Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting country’s GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story – and other stories- much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.
Mind the Gap
June 24th, 2009 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff, Graphics, Public Interest 5 Comments »
The answer is 42
May 19th, 2009 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff, Public Interest 5 Comments »
Last week the eccentric genius Stephen Wolfram released his new intelligent search engine WolframAlpha. The idea is to provide a search engine that takes questions in ordinary language. The ever humble Wolfram reports to the world
I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work…
Correlation Cartoon
April 9th, 2009 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff 1 Comment »
This cartoon has been discussed by ANZstat recently and also appeared on CoreEcon via Andrew Leigh. but it is a good one so I thought I would post it here anyway. A nice way to start or end a lecture on correlation I have found. Enjoy.
Playing the big points
February 22nd, 2009 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff, Public Interest, Research/Theory, Sport 1 Comment »
Do some tennis players play better on “big points”? Come to think of it, what are the big points and can this be measured? Recent work by Olivier Gossner, Brian Rogers and Julio Gonzalez-Diaz has established a very neat framework for answering both questions. Read the rest of this entry »
Some (cool) traffic stats
January 31st, 2009 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff, Public Interest, Surveys and Sampling 9 Comments »
There is an impressive website called TrafficSTATS which allows you to generate risk estimates of road fatalities for the US. It is based on merging two databases, namely the federal fatalities database and a personal travel behavior database. One peculiar finding…it seems to be safer driving on ice than on bitumen!
World Athletics Records
November 27th, 2008 John Maindonald Posted in Fun Stuff, Sport 2 Comments »
Data on world athletics records are interesting for what they reveal about the limits of human physiology as well as the history of professionalism and training methods in sport. The post below is joint with Chris Lloyd.
A Right Royal Statistical Fallacy*
November 28th, 2007 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff, Politics, Probability, Public Interest No Comments »
The inquest into Princess Diana’s death is a great wastes of public money. but in addition to fuel for the tabloids, it has supplied me with a nice little example of wrong statistical reasoning. The culprit is (of course!) an expert witness but not apparently an expert in thinking about uncertainty. The expert in question is a Dr. John Searle, a traffic engineer hired by the Ritz hotel which is owned by Dodi al Fayed’s father. In other words he has really been hired to support al Fayed’s conspiracy theory that Diana was murdered which requires him first to discredit the theory that Diana’s driver being pissed was the cause of the tragedy.
Einstein’s Low Impact
October 29th, 2007 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff, Profession 4 Comments »
This is shamelessly stolen from an amusing talk by Tom Smith last month (delivered at a meeting of associate deans of research). It concerns the RQF measurment of research impact. For those of you not up to speed, impact has nothing to do with academic impact. It is all to do with applications, patents, impact on the lives of ordinary punters.
An embarassing quote for Frequentists
October 8th, 2007 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff 3 Comments »
The following is a direct quote from a giant of the field:
The climax culminated in Galton’s preaching Eugenics and his foundation of the Eugenics Professorship. Did I say `culmination’? No, that lies rather in the future, perhaps with Reichskanzler Hitler and his proposals to regenerate the German people. In Germany, a vast experiment is in hand, and some of you may live to see its results. If it fails it will not be for want of enthusiasm, but rather because the Germans are only just starting the study of mathematical statistics in the modern sense.
Leaving aside the delicate grammatical issue of whether a ‘climax can culminate’, which famous frequentist said this? Click HERE to find out.
An embarassing quote for Bayesians
September 26th, 2007 Chris Lloyd Posted in Fun Stuff 6 Comments »
A certain famous Bayesian expressed his hatred not only of objective probability but of realists in general. He was especially thrilled with the triumph of the fascists in 1922. He wrote (at the end of a learned paper):
Those delicious absolute truths that stuffed the demo-liberal brains! That impeccable rational mechanics of the perfect civilian regime of the peoples, conforming to the rights of man and various other immortal principles! It seemed to me I could see them these Immortal Principles, as filthy corpses in the dust. And with what conscious and ferocious voluptuousness I felt myself trampling them, marching to hymns of triumph, obscure but faithful Blackshirt
Who was it? Click HERE to find out and HERE for the Wiki Bio. Coming soon…an equally embarassing quote for frequentists.