More analysis please

“The problems that we face today, both big ones in society like the current health care debate and smaller ones like strategic business decisions, do not exist because we lack information, but because we don’t understand it. They can be solved only by developing skills and tools to make sense of information that is often complex. In other words, the major obstacle to solving modern problems isn’t the lack of information, solved by acquiring it, but the lack of understanding, solved by analytics.”

Stephen Few, http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=621

Stand-out records

 

Source: What Are the Odds? – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com

Address : <http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/what-are-the-odds/?em>In fact, every stand-out record in any sport that has ever been analyzed has always been found to be consistent with the patterns produced by random fluctuations. 

In fact, every stand-out record in any sport that has ever been analyzed has always been found to be consistent with the patterns produced by random fluctuations. 

Source: What Are the Odds? - Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com

Are “Great” Companies Just Lucky?

Mostly, yes. 

Are “Great” Companies Just Lucky?

Harvard Business Review April 2009

See also The Halo Effect

Parallel sets

Interesting new type of graphic for showing proportions

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7937382.stm

Statistically Significant Stupidity

Is Carl Doomed to be a C Student?

Statistically significant not equal to significant

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Desire and Scarcity

A Sense of Scarcity
 
Wanting something makes it seem rarer than it really is.  Another case of emotions affecting judgement.

From Herbert Wray’s excellent “We’re Only Human” blog on the Association for Psychological Science website.

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Bayes & Climate Change

Gambling on tomorrow – provocative piece from The Economist on how climate models have to include something like Bayesian priors, and a difficult challenge to which this gives rise. 

Lets just hope the climate skeptics don’t seize on this as another pseudo-reason to dismiss climate modelling altogether. 

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Thou Shalt Not Report Odds Ratios (as rate ratios)

 Language Log July 30 2007

Good clear explanation of why many statistics we see in “the media” are grossly “out”.

“This is a second in a series of posts aimed at improving the rhetoric (and logic) of science journalism.”

For more on this topic see Gerd Gigerenzer’s excellent book Calculated Risks.

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