Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

And it is not merely a hypothetical case. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months; he died of a different and unrelated kind of cancer twenty years later.3 Gould subsequently wrote a famous article called “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he argued that his scientific knowledge of statistics saved him from the erroneous conclusion that he would necessarily be dead in eight months. The definition of the median tells us that half the patients will live at least eight months—and possibly much, much longer than that. The mortality distribution is “right-skewed,” which is more than a technicality if you happen to have the disease.4

plural noun is a quick way to signal to anyone who does serious research that you are conversant with statistics.

information on thousands of people, including how frequently they eat bran muffins, and then use regression analys

happening to the economic health of the American middle class? That answer depends on how one defines both “middle class” and “economic health

measure of the “middle” of a distribution is the mea

controlled experiment in which the variable of interest (e.g., smoking) is the only thing that differs between the experimental

dead smokers definitely won’t show up.

number of identical wrong answers is highly unlikely,

Probability can even be used to catch cheats

average income in America is not equal to the income of the average American.