The Law and Statistical Thinking(The New Haven case)

One thing about classification schemes is that they should be mutually exclusive and selectively exhaustive. Translated that means that no sampling unit should belong to more than one class and that every sampling unit should be in a class. So the fact that every one of the firefighters is in a class (for the purpose [...]

Posted Under: Statistical Thinking
This post was written by John on June 30, 2009 Comments (0)

Scientism lives on

I was reading through Nate Silver’s blog (which I love) and came across an item about the recent flap about the closing of Chrysler dealerships under their reorganization plan. Some GOP pundits have made the claim that there is a relationship between the decision to close a particular dealership was based on whether or not [...]

Posted Under: Statistical Thinking
This post was written by John on June 3, 2009 Comments (0)

More on Samples of One

In the previous entry I discussed the hazards of samples of one. Later I began reading news articles from a variety of sources and also some blogs and they often involved an individual account of one kind or other. This type of evidence is call ‘anecdotal evidence in research circles and it almost invariably involves [...]

Posted Under: Statistical Thinking
This post was written by John on June 2, 2009 Comments (0)