Course: Survival Statistics: Secrets for Demystifying Numbers

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Professor Chris Hanretty introduces three new concepts/ideas that will become increasingly important for us as the week unfolds. Chris Hanretty is a Professor of Politics at Royal Holloway, University of …

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 …

You can set up a bunch of on-camera interviews but you can’t predict exactly what will come out the other end. One pleasant surprise for me was the discovery of …

Visit this Padlet to view another graph which employs the truncated x-axis trick. But this manoeuvre is trivial compared to a much more serious manipulation; the picture fakes one of …

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 …

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 …