I've been working with linear regression, both as a tool for understanding psychology and as a primary professional skill, for more than eight years now. At last, my conceptual understanding of statistics has advanced to the point where I've stopped understanding it. In a few years, I'll probably have to take some time off to think hard about what ( Read more... )

Just the other day, I was thinking about when you should and shouldn't omit the error terms from statistical equations.* Then I saw this.

* for those in other sciences, it's like the way you don't always need to add "plus a constant."

A couple of weeks ago I went to APS, where there was a talk by Gerd Gigerenzer, lead author on this amazing paper about medical statistics and how terribly they mislead doctors, academics, lawmakers, the media, and the people actually making decisions about their health. I'm going to invest whatever social capital I have and say that everyone ( Read more... )

Trying to get a little work done, after spending the entire day lying around due to a combination of laziness, tiredness, and recovering from a cold. I'm making some minor edits to the paper I drafted back in September, and finally got Barb's comments on a couple of weeks ago. This is the project on which I recorded and reorganized and documented ( Read more... )

I'm watching the VP debate. I'll leave aside my observations about how Palin is being surprisingly cohesive -- I have bigger issues. Look, Palin says Obama's tax plan would hurt n Americans in group x, and Biden says that's incorrect, it wouldn't even affect those people, it would only affect m people in group y, and Palin responds that anyway he's ( Read more... )

Hey, remember the post I made on statistical suppression? I was just puzzling over something strange in my data, and I discovered a real-life case of it! I was able to make sense of my data by statistically removing the suppressor.

What a great way to celebrate Passover!

I think this may be a geek's geek post, in that people who can really relate to deep thoughts about cognitive dissonance or hashing algorithms will _still_ think "why would anyone care about that?" But over at the correlation and causation blog there's a pretty good short article on suppressor variables. Suppression is an interesting concept; it ( Read more... )

It was quite late in the evening of a day that was by any account long -- emotionally, physically, and intellectually as well. I was returning from the gym (better late than never, I always say), but instead of bed I found my feet turning towards O'Keeffe kitchen and a bedtime snack I didn't need. There I encountered my old friend boberone, who was just ( Read more... )