What Are the Chances?

One reason for quotes like there are "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics" is because of graphs like these:  

With the upcoming election, I have been following my favorite prediction site: electoral-vote.com.  That site has a big map showing current predictions state-b...

About a year ago, I read a book called "Born to Run," by Christopher McDougall, who last week wrote

In my professional work, I like being the statistical sleuth, trying to figure out whether a person or company cheated, and how much they cheated. Thus it was with a lot of interest that I read a rece...

A couple years ago, I wrote about a study that looked at the effect of a seawater nasal spray on the health of children (see

I think that's how the ad line went. When? maybe 25 years ago.   Well, it seems to apply now. Sudden acceleration. Mention a problem with a car, any problem with any car, and pe...

So says an article in today's Science Daily, which reports on a recent study at Northwestern of children from the Philippine...

This updates my previous blog: "Why Swine flu is a bunch of hogwash?"   Thing...

A recent article in Yahoo Sports pointed out that the Washington Red...

There was a bit of interesting news that came out Friday--the nations unemployment rate actually declined, from 9.5% to 9.4%. This is true despite the fact that there was a net loss of jobs of 247,00...

Now that the sun has finally come out in NYC today after what seems like weeks of rain and cold weather, it seems an appropriate time to talk about one of my favorite summer recreational activities--r...

I first thought of writing about this a couple of weeks ago, when the nationwide hysteria concerning swine flu was just beginning, but then, as quickly as it came, it went. Now, with the first death...

I don't have a long post for today, but I want to briefly discuss the discussion of a study on Facebook and grades. It was the subject of the Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy blog last week:

Suppose we want to figure out what percentage of BIGbank's 1,000,000 loans are bad. We also want to look at smallbank, with 100,000 loans. Many people seem to think you'd need to look at...

A recent article by the Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy" has re-surfaced one of my old