statistics
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Meet Godfrey Thomson
with mastery, won in most cases before thirty, comes leisure which can be truly enjoyed, not leisure stolen from duty. Dr James Thompson (no relation) gives us a short professional biography of a pioneering educational psychologist. More biography here and here. Read more
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Simpson at Bletchley Park
Best known for his Paradox and diversity index, Edward Simpson was also one of the code-breaking geniuses at Bletchley Park. He explains their use of Bayesian reasoning in Significance. Tip from X’ian’s OG, by way of R Bloggers. Read more
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The Mother of all Meta-Analyses
So I’ve been preparing a new version of my introductory biostatistics course for the past 2 weeks, and I decided to incorporate most of the videos in the Annenberg Learner online course Against All Odds. One of the videos I’m using is Correlation, which has an interesting discussion on twin studies, addressing the perennial “nature Read more
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NNT and NNH
Two interesting articles in the New York Times describing the Number Needed to Treat (NNT), the Number Needed to Harm (NNH), have prompted some interesting discussion among ASA members (at the members-only discussion board, unfortunately). The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has a nice technical definition, fans of the NNT have posted a nice tutorial, and Read more
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Top College Majors for Jobs
Lots of handwringing discussion at the source, mostly not worth reading. 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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The Beginning of the End for 5%
My students repeatedly ask about setting the critical values or interpreting p-values in statistical hypothesis testing. My stock answer is they should do their tests at the 5% level, since this is the most common and accepted practice in the biomedical community (my translation: it’s what all the KooL KiDz do.) But now some upstart Read more
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Simpson’s Paradox, revisited
Check out this cool new webpage explaining Simpson’s Paradox. Tip from Flowing Data. 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
The Random Texan 