"Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.... At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion." Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures in the U.S., but it can be very difficult to get unbiased information about the procedure. From Jezebel:
The Girl's Guide to Having an Abortion.
posted by jokeefe
on Jan 16, 2011 -
104 comments
Wins-above-replacement, or
WAR, is a
Sabermetric term of art for baseball player comparison.
Fangraphs, one of the go-to sites for baseball nerdlingers, now offers a way to make
WAR grids, an amazingly easily comprehended visual display comparing players based on WAR, sortable by team, position and season, with a default topline of player age.
[more inside]
posted by klangklangston
on Jan 14, 2011 -
54 comments
Dataists give their hopes and dreams for data, data tools and
data science in 2011.
Already, Google has provided
Google Refine (
previously) to help clean your datasets. While great
visualizations can be created with online
tools or by combining R (great
posts previously), with
ggplot2,
GGobi, and even
Google Motion Charts With R (already built into Google
Spreadsheets).
Need data?
Needlebase, helps non-programmers scrape, harvest, merge, and data from the web. Or if you’re introspective,
Your Flowing Data and
Daytum provide tools to measure and chart details of your own life.
posted by stratastar
on Jan 11, 2011 -
19 comments
Following the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology's decision to publish Daryl Bem's writeup of
8 studies (PDF) purporting to show evidence for precognition (
previously), researchers from the University of Amsterdam have written a
rebuttal (PDF) which finds methodological flaws not only in Bem's research, but in many other published papers in experimental psychology. Could this prove to be psychology's
cold fusion moment?
[more inside]
posted by yourcelf
on Jan 8, 2011 -
21 comments
Google is known to ask the following question in job interviews:
In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country? Think you know the answer?
If so, Steve Landsburg may be willing to bet you up to $5000. [more inside]
posted by gsteff
on Jan 1, 2011 -
279 comments
"Normal" human pregnancies last 40 weeks, right? Well, no; they can vary quite a bit by the mother's
race,
age,
number of previous children,
family history of delivering early or late,
home state,
work habits, and even
the fetus' HLA type. So where does that "40 week" thing come from?
Oh, dear. So check out this
super-nerdy pregnancy statistics website, from an engineer mom who is
collecting data from the public (see the
raw data and
auto-generated graphs, and
read the FAQ about the survey, with more cool graphs). Looking for
day-by-day probabilities on when that baby's due? This would be
your stats table with daily prediction (adjust dates at top of page as needed). Of course, you could always shut up your constantly inquiring relatives and friends
another way.
posted by Asparagirl
on Dec 16, 2010 -
45 comments
Measure-theoretic probability: Why it should be learnt and how to get started. The
clickable chart of distribution relationships. Just two of the interesting and informative probability resources I've learned about, along with countless other tidbits of information, from statistician
John D. Cook's
blog and his probability fact-of-the-day Twitter feed
ProbFact. John also has daily tip and fact Twitter feeds for
Windows keyboard shortcuts,
regular expressions,
TeX and LaTeX,
algebra and number theory,
topology and geometry,
real and complex analysis, and beginning tomorrow,
computer science and
statistics.
posted by grouse
on Dec 5, 2010 -
17 comments
'Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong.' Dr. John P. A.
Ioannidis, adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine is a meta-researcher. 'He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Oct 18, 2010 -
68 comments
The Center for Sexual Health Promotion, Indiana University, has investigated in 2009 sexual practices in the USA. The results are reported in this month's
Special Issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. (The
full text is available behind a short anonymous online survey.)
[more inside]
posted by knz
on Oct 15, 2010 -
14 comments
It's a simple concept: Given a choice between two random movies, which one do you like best? That's the driving force behind
Flickchart, an
addictive review site for movie lovers. Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer (weeding out the ones you haven't seen). Good! Now do it again. And again. And again. With each new face-off, Flickchart perfects a growing list of your favorite films -- and there can be no ties. This leads to some
difficult dilemmas:
Star Wars or
Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Citizen Kane or
The Godfather?
WALL-E or
Spirited Away? But you needn't struggle alone -- Flickchart is also social. By drawing on
the data of tens of thousands of fellow users, you can create
remarkably specific lists:
Martin Scorsese's Best Period Films.
The Best Road Movies of the 1980s.
The Worst Movies of All Time. If you rank enough films, you can generate interesting personalized charts, like "Your Favorite Musicals" or "The Best Movies You Haven't Seen." These filters carry over to the ranking system, letting you judge nothing but Horror movies or 1960s movies or unranked movies or movies from your top 100. You can also comment on
popular match-ups, lending your voice to contentious debates like
Ghostbusters vs.
Back to the Future or
Jaws vs.
Predator. Not a movie fan? Don't worry. Flickchart will be expanding into books, games, and music soon. Until then, you can give your own data sets the Flickchart treatment using
this tool from CNN.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Sep 3, 2010 -
202 comments
In an attempt to make sense of the 6.4 million words that comprise the more than 573.000 paged lines in the wikileaks 9/11 pager intercept data, researchers Mitja Back, Albrecht Kuefner, and Boris Egloff from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, have now conducted a statistical analysis of the emotional content of these pages.
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 3, 2010 -
7 comments
Do we live in a world where there is magic and meaning, or is it all just chance? Radiolab meets two young women who share a nearly unbelievable story of coincidence and fate. Then they consult with statisticians for a very different take on the same story.
This short audio documentary is charming and delightful.
A Lucky Wind won a Best Documentary: Honorable Mention Award in the 2009 Third Coast / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition as well as the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award (Radio Documentary).
[more inside]
posted by storybored
on Aug 25, 2010 -
92 comments
Interested in teaching yourself some statistics? Here is an excellent online and interactive
statistics textbook developed at UC Berkeley, and also used at CUNY, UCSC, SJSU, and Bard. Here is the
syllabus for the course at Berkeley. And here are some insightful
reflections from the professor on developing Berkeley's first fully approved online course.
posted by AceRock
on Aug 9, 2010 -
18 comments
It has applications in
Economics,
Biology,
Pharmaceuticals, and
is rooted in State Space Modeling, which with
Kalman Filtering (
paper,
breakdown [warning: long]) was used in the
Apollo program.
Dynamic Linear Models are gaining in popularity. There exists an
R package, and both
a short doc and
a really great (read: worth buying) book (sorry, not a download, but
here's chapter 2) by
Giovanni Petris,
Sonia Petrone, and Patrizia Campagnoli with
its own little website.
posted by JoeXIII007
on Jul 30, 2010 -
14 comments
Veronique de Rugy, NRO contributor and George Mason fellow, says her
research indicates that stimulus funding was disproportionately directed towards Democratic congressional districts. Nate Silver
begs to disagree. De Rugy responds
here; Silver responds
here. Others say that this is a model "for the quick, effective peer-review that the internet facilitates." Perhaps this is a
new model for peer review?
posted by lalex
on Apr 3, 2010 -
27 comments
Significantly what? ...Or how our most common statistical methods really weren't meant to be used that way and why that study result is likely spurious. Since mefites like to argue about stats, here's some background for us all (and I'm not talking correlation vs causation)!
posted by mandymanwasregistered
on Mar 18, 2010 -
51 comments
Mercenary Epidemiology: Data Reanalysis and Reinterpretation for Sponsors With Financial Interest in the Outcome. (.pdf link) When should scientists be required to release their raw data for (potentially hostile) re-analysis? A letter to the editors of Annals of Epidemiology from David Michaels, Ph.D., MPH,
public health blogger, author of the book
Doubt Is Their Product, and, as of December 2009, the
Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, unanimously confirmed by the Senate despite the
dismay of some. Michaels
interviewed at Science Progress about
Doubt Is Their Product (podcast, with transcript.)
posted by escabeche
on Feb 11, 2010 -
9 comments
"We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well." The people who run the dating site
OkCupid continue to analyze the aggregate data of their users, shedding light on preferences and behavior. The most recent
OkTrends post takes a look at their compiled racial data:
Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back. (previously
1 2)
posted by naju
on Oct 7, 2009 -
459 comments
"Death Risk Rankings calculates your risk of dying in the next year and allows you to compare that risk to others in the world." Fun with mortality data and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.
posted by OmieWise
on Sep 4, 2009 -
28 comments
