Last year, Gizmodo capitalized on the fallout from the Ashley Madison hacking scandal and published a sensational article claiming the website that, if you haven't heard, promotes adultery, has "almost no" real women on it. The subtext is that millions of gullible, disloyal males were paying monthly fees to the website to do nothing or, cue the laugh track, to converse with "badly-designed robots." These men, according to Gizmodo, were…
Last year, Gizmodo capitalized on the fallout from the Ashley Madison hacking scandal and published a sensational article claiming the website that, if you haven't heard, promotes adultery, has "almost no" real women on it. The subtext is that millions of gullible, disloyal males were paying monthly fees to the website to do nothing or, cue the laugh track, to converse with "badly-designed robots." These men, according to Gizmodo, were…
Long-time reader Daniel L. isn't a fan of this chart, especially when it is made to spin, as you can see at this link: Like other 3D charts, this one is hard to read. The vertical lines are both good...
Andrew Gelman and I have published a piece in Slate, discussing the failure to replicate scientific findings, using the recent example of the so-called power pose. The idea of the "power pose" is that people develop psychological and hormonal changes by making this "power pose" before walking into business meetings, whereupon these changes make them more powerful. As you often read here and at Gelman's blog, the fact that someone…
The news is out that Uber got fined by the New York Attorney General's office for data breaches and privacy concerns. The headline writer for ZDNet nailed this one: "Uber fined peanuts in God View surveillance" (link). And the sub-lead has the kicker: "For a company with a valuation of over $50 billion, a $20,000 fine over user data protection is laughable." This settlement tells us one of the following…
In this week's Statbusters, my column with Andrew Gelman in the Daily Beast, we take note of Slate's recent rant about "wasteful" anti-smoking advertising, and demonstrate how to think about cost-benefit analysis. The key point is: if you are going to make an extreme claim, you better have some numbers to back it up. These numbers can be approximate, and based on (potentially dubious) Googled data. Not every analysis needs…
My friend Alberto Cairo said it best: if you see bullshit, say "bullshit!" He was very incensed by this egregious "infographic": (link to his post) Emily Schuch provided a re-visualization: The new version provides a much richer story of how...
My co-columnist Andrew Gelman has been doing some fantastic work, digging behind that trendy news story that claims that middled-aged, non-Hispanic, white male Americans are dying at an abnormal rate. See, for example, this New York Times article that not only reports the statistical pattern but also in its headline, asserts that those additional deaths were due to suicide and substance abuse. It all bega n with the chart shown…
It appears that Google Flu Trends (GFT) has slipped quietly into the night. In a short post to the Google Research blog, the team behind GFT announced that they are "no longer publishing" flu estimates, effectively ending the seven-year-old experiment. The GFT home page now links to some historical datasets. The post was dated August 15, and it appears that mainstream media completely missed it. GFT was one of the…
Robert Kosara posted a response to my previous post. He raises an important issue in data visualization - the need to aggregate data, and not plot raw data. I have no objection to that point. What was shown in my...
