Chance News 98

Quotations

"In statistics it's enough for our results to be cool. In psychology they're supposed to be correct. In economics they're supposed to be correct and consistent with your ideology."

--Andrew Gelman, "75 best lines from my Bayesian Analysis course"

Some other selections:

• “God created the world in 7 days and we haven’t seen much of him since.” (God draws θ from an urn and then is out of the picture)
• “People don’t go around introducing you to their ex-wives.” (why model improvement doesn’t make it into papers)

Submitted by Paul Alper

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"In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure...and forget that there is a difference."

George Udny Yule, cited by David Salsburg
“Statistics and Experimentation”, AP Statistics Reading, June 16, 2011

"We value what we measure rather than measuring what we value" is an expression commonly heard in education circles these days.

Brandon Busteed, “Colleges Should Measure What They Value”, HUFF Post, June 21, 2012

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Forsooth

A Google search for “apophenia” yielded the following:

(a) “the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.”
(b) “an example of a Type I error … – the identification of false patterns in data. It may be compared with a so-called false positive in other test situations.”

(c) “heavily documented as a source of rationale behind gambling, with gamblers imagining they see patterns in the occurrence of numbers in lotteries, roulette wheels, and even cards.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

(d) “an open statistical library for working with data sets and statistical models. It provides functions on the same level as those of the typical stats package … but gives the user more flexibility to be creative in model-building.” [emphasis added]

http://apophenia.info/

Submitted by Margaret Cibes