Statistical Literacy
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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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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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Klout wins for this year’s stupidest bar chart
Check it out here: http://blog.infoadvisors.com/index.php/2011/12/22/stupidest-bar-chart-of-2011-congrats-klout/ I’m not sure how you trust a company who claims to have some super-secret statistical insight when they put out things like this. Continue reading
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Base Rate, Revisited
Reading Dan Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, and I can tell very early in it’s going to be excellent. The following Kahneman insight is an old saw of research on statistical intuition by now, but was revolutionary when he and Tversky came up with it in the early 70s. I thought I’d share it for Continue reading
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A Statistical Literacy Concept Inventory
Been thinking lots about concept inventories. The key to a good concept inventory is that it tests intuitions, not terminology or formulas. It’s far too easy to pre-test students on a test with unfamiliar vocabulary, spend a semester on vocabulary, then act surprised that students do better at the end of the semester when they Continue reading
Hapgood 