January 2012
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On Sex After Prostate Surgery, Confusing Data [Problems with Term Definition]
On Sex After Prostate Surgery, Confusing Data [Problems with Term Definition] A classic problem of term definition from the NYT (somewhat older article): A notable study in 2005 showed that a year after surgery, 97 percent of patients were able to achieve an erection adequate for intercourse. But last month, researchers from George Washington University Continue reading
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Are we winning or losing the “War on Cancer”?
If your answer was that war is the wrong metaphor, you win the prize, I suppose. Still, I found this exercise from a medical stats textbook rather interesting: 17.1. A major controversy has occurred about apparent contradictions in biostatistical data as researchers try to convince Congress to allocate more funds for intramural and extramural investigations Continue reading
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How Visa Predicts Divorce
How Visa Predicts Divorce From TDB: Hunch then looks for statistical correlations between the information that all of its users provide, revealing fascinating links between people’s seemingly unrelated preferences. For instance, Hunch has revealed that people who enjoy dancing are more apt to want to buy a Mac, that people who like The Count onSesame Continue reading
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Udacity and the future of online universities
Udacity and the future of online universities Felix Salmon on Sebastian Thrun, the open course runner extraordinaire who built the Stanford AI course: Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Continue reading
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A nice summary on mean, median, mode, range, and standard deviation from Basic Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences from Heiman. Continue reading
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The Numbers Game
We often talk of social statistics, especially those that seem as straightforward as age, as if a bureaucrat were poised with a clipboard, peering through every window, counting; or, better still, had some machine to do it for them. The unsurprising truth is that, for many of the statistics we take for granted, there is Continue reading
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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 Continue reading
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I’ve been playing around with cognitive disfluency in slide design for my class lately, trying to solve a conundrum. The problem is this — we know from research that reading materials that introduce “desirable difficulties” (such as presenting information in a difficult to read font) are recalled better than reading materials with a cleaner, more Continue reading
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From A. N. Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics, a brilliant early reflection on what we now see as a System 1/System 2 problem: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise Continue reading
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Hello world!
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