Sometimes the raw numbers are better than a percentage
A NY Times Environment blog entry summarizes an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks into whether there really is a “scientific consensus” that humans are substantially...
View ArticleGratuitous use of “Bayesian Statistics,” a branding issue?
I’m on an island in Maine for a few weeks (big shout out for North Haven!) This morning I picked up a copy of “Working Waterfront,” a newspaper that focuses on issues of coastal fishing communities. I...
View ArticleCreating a good wager based on probability estimates
Suppose you and I agree on a probability estimate…perhaps we both agree there is a 2/3 chance Spain will beat Netherlands in tomorrow’s World Cup. In this case, we could agree on a wager: if Spain...
View ArticleUnhappy with improvement by a factor of 10^29
I have an optimization problem: I have a complicated physical model that predicts energy and thermal behavior of a building, given the values of a slew of parameters, such as insulation effectiveness,...
View ArticleNebraska never looked so appealing: anatomy of a zombie attack. Oops, I mean...
One can quibble about the best way to display county-level unemployment data on a map, since a small, populous county gets much less visual weight than a large, sparsely populated one. Even so, I think...
View ArticleClimate Change News
I. State of the Climate report The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently released their “State of the Climate Report” for 2009. The report has chapters discussing global climate...
View ArticleJohn McPhee, the Anti-Malcolm
This blog is threatening to turn into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Social Science, and Literature Criticism, but I’m just going to go with the conversational flow, so here’s another post...
View ArticleSome things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts.
Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to think that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in Kenya. But why? People choose to be Republicans or Democrats because they prefer the policy or...
View ArticleNo matter how famous you are, billions of people have never heard of you.
I was recently speaking with a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a Californian in a tight race this year. I mentioned the fivethirtyeight.com prediction for him, and he said...
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Works almost as well, costs a lot less
The post Works almost as well, costs a lot less appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
View ArticleConsulting: how do you figure out what to charge?
I’m a physicist by training, statistical data analyst by trade. Although some of my work is pretty standard statistical analysis, more often I work somewhere in a gray area that includes physics,...
View ArticleReinventing the wheel, only more so.
Posted by Phil Price: A blogger (can’t find his name anywhere on his blog) points to an article in the medical literature in 1994 that is…well, it’s shocking, is what it is. This is from the abstract:...
View Article“Tied for Warmest Year On Record”
The National Climatic Data Center has tentatively announced that 2010 is, get this, “tied” for warmest on record. Presumably they mean it’s tied to the precision that they quote (1.12 F above the...
View ArticleNews coverage of statistical issues…how did I do?
This post is by Phil Price. A reporter once told me that the worst-kept secret of journalism is that every story has errors. And it’s true that just about every time I know about something first-hand,...
View Article“If it saves the life of a single child…” and other nonsense
This post is by Phil Price. An Oregon legislator, Mitch Greenlick, has proposed to make it illegal in Oregon to carry a child under six years old on one’s bike (including in a child seat) or in a bike...
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Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to...
View ArticleDo you have any idea what you’re talking about?
We all have opinions about the federal budget and how it should be spent. Infrequently, those opinions are informed by some knowledge about where the money actually goes. It turns out that most people...
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Worst statistical graphic I have seen this year
This gets my vote for the worst statistical graphic I (Phil) have seen this year. If you’ve got a worse one, put a link in the comments. “Credit” for this one goes to “Peter and Maria Hoey (Source:...
View ArticleImprovement of 5 MPG: how many more auto deaths?
This entry was posted by Phil Price. A colleague is looking at data on car (and SUV and light truck) collisions and casualties. He’s interested in causal relationships. For instance, suppose car...
View ArticleHow the ignorant idiots win, explained. Maybe.
According to a New York Times article, cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have a new theory about rational argument: humans didn’t develop it in order to learn about the world, we...
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