Right Wing Nation

Update: Thanks to a couple of sharp-eyed readers, I corrected a couple of decimal place errors. That’s what I get for even thinking about math on pain meds, I guess.
My doctor did a stint as an epidemiologist, so he’s a statistician (most doctors are not, by the way), and we always end up talking statistics. […]

Thanks to Darren, I saw this story about a study.
Douglas Reeves, an expert on grading systems, conducted an experiment with more than 10,000 educators that he says proves just how subjective grades can be.
Like me, you’re thinking, “Well, duh!” and wondering how much money was wasted on such an obvious study. Well, keep reading.
Reeves asked […]

What happens when a math geek wonders which line in the supermarket is fastest? He collects data and runs a regression! There are a lot of variables he doesn’t take into account, such as the sex of the shopper, which I discussed here, but others can take the baton and run with it.
Thanks to Darren […]

I have for the last hour or so been scouring my blog looking for an excellent presentation on statistics by Peter Donnelly — although I couldn’t remember where it was or who gave the presentation. I’m assigning it in class this semester. Anyway, it’s for general audiences, and it’s technically about how statistics fool juries.
Here […]

I’ve reworked this to make it a bit more readable (particularly to the non-math folks), and here and there, I’ve clarified or added material. I hope it helps. I’ve also added a section for those of you who use mostly written assessments, like papers or esssay questions (yes, you can use statistics to help […]

Bad Science has an excellent article up about how we are hardwired to find patterns:
But we have an innate human ability to make something out of nothing. We see shapes in the clouds and a man in the moon; gamblers are convinced that they have “runs of luck”; we can take a perfectly cheerful heavy […]

Sit around the fire and let me tell you a story — a true story, by the way — from an academic conference I attended some time ago. For those of you who have never attended an academic conference, it’s exactly as you imagine: Hundreds of egghead academics gathered together to present egghead academic papers […]

If you’re not interested in the issues (yes, with political implications, at least in some cases) of academic research, you probably want to skip this. Just sayin, you know.
The field discussed here, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), is a split-personality field. It didn’t exist until Chomsky (yes, that Chomsky), so it is a field monopolized by […]

“It’s a crisis! 0.059% of travelers are too stupid to distinguish between Lindbergh and Humphrey! We need to spend millions of dollars!”
Hat tip: Hot Air.

Math wars heat up here.

This Chris Cillizza character says in the WaPo:
A new Gallup analysis shows that the precipitous decline in the number of people who identify themselves as Republicans is widespread across nearly every demographic group — a development that suggests that there is no simple solution to solving the party’s current problems.
He’s talking about the most recently […]

Math wars come to State College.

Or not.
CBO: Whoops, We Need to Revise Our Deficit Projections Up by a Tad*
* A “Tad” is an Accounting Term Meaning 50%
Then, if liberals could do basic arithmetic, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

MSNBC:
Survey: Weather forecasts often misinterpreted
What does a 20 percent chance of rain mean? Keep reading
Oh, that’s not the scary part. This is:
But only half the population understands what a precipitation forecast means well enough to make a fully informed answer, a new study finds.
If, for example, a forecast calls for a 20 percent chance of […]

Blogosphere rumbling: “Two Friday the thirteenths in a row! Has that ever happened before? OHMYGODWE’REALLGONNADIE!!!!!!”
How many days are there in February (save in a leap year)?
Is the number of days divisible by seven?
If so, what does that tell you?

Note. Heh. Sorry about the unintentional pun.
If you’ve been following here for a while, you already know that I was raised playing the piano and own my mother’s Steinway. What you probably don’t know is that I used to be a piano technician, and in fact, tuning pianos went a long way toward paying my […]

Two colleagues and I were sitting in the office between classes, when an MBA student suddenly swept through the open door and interrupted our conversation.
“Can somebody who knows the material teach my class for me?”
“Come again?”
“I didn’t go to the teacher training seminar Friday, so I missed the material. Can somebody teach my class?”
“When?”
“Right now. […]

Joanne Jacobs points to this article by a Penn State accounting professor, and he comes out swinging:
I have been teaching full time for over thirty years. If you toss in my apprenticeship teaching as a graduate student, I have taught for almost thirty-five years. During that span of time, one sees many, many students, and […]

I’m working on a project, a preparatory business math text (more like workbook) for kids who will be going to business school. Anyway, I’m digging around for ideas, and found this, which I wrote in 2006.
 
I was curious to see what was on the web and what links I could collect for that stats rewrite, […]

Stats.Dot.Org’s Dubious Data Awards for 2008

Years ago when I was in my first year as a PhD student, one of the courses I had to take was phonology. Now, you need to understand that there are two types of linguists (formalists, at any rate): Syntax and sematics people, and phonology and phonetics people. The two groups are mutually exclusive: Syntacticians […]

First, McCain, now Penn State:
Iowa kicked a 31-yard field goal to complete a comeback and beat Penn State 24-23.
Undefeated no longer.

DJ is on a roll. Just scroll and read.

William Tate talks to an Obama campaign caller. A few excerpts:
Obama will give me government-run health care and will pay for it, and all his other programs, by taxing the rich and corporations. When I pointed out that the wealthy already pay the majority of income taxes, and that corporations don’t really pay taxes, that […]

to blog and watch hockey, that is. As far as that goes, it’s not possible to do anything and watch hockey. So before the commercial is over and the game comes back on, Sean Berry takes down the whiners at the Corner.
Speaking of takedowns, Brink Lindsey guts Weisberg like a fish (although everything Weisberg has […]

Stuff like this really honks me off, and this is even worse (Darren, you owe me blood pressure medication).
Teachers at Soquel High School have agreed not to wear “Educators for Obama” buttons in the classroom after a parent complained that educators were attempting to politically influence his daughter and other students.
These teachers must not have […]

Have you noticed that the only numbers we’re getting is the amount of the bailout? In the last couple of days, I’ve heard 700 billion and 1 trillion. But you know, there are some things we — not to mention Congress — need to know.
First, what will be the estimated economic cost of the bailout?
Second, […]

even Newsweek calls him on it.
Obama’s Social Security Whopper
He tells Social Security recipients their money would now be in the stock market under McCain’s plan. False.
What happened to those hope-y change-y politics? Let’s see, Dukakis tried it, Mondale tried it, Gore tried it, Kerry tried it, and you can see how far it got them. […]

“The Palin Effect,” Noemie Emery, which is as much about Hillary and the Democrats as it is Palin and the Republicans. Sharp analysis.
If Obama wins, she gets to see her party in power, if that is her object. The problem is that the party is no longer hers. Or hers and her husband’s. If Obama […]

These are the questions they could use calculators on.
5. Write these percentages as decimals: 34% 52% 8%
6. Write these decimals as fractions: 0.5 0.03 0.95
7. Betty got 13 of the 20 questions correct in a biology test. What percentage did Betty get?
8. Gary ate 25% of a cake. What fraction of the cake did he […]

Er no, contrast. ABC. Match the candidate to the action.
In response to an impending hurricane:
1. Postpones the beginning of the Convention and travels to the area where the hurricane will land.
     A. John McCain
     B. Barack Obama
2. Uses the hurricane as a springboard to attack his opponent 1,900 miles from the hurricane.
     A. John McCain
     B. Barack Obama
Do I […]

Simulations 101
A simulation is a statistical model used to make informed predictions. Since simulations seem to have a mystical aura these days, due to all this climate stuff, it’s in everybody’s best interest to understand that no, they aren’t magic, and yes, they’re actually quite simple.
You need four things. You need data, from which you […]

Just kidding. But other than pundits and blog readers, the US is just starting to discover who Sarah “Barracuda” Palin is. If you’re one, this is for you. If you know all about her, you’ll appreciate the links.
Note: These are just from yesterday. There are lots more already posted on the blogs I read since […]

Class today, so while I’m gone, here are some “test your knowledge” quiz questions I have given my students. Each is easily answered with no more than simple descriptive statistics, but tests the student’s knowledge of the concepts (as opposed to whether the student can calculate an arithmetic mean or standard deviation). A student sitting […]

This is really long, so it’s below the fold.

Read single article or Open it here… »

The problems I use aren’t for the most part mathematical brain teasers, because the real world problems I’m trying to […]

Ann Althouse has an update about Google shutting down Democrats’ anti-Obama blogs. According to her cited article:
On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be […]

rather, another reason why learning them (as opposed to mindlessly punching a calculator) is a good idea: On one of those house flipping shows, this woman was told that fifty gallons would be enough, so she bought fifty five-gallon buckets — thinking she was buying fifty gallons.

This is funny as hell. Roger Pielke (former director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and an associate professor of environmental studies) enlists the help of an undergraduate to help him “understand” a climate change lunatic. A very grateful hat tip to Rich Horton for the link — I’m […]

Over at Wm Briggs. And aren’t all police good Bayesians?

“The Democrats seem to have a living, breathing definition of the word filibuster.” And the pictures are, well, priceless.