Posts tagged: undergraduate
Anecdote and Data
What personal experience can and cannot tell you. Anecdote is not worthless: it is a sample of one from an unknown distribution. The weight it deserves depends on what else is known.
Florence Nightingale's Rose Diagrams
How Nightingale used polar area charts to make mortality data legible to people who would not read a table, and why the design choices were deliberate and effective.
How Charts Mislead Without Lying
Truncated axes, dual y-axes, cherry-picked time windows, and area encoding errors. What to look for before trusting a chart.
Law of Large Numbers vs. the Gambler's Fallacy
The law of large numbers is a theorem. The gambler's fallacy is a mistake. They sound related and are easy to confuse. They say opposite things.
The Multiple Comparisons Problem
Run enough tests at a 0.05 threshold and something will look significant by chance. What the family-wise error rate means, why it matters, and what to do about it.
Simpson's Paradox: When Subgroups Disagree With the Aggregate
How a trend that holds within every subgroup can reverse when those groups are combined, and why the Berkeley admissions data remains the clearest illustration.
Statistical Power: Why Small Studies Often Find Nothing
Power is the probability of detecting an effect that actually exists. A study that finds nothing may simply have been too small to find anything. Here's what determines power and why it matters before collecting data.
Survivorship Bias: The Sample You're Not Seeing
When you study only the outcomes that made it through a filter, you are not studying outcomes. You are studying a selection process. The WWII plane problem and why it matters wherever data gets filtered.
The Birthday Problem: Why 23 People Is Enough
In a room of 23 people, the probability that two share a birthday exceeds 50%. The math is clean; the intuition resists it. Here's what's actually being counted.
The Hot Hand
Streaks in basketball shooting data and whether they reflect genuine elevated performance or expected clustering in random sequences. A case study in what random actually looks like.