As if we need more evidence. The statistics community loves to think of our subject as highly practical and relevant to the general population. And this is true. The average person has a poor grasp of basic statistical thinking, even if he or she has taken one or more statistics courses. This is true, yet many in our community are in denial. Chapter 1 of Numbers Rule Your World deals…
A number of folks have reacted to various blogs and talks I have recently given. I'm glad that my writing has inspired others, and I recommend reading these wonderful responses. *** Diane Ravitch, the eminent scholar of New York education and author of several great books, found my 2011 post about Bill Gates's view of education. Here is her reaction: How refreshing to know that statisticians like Kaiser Fung are…
I'm excited to announce that there will be a summer session for my Dataviz Workshop at NYU (starting June 21). This is a chart-building workshop run like a creative writing workshop. You will work on a personal project throughout the...
Back in 2009, I wrote about a failed attempt to visualize regional dialects in the U.S. (link). The raw data came from Bert Vaux's surveys. I recently came across some fantastic maps based on the same data. Here's one: These...
I saw Joe N.'s tweet asking me about a study of how professors spend their time, reported by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images. This is an anthropological study, something that I am not at all familiar with although the people in the field seem to believe that they can make statistically valid observations. I'm glad the author of the study, John Ziker, wrote a (really) long article describing what he…
Princeton - apparently due to pressure from parents - is on the verge of losing its nerve in the battle against grade inflation (link). It is the most prestigious college to have instituted an A-grade quota. By contrast, 62 percent of all grades given at Yale are As and at Harvard, the most common grade given is A. At Stanford, 93 percent of grades were As or Bs, and that…
My chart making workshop has passed the point where each participant (except one) has presented the first draft of his or her project, and the class has opined on these efforts. Previously, I posted the syllabus of the course here....
The Facebook data science team has put together a great course on EDA at Udacity. EDA stands for exploratory data analysis. It is the beginning of any data analysis when you have a pile of data (or datasets) and you...
Russ Roberts had this to say about the proposal to replacing the calculus requirement with statistics for students. Statistics is in many ways much more useful for most students than calculus. The problem is, to teach it well is extraordinarily difficult. It’s very easy to teach a horrible statistics class where you spit back the […]
