From the category archives:

Data Junkie

Dilbert notes a problem with the survey methodology

by bledsoe on January 23, 2010

Dilbert.com

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Fox News mangles stats, denies error

December 27, 2009
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A recent series of events at Fox News involved not only a mistake in reporting survey data, but a subsequent refusal to acknowledge the mistake, even after it was pointed out.  The timeline of events is as follows: On November 23, 2009, after a "series of [on-screen] mistakes," Fox News implemented a zero-tolerance policy for [...]

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Book Review – The Drunkard’s Walk

October 8, 2009
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Just wanted to send a quick shout out for The Drunkard's Walk, a really neat book on "how randomness rules our lives," written by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist at Caltech and a collaborator with Stephen Hawking on the book A Briefer History of Time. When I write a review of a math-related book, I generally [...]

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Hubspot data suggest blogging is good for business

September 8, 2009
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The online marketing and web analytics company Hubspot recently reviewed some data that they collected from some of their customers, and the data provide some pretty interesting numbers for people who wonder if blogging is really all that useful as a business marketing tool. Hubspot looked at website traffic and other stats for approximately 1500 [...]

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Teen drivers and teen passengers

August 2, 2009
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My first son is currently 14 and a half, and while he's not driving yet he has a few older friends who are.  Until recently, one of our house rules was: no riding in a car with a teen driver.  Though it was inconvenient at times (like when I had to drop off The First [...]

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17,000 towels? That must be a lot, right?

June 8, 2009
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I go to a really nice gym.  They have not only a large weight room with a ton of nice equipment, but also two swimming pools, two full-size basketball courts, several racquetball courts, a rock-climbing wall, and two large rooms for aerobics classes and such.  They also have a full-service child-care center, a small cafe, [...]

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Swine Flu: How scared should we be?

May 4, 2009
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The current national and international concern over the swine flu (aka influenza A, H1N1) outbreaks has created a fair amount of concern among many.  With so many media outlets anxiously reporting on the latest suspected or confirmed cases, or on different people's or institutions' reactions to the disease, a little perspective could be helpful. A [...]

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Wake County could eliminate 100 positions; but is that a lot?

April 14, 2009
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A recent post at wral.com, a local news site here in Wake County, NC, is titled, "Wake County could eliminate 100 positions," a headline which is unfortunately all too common in this time of rising unemployment.  The post goes on to tell us a number of other things, including that the elimination of these positions [...]

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Michael Kinsley analyzes the wrong numbers

February 2, 2009
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Journalist Michael Kinsley recently wrote an article for Time magazine in which he criticizes the Social Security system for providing "entitlement" income for those who don't really need it.  The starting point for his critique is a number he got from a Federal Reserve report that says the average net worth of American families whose [...]

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Cool graph, but where’d the data come from?

December 29, 2008

Below is a nifty graph which I first saw displayed in a post by Clay Shirky at boingboing. The graph shows the annual return on the S&P stock index for every year going back to 1825.  The heavy black line in the middle represents a zero return; if a year is listed to the right [...]

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