Twenty-first century Junior Woodchuck Guidebook I grew up reading Donald Duck comics. I love the Junior Woodchucks, and their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. The Guidebook is a small paperback book, containing information on every conceivable subject, including geography, mythology, history, literature … Continue reading →
Some more help (preaching?) for students of statistics Last week I outlined the first five principles to help people to learn and study statistics. They focussed on how you need to practise in order to be good at statistics and … Continue reading →
Statistics is not really elegant or even fun in the way that a mathematics puzzle can be. But statistics is necessary, and enormously rewarding. I like to think that we use statistical methods and principles to extract truth from data. … Continue reading →
The role of context in statistical analysis The wonderful advantage of teaching statistics is the real-life context within which any applicaton must exist. This can also be one of the difficulties. Statistics without context is merely the mathematics of statistics, … Continue reading →
Patterns, vocab and practice, practice, practice An important part of statistical analysis is being able to look at graphical representation of data, extract meaning and make comments about it, particularly related to the context. Graph interpretation is a difficult skill … Continue reading →
This post is prompted by two 17 year old boys, Cam and Thomas, who are about to enter year 13, the final year of High school in New Zealand. They are both academically capable, with highly educated parents. And both … Continue reading →
Optimise everything! I had a colleague who believed that everything could and should be optimised. He had a diet Linear Program which he used to plan his meals to provide optimal nutrition. Unfortunately the Linear Program didn’t seem to have … Continue reading →
The one-armed operations researcher My mentor, Hans Daellenbach told me a story about a client asking for a one-armed Operations Researcher. The client was sick of getting answers that went, “On the one hand, the best decision would be to … Continue reading →
All sorts of numbers are used to describe us. The following numbers (with a few alterations to protect the innocent) can be used to describe me: 70, 50, 44, 145, 18, 2013, 176, 12438756, 51008420, 3, 0.25, 2, 26, 6439801802, … Continue reading →
One of the most famous sayings about statistics is the line: “There are three types of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics.” This was stated by author Mark Twain (Samuel Clements) and quoted by British statesman Benjamin Disraeli. There is … Continue reading →
