Fishing in the Bay

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.

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 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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How do you detect election fraud? A recent article in the Washington Post describes a novel statistical idea. I wish I had thought of it.

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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.

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Below is  a nice little graphic that I generated from an exploration tool provided by the good folks at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developement. It shows the relationship of population distribution and GDP per head. Each point is a country. The axes are % of population below 14 and above 50. So countries in the top left endure the terrible aging armageddon that Australia is supposedly heading for (lots of old people and few young people). Bottom right countries are (dynamic?) youthful countries. The GDP per head is measured by the size of the blobs.

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Merck are currently defending a civil suit filed by an Australian who suffered a heart attack in 2003 while on Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory. Merck has been strongly criticized for distorting early scientific findings which showed cardio-vascular risk was higher for Vioxx patients than for those using a competiting drug Naproxen. They claimed that this was explained by Naproxen actually being protective against heart attack. This post is not about Vioxx however. It is about what arose in testimony concerning the relationship between the esteemed publisher Elsevier and Merck.

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