Fishing in the Bay

Science News is a respectable magazine in the mould of New Scientist. So I was surprised to be pointed to a recent article by Tom Siegfried which comes close to blaming all the world’s woes on…we humble statisticians. I suggest that you read the article from beginning to end before returning to my comments.

It is easy to be defensive when statistics is polemically described as

a mutant form of math that has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos

and I will not disappoint! But ultimately a better response is to understand how others view and misinterpret statistics and sketch out an appropriate response.

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I recently came upon a piece in Slate Magazine by Steve Landsburg describing a very nice price of research. It concerns the financial costs to women of having childern. I thought this article (reproduced below the fold) might provide a nice class room example.

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Few statistics are more oft-quoted by empirical researchers than r-squared. While applauding the value of an intuitive interpretation in principle, it is pretty clear that the interpretation is wrong. Apart from honesty, the main reason I care about this is that it gets me into trouble with (the more discerning) students.

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A common lament of the naughties is that we are drowning in data. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could swim instead of drown? I have recently become aware of a new data visualization tool called Pivot, developed by Microsoft Live Labs.

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As a soon-to-be-Australian motorcyclist I had a look at some motorcycling related figures for Australian states.

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A Neilsen poll on religion and faith shows that most Australians believe in God or a similar universal spirit, but a majority also believe in miracles, heaven, life after death and angels. Read the rest of this entry »

A colleague recently brought to me some alternative fits he had done for a paper he was writing. The alternative fits looked very strange but had been strongly suggested by a referee. He was fitting a regression model to inter-country trade data and trying to explain patterns in terms of various measures of cultural fit. The referee was pointing to some papers in econometrics that had argued about the relative merits of multiplicative regression models fitted on the direct scale, rather than on the log-scale. The referee wanted a direct fit on the basis that the random errors may be more normal and additive on the direct scale.

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At the one extreme we have exotic financial derivatives that no-one knows how to value as well as opaque bundles of high risk loans and low risk bonds that no-one knew how to value either. At the other extreme, we have the simplistic nonsense known as technical analysis that anyone can understand, but happens to be bollocks. No wonder the world financial system is such a ferrel beast. Read the rest of this entry »

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.