No Replay In Soccer: Sepp Blatter, Hold Strong!
Hold the line, Sepp. Don't buckle under the pressure, which now is intense and hot, but soon will be slack and not even tepid. We do not need to let…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Statistics as Beauty; Global Warming Miscellany; SATs Biased?; More
Statistics is Beautiful? From reader Yeah, Yeah comes a link to a Wired article which assures us we should "Learn the Language of Data." It's not a pretty language, but…
More Bad Music; Class Wrap-Up; Go USA
Way Behind Back Thanks to everybody who stuck through the lectures, such as they were, for the last two weeks. I wrote these "lessons" over about a twenty-minute period each…
Posted inStatistics
Last Class
It was the Nines last night. Pizza, beer, and wine, followed by sketchy music. A definite conceit of statistics is its habit of declaring with something-approaching-certainty that this or that…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Do You Really Want: Part II
Class is, thank God, rapidly coming to an end. I am sure we are all grateful. Here's an addendum to yesterday; but only briefly explained. Because of the crush of…
Posted inStatistics
What Do You Really Want? Modern Statistics. Lesson n+2
Only a couple of days left, everybody. Then back to more interesting subjects. Incidentally: when is the best time to contact a statistician? Before you begin to collect data. You…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Lesson n+1: Measurement & Observables
Just a very crude sketch today: it is not complete by any stretch. Naturally, the students in the summer class don't receive this level of information. Best we can tell,…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Lesson Somethingorother: Against the P-value
I've lost count of the lesson numbers. The definition of a p-value, here phrased in the incorrectly named "test of difference in means", is: Given the truth of a probability…
