statistics
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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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Egg yolks are bad for you. Oh, wait. No they’re not…
First some guy in a rush to publish a paper decides egg yolks are almost as bad for you as smoking, then some other guy reads the paper and declares it hogwash. It’s a bunch of Canucks, so you gotta make allowances. Tips from Instapundit and BlissTree. Update (18 August). BlissTree reminds us that eggs Read more
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Does this mean we need to start worrying about Peak Dust?
Two amazing facts: The vast amount of mineral nutrients required to sustain the Amazon rainforest come from dust storms in the African Sahara, and We’ve known about this for six years (for some small values of we). And I really dig the estimate of the amount of dust that makes it across the Atlantic to Read more
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A Primer on Clinical Trials
Over on the Scientific American blogs, Dr Judy Stone begins a series of online articles describing the ins and outs of clinical trials. Most folks have no idea how complicated or time-consuming the process is. Molecules to Medicine Stay tuned, I’ll keep these updated. Tip from Boing, Boing. Read more
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Bayesian Gaydar
Sanjay Srivastava describes The Precisely Fuzzy Science of Gaydar: “…, a quick calculation tells us that for a randomly-selected member of the population, if your gaydar says “GAY” there is a 9% chance that you are right. Eerily accurate? Not so much. If you rely too much on your gaydar, you are going to make Read more
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Weekly geekery
Statistics Taking the bias out of crowd counting. (Tip from the Geek Press) A bad vita trumps bad statistics. (Outraged tip from The Endeavour) Doing statistical graphics? Worry about color. (Tip from the Endeavour) Security Typosquatting. (Tip from the Geek Press) Food and Drink We took my sister-in-law out to dinner at Il Sogno a Read more
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Weekly geekery
Back from a hectic JSM in Miami, so back with the odd items. Statistics Paul Meier’s survival function converges to zero Through the eyes of a statistician (JSM award winner) Even more statistics videos from JSM user333 wanted an autocorrelated binary sequence; I introduced him to a simple Markov chain Recipes from Miami mango mojito Read more
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Statistics for Experimental Biologists
The Endeavor’s John Cook just tweeted @StatFact about four kinds of statistics, which led me to this wonderful site, Statistics for Experimental Biologists. What a fabulous resource for my Statistics 1403 course! Read more
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Reproducible research
Great article in the NY Times about Keith Baggerly’s push for open data and reproducible analysis of results. Curiously enough, one of my students hit upon a tiny example of the problem this semester: …I decided to run my own descriptive statistics on their data sets to make sure their reports were all represented in Read more
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Data mining for cheaters
Using data forensics to detect cheaters on standardized tests..is there anything statistics can’t do? Tip from the Geek Press. Read more
The Random Texan 