Aris Spanos, my colleague and co-author (Economics),recently came across this seemingly anonymous review of our Error and Inference (2010) [E & I]. It’s interesting that the reviewer remarks that “The book gives a sense of security regarding the future of statistical science and its importance in many walks of life.” I wish I knew just what […]
Among the (less technical) items sent my way over the past few days are discussions of the so-called High Quality Research Act. I’d not heard of it, but it’s apparently an outgrowth of the recent hand-wringing over junk science, flawed statistics, non-replicable studies, and fraud (discussed at times on this blog). And it’s clearly a […]
My colleague, Lydia Patton, sent me this interesting article, “The Philosophy of the Higgs,” (from The Guardian, March 24, 2013) when I began the posts on “statistical flukes” in relation to the Higgs experiments (here and here); I held off posting it partly because of the slightly sexist attention-getter pic of Marilyn (in reference to an “irrelevant […]
Three years ago, many of us were glued to the “spill cam” showing, in real time, the gushing oil from the April 20, 2010 explosion sinking the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11, and spewing oil until July 15. Trials have been taking place this month, as people try to meet the 3 year deadline to […]
Error Statistics Philosophy Blog: March 2013* (Frequentists in Exile-the blog)**: (3/1) capitalizing on chance (3/4) Big Data or Pig Data? (3/7) Stephen Senn: Casting Stones (3/10) Blog Contents 2013 (Jan & Feb) (3/11) S. Stanley Young: Scientific Integrity and Transparency (3/13) Risk-Based Security: Knives and Axes (3/15) Normal Deviate: Double Misunderstandings About p-values (3/17) Update on […]
(guest post) When Relevance is Irrelevant, by Stephen Senn Head of Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS) Applied statisticians tend to perform analyses on additive scales and additivity is an important aspect of an analysis to try to check. Consider survival analysis. The most important model used, the default in many cases, is the […]
Chance, rational beliefs, decision, uncertainty, probability, error probabilities, truth, random sampling, resampling, opinion, expectations. These are some of the concepts we bandy about by giving various interpretations to mathematical statistics, to statistical theory, and to probabilistic models. But are they real? The question of “ontology” asks about such things, and given the “Ontology and Methodology” […]
It was from my Virginia Tech colleague I.J. Good (in statistics), who died four years ago (April 5, 2009), at 93, that I learned most of what I call “howlers” on this blog. His favorites were based on the “paradoxes” of stopping rules. “In conversation I have emphasized to other statisticians, starting in 1950, that, […]
Kent Staley Associate Professor Department of philosophy Saint Louis University Regular visitors to Error Statistics Philosophy may recall a discussion that broke out here and on other sites last summer when the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they had discovered a new particle in their search for the Higgs […]
Deiderik Stapel is back in the news, given the availability of the English translation of the Tilberg (Levelt and Noort Committees) Report as well as his book, Ontsporing (Dutch for “Off the Rails”), where he tries to explain his fraud. An earlier post on him is here. While the disgraced social psychologist was shown to […]
