Mammograms continue to be an emotional and controversial topic. I blogged about it some time ago. (link) Felix Salmon, whose blog should be daily reading, praises an article by Peggy Orenstein called "Our Feel Good War on Breast Cancer", NYT Magazine (link). Salmon's blog provides a quick summary; Orenstein's article is very long. Orenstein's point of view has particular weight because she was diagnosed at an early age, and was…
This post is long over-due. I have been meaning to write about this blog for a long time but never got around to it. It's like the email response you postponed because you want to think before you fire it...
The past week, you are unable to avoid, if you read the business news, mention of the "law of large numbers". We are led to believe that tech giants like Apple and Amazon are suffering from this statistical law. For example: Apple: Newest Victim of the Law of Large Numbers (CNet) New York Times Paywall Growth Slows (Columbia Journalism Review): "Much of this is due to the law of large…
Josh hated this "dataless visualization" from ABC. (link; warning: ads). Here are his comments: The report has planes leaving China, landing across the globe and instantly infecting us all with bird flu. It doesn't do a good job explaining how...
I shouldn't be surprised by this. No sooner did I sing the praise of Significance magazine (link) than a reader sent me to some charts that are not deserving of their standard. Here is one such chart (link): Quite a...
The first thing one (should) learn about statistics is "all that data is not information." That's the very first thing I tell my class each semester. This message is doubly resonant in this age of "Big Data". *** I was reading a post on Dell at Felix Salmon's blog, a post written by Ryan McCarthy or Ben Walsh. It cited BusinessWeek's Roben Farzad: "When it comes to putting a price…
Andrew Wheeler took the time to write code (in SPSS) to create the "Scariest Chart ever" (link). I previously wrote about my own attempt to remake the famous chart in grayscale. I complained that this is a chart that is...
[This is a cross-post from the sister blog, Numbers Rule Your World] Some interviews with me or snippets of such have surfaced recently. Here is a list: Kate Meersschaert interviewed me for New Learning Times (link; registration required). I talked...
Imagine you are locked up in a hospital room with a bed and plenty of food. What do you think you'd be doing when you aren't sleeping? *** Well, some researchers (link) discovered that you'd be eating the food. What a surprise. The New York Times then saw it fit to report this result as "Lost Sleep Can Lead to Weight Gain", which isn't as bad as the lead given…
Reader (and author) Bernard L. sends us to the Economist (link), where they walked through a few charts they sketched to show data relating to the types of projects that get funded on Kickstarter. The three metrics collected were total...
