Researching my health statistics class, and found this great walk-through of the issues of sensitivity and specificity in medical test design and interpretation. Clear, easy to read, and suitable for everyone.

Everyone that gets medical tests done or will get medical tests done (which, let’s face it, is everyone) should be familiar with this stuff, but it’s often hard to visualize. The author’s technique for representing this makes it wonderfully simple. Click through!

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If you are interested in these issues, Kaiser Fung’s Numbers Rule Your World has a great discussion of how they relate to the sham that is steroids testing in sports.

The best book on health statistics I have read is Know Your Chances. For some reason there is a free PDF of it here. It’s short, you can read it in an afternoon, and it’s one of the most useful things you could spend your time on, honest.