Are science journalists required to take one good statistics course? That is the question in my head when I read this Science Times article, titled "One Cup of Coffee Could Offset Three Drinks a Day" (link). We are used to seeing rather tenuous conclusions such as "Four Cups of Coffee Reduces Your Risk of X". This headline takes it up another notch. A result is claimed about the substitution effect…
Only 6% of crashes in New Zealand involve foreign drivers, according to the latest figures provided by the Ministry of Transport. But in some remote regions of the South Island particularly popular with tourists for their scenery... foreign drivers are involved in about a quarter of all crashes. These sentences come from a CNN article about a vigilante movement in those regions popular with tourists. The vigilantes snatch car keys…
On the sister blog, I wrote about Hans Rosling’s recent presentation in New York (link). I noted that Rosling has apparently simplified his visual palette. Rosling is best known as the developer of the Gapminder tool, used to visualize global...
Chapter 1 of Numbersense (link)uses the example of U.S. News ranking of law schools to explore the national pastime of ranking almost anything. Since there is no objective standard for the "correct" ranking, it is pointless to complain about "arbitrary" weighting and so on. Every replacement has its own assumptions. A more productive path forward is to understand how the composite ranking is created, and shine a light on the…
Every chart, even if the dataset is small, deserves care. Long-time reader zbicyclist submits the following, which illustrates this point well. The following comments are by zbicyclist: This is from http://win.niddk.nih.gov/statistics/ -- from the National Institute of Diabetes and Kidney...
Last week, I pointed out the futility of using data as proof or disproof in Deflate-gate. Emphatically, a case of "N=All" does not make things better. I later edited the post for HBR (link). In this post, I want to address a couple of more subtle technical issues related to the Sharp analysis, which can be summarized as follows: 1. New England is an outlier in the plays per fumbles…
I was asked to adapt my earlier post for the HBR audience, and the new version is now up on HBR. Here is the link. I'm happy that they picked up this post because most business problems concern reverse causation. A small subset of problems can be solved using A/B testing, but only those in which causes are known in advance and subject to manipulation. Even then, Facebook got into…
A number of readers sent me Warren Sharp's piece about the ongoing New England Patriots' deflate-gate scandal (link to Slate's version of this) so I suppose I should say something about it. For those readers who are not into American football, the Superbowl is soon upon us. New England, one of the two finalists, has been accused of using footballs that are below the weight requirements on the rulebook, hence…
I'd like to start 2015 on a happy note. I enjoyed reading the piece by Steven Rattner in the New York Times called "The Year in Charts". (link) I particularly like the crisp headers, and unfussy language, placing the charts...
Merry Christmas, readers. *** A Twitter follower pointed me to this visual: I have yet to understand why the vertical axis of the top chart keeps changing scales over time. The white dot labelled "Peak 1982" (70 million) is barely...
