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‘Adrift’ in Adulthood: Students Who Struggled in College Find Life Harsher After Graduation
‘Adrift’ in Adulthood: Students Who Struggled in College Find Life Harsher After Graduation From the article: Here is what they found: Graduates who scored in the bottom 20 percent on a test of critical thinking fared far more poorly on measures of employment and lifestyle when compared with those who scored in the top 20… Continue reading
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Infant mortality and choice of a base
If I have 10 kids in my class and two failed last year and one failed this year, I can say two equivalent things: 50% less students failed my course this year 10% more of my students passed. The odd thing is most students refuse when looking at such figures to believe they are equivalent… Continue reading
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Tutoring at Scale Sighting
From The Chronicle, Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up: Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with… Continue reading
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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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