Fishing in the Bay

On January 26, 2010 the Grattan Institute released a report (HERE) on measuring school performance. The main recommendation of the report is to replace measurement of average school performance with so-called value-added indices. The idea is very simple – to measure student progress as the primary outcome – and by employing an appropriate statistical model to extract that component of the improvement which can be attributed to the school.

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The article

G.M.Laslett, C.J.Lloyd and G.K.Robinson (1994)Encounters with statistical inference - an interview with Evan Williams. Australian Journal of Statistics, 36, 133-152. 

is HERE (about 2MB). Evan’s funeral will be held at St Luke’s Uniting Church, Barrabool Road, Highton on Wednesday (February 3) at 2.00 pm, prior to a private cremation.

Statistics features heavily in every psychology course. My son has just completed the rats and stats section of the course – and he vastly preferred the rats. Some psychology researchers, like Spearman, developed their own methods and have become household names in our field. But have statisticians influenced the field of psychology? We would certinaly hope so. The British Psychological Society agrees and have recently compiled an annotated list of the 10 statisticians (who were not psychologists) who have most influenced the field of psychology.** Read the rest of this entry »

There is a BBC radio play next week, a crime thriller where statistical DNA evidence is the central issue. The author, Peter Kesterton, is a reader of FIB and contacted me about some statistical fallacies. I treid to fill him on on a few central issues but how this translated into a radio play I ahve no idea! I haven’t heard the result yet

It will however be available online for a week after the live broadcast via the BBC I-player, or you can navigate through BBC Radio 4 drama - “Afternoon Play.”

Some of my colleagues recently ran in the Melbourne Half Marathon. The good folks who administer the event are good enough to provide an excel spreadsheet listing the finishing times of each competitor with their registered age and gender. You might find it useful in the classroom. There are some interesting patterns in the data but not for the reason you might first think.

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Melbourne Business School did extremely well this year - four successful grants from 5 submitted. I did not apply - so no sour grapes around here! How did statistics do? I went to the ARC outcomes page and searched each file for RFCD code 2302. Here is what I got:

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Here is another post about wrong headed justification of Bayesian over frequentist statistics. As suggested by David Dowe in his comment on my previous post, it is worth pointing out at the beginning rather than the end that nowhere below will you find an argument against Bayesian statistics per se (though I think there are some).

In the previous post I mentioned that there are two claims that (some) Bayesians make about their approach that get me annoyed. The first is that Bayesian thinking is natural and people will naturally apply probability to unknowns if not brain-washed by a frequentist education. The second is that only Bayesians, and not frequentists, can make use of prior information. Wrong.

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Some simple human characteristics are reasonably close to normal – like height or length of index finger. But more complex human abilities are strongly positively skew. Below is a cute little 90 second talk from Angela Duckworth, a well-known academic pyschologist at the University of Pennsylvania

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It is often claimed that regular, normal people naturally think like Bayesians. Leaving aside whether we should leave the foundations of our subject to the average punter, I suspect that this might be true. But it really depends on how you frame the question. Below is a description of a class discussion exercise used by Bill Jefferys, who is a Professor of Astronomy but also an adjunct professor of statistics, teaching a course in Bayesian statistics at the University of Texas.

See if you can spot the flaws.

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The ISI 2009 conference was held lst week in Durban, South Africa. I quite enjoyed the previous one in Lisbon and was invited to this one so I thought I would go back for seconds. Below the fold are some impressions (considered an uncontroversial as ever) on the academic and non-academic aspects of the meeting.

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