Fishing in the Bay

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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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 »

One of the better known surveys of business confidence is NAB Business Confidence index which is part of their monthly business survey. I have a few gripes about how it is used and reported and an interesting observation about how you should respond if you are ever surveyed.

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My colleague, Peter Cebon, has sent me the graphic below which shows a time series of temperature, CO2 and sea levels. It is actually a pretty good graphic. While it is true that one generally counsels against putting three plots, on different scales, on the same graph, I think that this one works pretty well, especially with the three axes at the right color coded to agree with the time series. The resolution is not that great so I suggest you download it in pdf form HERE.

On a recent ABC interview, a well known scientist made the following statement about global temperatures.

Actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Is she right?

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Following on from the SuperCruncher’s post, I recently became aware of some interesting research on bias in job hiring practices. This is a field where a properly designed trial can reveal even unconscious bias, beyond any reasonable doubt.

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DNA evidence of a match between a suspect and a sample at the crime scene are often presented as evidence in court. Roughly speaking, if there is a probability “p” of someone matching the crime scene sample by luck, then the LR contribution from the DNA evidence turns out to be 1/p. So you can think of “p” as the significance of the match. In many cases, the match may be have been obtained by checking through a database of known criminals. The question obviously arises: If the match comes from trawling a large database, doesn’t this affect the weight of evidence to be assigned? As statisticians we are familiar with the dangers of trawling the data. Shouldn’t the jury at least know that the match was obtained this way?

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