trying to be a mile wide AND a mile deep
Far from carefully vetted for accuracy. We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them. William James A judicious man looks on statistics not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him. Thomas Carlyle After all, facts are facts, and although we may […]
This is a page I made for my statistics students in Spring of 2010. I can’t guarantee it’s perfectly accurate with a current version of Excel because I don’t have Excel on my current computer, but I assume it should still be very close. In all of the below, “data” (“x-data”, “y-data”) stands in for […]
1. Drawing causation conclusions Ski and snowboard sales tend to rise and fall together, but sales of one don’t lead to sales of the other – they are both tied to an outside factor. Throughout grade school, mathematical skills correlate positively to height. Height doesn’t make you good at math, but older children are on […]
From the Editor in Notices of the AMS Vol 43, Issue 10 (October 1996) was an essay on the need for mathematical literacy in the general public, beginning with Nixon’s use of the third derivative. A beginner’s guide to quadric surfaces (pdf), by me, for my calculus students and intended to supplement the textbook rather […]
The risks associated with medicines and medical procedures are rarely conveyed clearly. I remember learning about intra-uterine devices in high school health class and the fact that uterine puncture was a risk with them, which sounds awful and terrifying. However, there are two vital pieces of information omitted in that statement: first, how high is […]
I had enough links from teaching statistics to make their own list. Actually several lists. Textbooks and other comprehensive approaches Online Statistics Education, an online openly licensed statistics text with labs; outgrowth of the Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics StatLib, a statistics community database The Little Handout of Statistical Practice, online textbook Sources for statistics […]