Felix Salmon hates the 401(k), and he explains his reasoning here. His strongest argument is the data, which shows that the first generation of retirees who grew up with these individual retirement savings accounts find themselves with meager retirement savings (average: $120,000, excluding those with zero). I have always disliked 401(k), and here are some reasons: I hate the myth of individual control. These accounts (just like health savings accounts…
Medical researchers are somehow allowed to get away with statistical murder. It upsets me to read the article in Forbes titled "Pet Owners May Have Lower Risk For Heart Disease." (link) This article takes the form of many other similar articles that purport to find an association between some risk factor and a common disease. Note they always use the weasel word "may". If you see this word, and immediately…
On the Junk Charts blog (link), I discussed some charts from the NYT graphics team (@nytgraphics) for a feature on the NFL draft. In the second part of the behind-the-scenes blog post, they discussed how they visualized work by some economists. This is how the research was summarized: "across all players and positions, teams only picked a player better than the person who went next at that position 52 percent…
Mammograms continue to be an emotional and controversial topic. I blogged about it some time ago. (link) Felix Salmon, whose blog should be daily reading, praises an article by Peggy Orenstein called "Our Feel Good War on Breast Cancer", NYT Magazine (link). Salmon's blog provides a quick summary; Orenstein's article is very long. Orenstein's point of view has particular weight because she was diagnosed at an early age, and was…
The past week, you are unable to avoid, if you read the business news, mention of the "law of large numbers". We are led to believe that tech giants like Apple and Amazon are suffering from this statistical law. For example: Apple: Newest Victim of the Law of Large Numbers (CNet) New York Times Paywall Growth Slows (Columbia Journalism Review): "Much of this is due to the law of large…
That's not really what the FDA said but based on the shameful actions unearthed by ProPublica and reported by Scientific American here, one would think one can get away with this scam. Three years ago, the FDA busted a Houston lab (based on a whistleblower report) that fabricated loads of research studies that were used by the FDA to approve about 100 drugs. Eighty-percent of those drugs were generic drugs…
Josh hated this "dataless visualization" from ABC. (link; warning: ads). Here are his comments: The report has planes leaving China, landing across the globe and instantly infecting us all with bird flu. It doesn't do a good job explaining how...
The New York Times brought attention to the Bronx courtrooms this weekend. (link) The following small-multiples chart effectively illustrates how the Bronx system is uniquely unproductive, compared to the other boroughs: The above chart shows the outcomes. The next chart...
The first thing one (should) learn about statistics is "all that data is not information." That's the very first thing I tell my class each semester. This message is doubly resonant in this age of "Big Data". *** I was reading a post on Dell at Felix Salmon's blog, a post written by Ryan McCarthy or Ben Walsh. It cited BusinessWeek's Roben Farzad: "When it comes to putting a price…
Sometimes, a chart just strains your mind. Such is the case with the following, a tip from Augustine F. (@acfou) There are just so many percentages on the chart it's really hard to figure out which is which. Under the...
