Chance News 95

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Quotations

“It is worth dwelling for a moment on Egon [son of Karl] Pearson’s first-year lecture course …. [H]e was an inspirational teacher …. What was the reason for his success? [H]e was not a teacher who ladled out cookery-book recipes; rather he always seemed in his lectures to be working through and exploring problems with the class. He would wander down enticing dead-ends, but return to seek alternatives again and again until a satisfactory approach had been established. The result was that students acquired a questioning approach, not a compartmentalized approach whereby one problem was allocated to a 2 x 2 table, the next to multiple linear regression, etc.”

“What is Statistics?” by David J. Bartholomew

(1994 presidential address to the RSS)

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 1995

Submitted by Margaret Cibes


“In my own field of flood risks, a talented statistician declared: ‘It is also true that for extremely rare events, correct uncertainty estimates may lead us to conclude that we know virtually nothing. This is not such a bad thing. If we really know nothing we should say so!’”

Letter to editor, Significance magazine, June 2013

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Forsooth

TopTenWorstGraphs.jpg
“Figure 2. Q-Q plots of Z scores for telomeric interval-length differences.”


Cited as #8 of “The top ten worst graphs”
from “Ethnicity and Human Genetic Linkage Maps”, American Journal of Human Genetics, February 2005


EconGraph.jpg
“What Is Economics Good For?”
The New York Times, August 24, 2013
ConfVar.png
Significance magazine, March 2011

Submitted by Margaret Cibes and James Greenwood


Weeding wedding invitation lists

“GUESTimation: Breaking the deadlock on wedding guest lists”
by Damjan Vukcevic, Significance, August 2013

Winner of the second annual Young Writers Competition, this article describes the process the author used to narrow his initial wedding guest list down to a number that his venue could accommodate. The process included grouping potential invitees (e.g., families), ranking them for their probabilities of attending if invited (to Australia), and using a probability distribution of the number of attendees to get a confidence interval of attendees. He also discusses his independence assumption and the consequence of using or not using it.

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Item 2