by Craig Marker | Apr 12, 2007 | Uncategorized
From the Mahalonobis Blog: Just as Stephen Jay Gould said we shouldn’t blame the dinosaurs for being obsolescent–they lasted for hundreds of millions of years–we shouldn’t be too hard on Microsoft. Being very popular means having a target...
by Craig Marker | Apr 12, 2007 | Uncategorized
An interesting post from the Social Science Statistics Blog (see also earlier related posts on Risk Assessments, Diagnostic Tests, and the Taxi Cab Problem):The availability heuristic describes people’s tendency to judge that events that are really emotionally...
by Craig Marker | Apr 9, 2007 | Uncategorized
I am about to read Taleb’s Black Swan book. According to Wikipedia, a Black Swan is an event that has a large-impact and it is hard-to-predict because of its improbability.Mahalonobis’ Blog writes about how Black Swans are highlighted in the media:Yet that...
by Craig Marker | Apr 4, 2007 | Uncategorized
If you enjoyed the earlier blog on presenting data by Hans Rosling, his website can be found at: www.gapminder.org.
by Craig Marker | Mar 30, 2007 | Uncategorized
by Craig Marker | Mar 30, 2007 | Uncategorized
From Happy Accidents, Seredipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs: Doctors typically treated ulcers by initially ordering changes in a patient’s diet, in an attempt to protect the stomach walls from its acid. The Sippy diet, introduced by Chicago physician...
by Craig Marker | Mar 28, 2007 | Uncategorized
The journal Human Reproduction has a article soon to be published describing the amount of beef eaten by mothers being related to son’s sperm production (see here for a popular press account and here for the article). There are some interesting issues with a...
by Craig Marker | Mar 28, 2007 | Uncategorized
The Social Science Statistics Blog has a great entry on the government new home sales figures. The 90% Confidence Interval around this number indicates that these figures are not significantly different from zero. Thus, when the press discusses these numbers as if...
by Craig Marker | Mar 28, 2007 | Uncategorized
by Craig Marker | Mar 22, 2007 | Uncategorized
A great deal of attention is paid to homicide in our country. I see many more reports of murder in the news media than I do suicide. Very few suicides even make the news media and these reports are hardly ever the focus. It is interesting to note that there are almost...
