Suggestions for further reading
Our course is not a traditional introduction to statistics. Traditional courses focus on the mastery of techniques while the present one is all about not getting fooled by numbers. The …
Course: Survival Statistics: Secrets for Demystifying Numbers
Assymetrical Errors
This video clip summarizes a great article by David Hemenway which has two main points: Survey-based estimates of defensive uses of guns must be too high because they don’t square …
On the Cutting Edge
The methods that Chris and I discuss in this clip are another promising direction for the survey and polling industry. They constitute a serious response to at least two of …
Potential Pitfalls for Election Prediction
This interview nicely complements my video from step 2.14, but with an exclusive focus on election prediction. Here’s my summary of the key points, which mix together both old and …
Potential Pitfalls
Think back to steps 2.12 and 2.13 about error margins. Notice that none of the pitfalls covered in the video are even mentioned in these steps on error margins. Error …
Measuring Personal Income
Professor Melanie Luhrmann (promoted from Dr. Luhrmann after we filmed the clip!) introduces yet another important idea into our measurement discussion. Melanie is a Professor at Royal Holloway, University of …
The Idea of a Survey
After I recorded this video a veritable volcano blew its stack on social media in a way that is highly relevant to my last point about knowing exact wordings of …
What is Margin of Error Polling?
Chris Hanretty is a Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research spans empirical legal studies and studies of public opinion and voting behaviour. He is the …
Domestic Abuse
I was genuinely astonished by an effect that Professor Dan Anderberg mentioned at the beginning of this interview; leaving women alone to answer questions about domestic abuse triples the reported …
The Gender Pay Gap
In this video, professor Michael Spagat interviews Dr. Tanya Wilson about gender pay gap. Tanya Wilson is a Lecturer in Economics at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. …
What is the truncated x-axis trick?
Number fakery takes us into scary territory. It’s one thing to learn how to spot a misleading graph that is, nevertheless, based on real numbers, it’s another entirely to pursue …
Relative Risks versus Changes in Absolute Risks
Here are some sample calculations that, hopefully, help you to understand relative and absolute risks better. We can extract the following pieces of information from this nice little article. 2.9 …
Playing With Percentages
Here are some examples of the sorts of calculations mentioned in the video. Percentage change The general form of these calculations is: ((NewValue – BaseValue) / BaseValue) x 100 For …
These articles are from the online course:
Survival Statistics: Secrets for Demystifying Numbers