netwatch | Shared With: Everyone - Aug 26 2007 | probability, statistics, news, math, science
Whether the subject is trends in housing sales or trials of a new cancer drug, news reports often have to grapple with applications of statistics and probability. ChanceWiki from Dartmouth College turns such items into lessons on statistical thinking.
Originally a newsletter penned by math professors, the site now lets readers post discussions and exercises based on media stories, papers, books, and other sources. Recent contributions have investigated possible explanations for why Europeans are now taller than Americans (a reversal of the situation 60 years ago) and slammed a 2001 report that claimed Oscar winners live nearly 4 years longer than mere nominees. The longevity boost is illusory, the entry's author concludes, the result of a statistical gaffe called selection bias.
Volume 317, Number 5838, Issue of 03 August 2007
- netwatch | Shared With: Everyone - Oct 14 2006 | charts, statistics
Jam-packed charts that bury the main point. Cutesy layouts that make it difficult to read values from a graph. Misplaced numbers that divert the eye from the most important information. These are just some of the graphical sins Kaiser Fung enumerates in his blog Junk Charts. Once or twice a week, Fung, a statistics consultant, critiques examples from magazines, newspapers, government reports, and other sources. Although the charts typically involve business and sports topics, scientists can pick up tips about designing better diagrams for their own papers and presentations.
Science 13 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5797, p. 229
Related Content from Around Faves
statistics
-
In theory, this can do an hour's worth of work in one second. That is a lot of horsepower. Glad I'm not paying the power bill.
1 FaverViewed: 2 TimesQuoted: • 4000 nodes
• 2 quad core Xeons @ 2.5ghz per node
• 4x1TB SATA disks per node
• 8G RAM per node
• 1 gigabit ethernet on each node
• 40 nodes per rack
• 4 gigabit ethernet uplinks from each rack to the core (unfortunately a misconfiguration, we usually do 8 uplinks)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 5)
• Sun Java JDK 1.6.0_05-b13
• So that's well over 30,000 cores with nearly 16PB of raw disk! - bedss - Sep 25 20081 FaverViewed: 11 Times
- billy86jw78 - 23 days ago1 Faver
