The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does it take you to spot the glitch?

Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than the average.

Continue reading “Journos: Back to stats 101!” »

Source: Long/Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata

I use emacs/for all my textprocessing needs, and for the last four or five years, I have created all my slides with Till Tantaus excellent “beamer” class. At the moment, I’m teaching a 2nd year stats course (imagine doing this with PowerPoint – the horror! the horror!), so I sometimes use graphs from the assigned text like this one from Long&Freese that illustrates the latent variable/threshold interpretation of the binary logit model. The message should be fairly clear: depends on andfollows a standard logistic distribution around its conditional mean.

Continue reading “All singing, all dancing 3d function plots with beamer, pgfplots and animate.sty” »

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 23rd through December 29th:

• The Data and Story Library – DASL (pronounced “dazzle”) is an online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods. We hope to provide data from a wide variety of topics so that statistics teachers can find real-world examples that will be interesting to their students. Use DASL’s powerful search engine to locate the story or datafile of interest.
• Drawing graphs using tikz/pgf & gnuplot | politicaldata.org -