Liberty
For Readers Who Are Worried by the Recent Study Purporting to Show that Moderate Drinkers Don’t Live Longer than Tea-Totallers…
Here’s a scathing Twitter thread debunking that study:
Statistical significance
Elections & Public Integrity
Voter ID and the “disparate impact” sham
The state superior court this week began hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed to overturn North Carolina’s 2018 voter ID requirement. A cornerstone of the case made by those challenging…
Liberty
A day in the life of transient data, politics, and media spin
It sounds as if on June 28, there were no reported COVID-19 deaths. To anyone other than news media, this would be news. It would have been the first time…
Education
Common myths about the use of statistics in research
Read Why traditional statistics are often “counterproductive to research the human sciences, a Q&A with professors Eric Loken and Andrew Gelman, now! Here is one of many noteworthy passages from the…
Liberty
Sowell tackles the ‘disparate impact’ argument
Thomas Sowell‘s latest column at National Review Online challenges the concept of using “disparate impact” to prove unlawful discrimination. “Disparate impact” statistics have been used for decades, in many different…
Liberty
Stats Are for Molecules
The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office is conducting a customer satisfaction survey of 4500 random addressees. Surveys annoy me. They ask people weird questions on subjects they would never consider in…
Health Care
Watch for the use of meaningless statistics to hide the Obamacare story
Alex Adrianson highlights on the Heritage Foundation’s “Insider Online” blog an inconvenient fact for those who are unveiling new measurements for the Obamacare website: Those measurements mean nothing. The Obama…
Liberty
Barron’s Epstein warns against reading too much into the latest jobs report
Gene Epstein devotes his latest “Economic Beat” column in Barron’s to downplaying the significance of one-month changes in the official U.S. employment numbers. Given the volatility and unreliability of the…
Liberty
Measuring something that isn’t measurable
Veteran N&R reporter Taft Wireback analyzes studies used to justify the claims of N.C. death row inmates that their sentences were based on racial bias. It’s a balanced piece, but…
Liberty
Meaningless Ratings
Are we to infer that all nursing homes should be above average? (Can we even say “nursing home” anymore?)
Liberty
Monday morning skepticism
I’m sorry, but some statistics don’t look plausible to me. The News & Observer’s Vicki Lee Parker referenced a poll by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, saying that 78…
Liberty
When is an increase not an increase? More on the NAEP
All four of North Carolina’s NAEP scale scores (reading and math for grades 4 and 8) increased from 2005*. But none of the four increases were statistically significant, i.e., the…