Another day, another misguided graph on happiness research. This time Fast Company (tech populations are ground zero for happiness research for some reason) puts up the graph above. Which seems interesting, right? Except that in the article we find this: Some countries are significantly happier than others (happiness is, of course, subjective). Indonesia, India Mexico, Continue reading

Students really don’t get randomness. This is the classic Trick Coin Flip question — I have a trick coin that either comes up heads a bit more than tails, or tails a bit more than heads [They sell trick coins both ways, apparently]. I don’t know whether this particular trick coin tends towards heads or Continue reading

I knew about the poll in 1936 that changed everything — where the two million responses collated by the Literary Digest were dead wrong while the 50,000 responses scientifically selected by George Gallup were right. If you need a Wikipedia refresher on that, here you go: In 1936, [Gallup’s] new organization achieved national recognition by Continue reading

Skewness — I think the idea a distribution has a shape is something that some students just don’t grasp, and I’ve never got a good grip on what it is that blocks them from understanding concepts like skew (they get outliers at least in the broad, conversational sense, but skew remains a mystery). The weirdest Continue reading

Example of Simpson’s Paradox from The Numbers behind Numb3rs. In this example„ women are accepted at a higher rate (or roughly equal rate) to all of Berkeley’s programs, but are accepted a a lower rate when those acceptances are combined into university-wide stats. Why? Because women apply to more competitive programs… Continue reading

From Farrington & Tarling’s Prediction in Criminology, a new term: predictive efficiency. The way to think about it is this — suppose I say that a college education predicts low incidence of being convicted of a violent crime, and at the end of the day I’m right — over the course of a year, 97.5% Continue reading

From Swing Voters via ilovecharts This is a great example for students of how longitudinal measurement is sometimes used in polling to understand the effect of a specific event. The post-speech numbers alone tell us a bit about Obama’s popularity, but nothing about the speech. With a pre/post on the speech, we can use the post-speech gain to Continue reading

Diagnostic vs. Spectral Markers. From Principles of Medical Statistics. Diagnostic markers are about whether the disease is present, whereas spectral markers deal with severity and stage. Continue reading