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Does Bran Make the Man? What Statistics Really Tell Us


Annette Georgey wrote to the [http://www.lawrence.edu/fast/jordanj/isostat.html Isolated Statisticans]
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,477686,00.html


<blockquote>An [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123301860344617927.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_pj article] came out in today's Wall St. Journal that would be fun to use for introductory stats classes.  It touches on several concepts--the limits of observational studies, confounding, spurious correlations, type I errors.</blockquote>
George Edw. Seymour


The author, Melinda Beck, usas as example [http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/w260687441pp64w5/fulltext.pdf/ an article]"You are what your mother eats"  in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and on a [http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/u12p544020045241/fulltext.pdf criticism of this article]: "Cereal-Induced gender selection? Most likely a multiple testing false positive" in the same journal.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9979
2155


The original article was discussed in Chance News 36 [http://chance.dartmouth.edu/chancewiki/index.php/Chance_News_36#Sex_and_Cereal here] by Paul Alper so we would advice you to look at this also.
P.S. Would appreciate more actual
 
applications and explanations of  
Beck writes
counter-intuitive probability events.
 
<blockquote>Some statisticians argue for a tougher standard of proof when researchers are fishing in large data sets. One method, a Bonferroni adjustment, requires dividing the usual mathematical formula by the number of variables; if 100 foods are studied, the link must be 100 times as strong as usual to be considered significant. Otherwise, statisticians say only strict clinical trials with a control group and a test group and one variable can truly prove a cause-and-effect association.<br><pr>
 
Epidemiologists argue that a Bonferroni adjustment throws out many legitimate findings, and that it's irrelevant how many other factors are studied simultaneously. They also note that controlled clinical trials are costly, time-consuming and sometimes unethical. The link between smoking and cancer, for example, was seen in many observational studies, but forcing subjects to smoke for years to prove it would be untenable.</blockquote>
 
 
Submitted by Laurie Snell
 
===Discussion===
(1) Do you think that readers of the Wall Street journal will understand Beck's comments on the Bonferroni adjustment?  Do you? 
 
Submitted by Laurie Snell

Revision as of 01:05, 1 February 2009

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,477686,00.html

George Edw. Seymour

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9979 2155

P.S. Would appreciate more actual applications and explanations of counter-intuitive probability events.

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