sneaky, these statistical types…. Tip from the Geek Press. Read more

The latest issue of the Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter has a great article by Thomas Lumley on color blindness and computer graphics, featuring my old nemesis, the Ishihara dot test.  Lots of other goodies too: Bayesian computing, multivariate glyphs, and tips for teaching statistical graphics.  Check it out. Read more

Holy Bayesian Prognostication!  Check out this forecasting doo-dad. Tip from the Social Science Statistics Blog. Read more