Letters Remain

Tag: statistics

  • For an Education in Statistics

    The ability to understand data and its analyses is becoming more important in many aspects of our lives–especially government–says Clive Thompson, and as such statistical literacy is becoming an important skill. Using recent arguments used by some confused climate change sceptics to show why it is important, Thompson explains briefly why we should learn the…

  • An Analysis of Supermarket Checkout Times

    An analysis of supermarket checkout times has shown that express lanes (for people with fewer than 5 items, say) are not always the most efficient checkout route for time-sensitive shoppers. Dan Meyer, a high school maths teacher, has done the hard work (providing his data and analysis) and came to the following conclusion: [Express lanes]…

  • The Statistics of A/B Testing

    Whether or not you believe this to be (as Joel Spolsky does) the “best post […] about A/B testing, ever”, it definitely is one of the easiest to understand and one of the few posts on split testing that is statistically sound (i.e. useful). Is [a given A/B test] conclusive? Has [variant] A won? Or…

  • The Exponential Growth of Death

    I was recently reading about supercentenarians–people that have lived to the age of 110 or above–and read the following statistic: [Reaching] the age of 110 years [is] something achieved by only one in a thousand centenarians (based on European data). Furthermore, only 1 in 50 supercentenarians lives to be 115 (1 in 50,000 centenarians). Fascinated…

  • Online Dating Statistics: Ideal First Messages

    After looking at race and religion, the online dating site OkCupid turns its statistical eye toward the actual content of the messages sent between participants. It’s worth noting that the average response/reply rate is 32%. First up, what to say in a first message: Be literate. Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. The worst…

  • Online Dating Statistics: Religion and Race

    The online dating website OkCupid has a rather fascinating blog, OkTrends, written by two of the four mathematics majors who founded the site. Still in it’s infancy the blog has a few fascinating posts studying data gleamed from their expansive user base. Starting out with a brief look at their matching algorithm and the control group…

  • CCTV Prevalence in Britain

    For many years the British public has often been told that the United Kingdom has 4.2 million CCTV cameras—that’s one for every fourteen residents—as widely quoted by politicians, various media, and even the police. This statistic is rarely questioned, but thanks to a recent episode of the excellent More or Less (UK-only?) suggesting that this…

  • The Over-Estimation of Sampling Errors

    Fairly obvious, but something I haven’t previously given much consideration to: Sampling errors mean that initial figures are equally as likely to be under-estimates as over-estimates but [in media stories where figures for a disease or condition are quoted] we only ever seem to be told that the condition is under-detected. That’s from a short post…

  • Publishing in Scientific Journals

    Not being a professional or published scientist, the workings of academic journals are foreign to me. As a semi-regular reader of them I really should at least understand the processes involved, and that’s where My Dominant Hemisphere‘s outline of the publihing process and list of 18 interesting journal facts comes in handy. Multiple surveys have…

  • The Advantage of Female Executives

    Of the top 500 public US companies, firms with women in senior management performed 18 to 69 percent better in terms of profitability than the median companies in their industries. Not only this, but these firms, with around three women in top jobs, scored higher on top measures of organisational excellence by at least 40 percent.…