ich wünschte ich wüßte...

Cathy and Cosma both feel that knowing specific programming languages is not essential. To quote Cathy, "you shouldn’t obsess over som...

Within any education category, richer people vote more Republican. In contrast, the pattern of education and voting is nonlinear. High scho...

infra dig

I recently read a discussion between Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer in the Guardian (they were talking about their new edition of...

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that if conditional probabilities are reinterpreted as frequencies, people have no problem in i...

disgusted in topeka

pp has not had much to say about statistics lately.  So. Data. Cussedness thereof. Lighting Rods took a long time to get published.  It was ...

Andrew Gelman on the difference between information visualization and statistical graphics: When I discuss the failings of Wordle (or of Nig...

under the hood

“You say autism, or Down syndrome, and people know somebody,” said Ms. Dopp, who stays home with Jackson and his three siblings. “When you t...

black swans

Andrew Gelman revisits his review of Taleb's The Black Swan. And then there are parts of the review that make me really uncomfortable. ...

Statisticians hate small numbers (samples); now there is another reason to hate small numbers. In one word, scams. The FTC has shut down a s...

Granger causality is a standard statistical technique for determining whether one time series is useful in forecasting another. It is import...

ESPN's Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) recently suggested that the primary cause of dwindling interest in Red Sox games by fans is tha...

After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Ins...

I think some of the confusion that has arisen from Ed Tufte's work is that people read his book and then want to go make cool graphs of ...

Andrew Gelman on Christian Robert on classics of statistics.

Expressing the problem using a population distribution rather than a probability distribution has an additional advantage: it forces us to ...

damn lies and good graphs

maybe they're right that crappy chartjunk graphs are better than crappy non-chartjunk graphs. But I don't think it's appropriate...

Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit e...

Gordon Lish in the House of Bayes

Andrew Gelman gives a statistician's take on the Lish method: In any case, in the grand tradition of reviewing the review, I have some t...

ppv v fp

When asked about the accuracy of a mammogram, doctors cite the "false positive rate". Ignore the false positive rate, what patient...

the audacity of Clegg

The Lib Dems are now at 30% according to recent polls - and Linux users are 12% of visitors of PP: