Chance News 110
Quotations
Forsooth
Statistical artifacts
Flint water crisis
The murky tale of Flint's deceptive water data
by Robert Langkjær-Bain, Significance, 5 April 2017
What went wrong In Flint
by Anna Maria Barry-Jester, FiveThirtyEight, 26 January 2016
Same stats
Jeff Witmer sent this link to the Isolated Statistician list-serv
Reporting that it is not known how Frank Anscombe went about creating his famous quartet of scatterplots, the authors present the results of thier simulated annealing experiments to produce some striking visualization. Worth a look just to see the Datasaurus!
Interracial marriage
Peter Doyle sent a link to this chart from the Economist:
- Daily chart: Interracial marriages are rising in America
- Economist, 12 June 2017
Quoting from the article, one reader commented:
"Of the roughly 400,000 interracial weddings in 2015, 82% involved a white spouse, even though whites account for just 65% of America’s adult population. " If you lump the population into just two groups A and B, 100% of intergroup marriages will involve a spouse from group A, no matter what fraction of the population belongs to group A.
Exercise: 2015 census data is available by googling "us census quickfacts". While the categories don't precisely match those in this piece, you can use this data to get a rough estimate the fraction of interracial weddings that would involve a white spouse under random pairing. What do you get? Is your answer more or less than 82%?
Peter notes that he got just over 82%. Here is his solution (using Mathematica):