Tag: misuse of statistics

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Statistics in “APA Format”

Mathematics is an ancient discipline, developed through many cultures and with many different ways of representing numbers and operations. Fortunately, there is a accepted convention that now governs how mathematics is represented around the world and it is through this convention that many mathematicians are able to exchange ideas independent of whether they speak the same (non-mathematical) language. It is not surprising, therefore, that statistics (a branch of mathematics) also has a convention on how statistics are represented.

Statistical Conventions

In the statistics discipline we are typically dealing with one of two groups, the population or the sample. The population we are working with should be denoted by a capital Roman letter (e.g.  X ) and an individual from that population should be denoted with a lower case Roman letter (e.g.  x ). When we take a sample from the population, we are getting a set of  x ‘s out of our population  X  (i.e each  x \in X )

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Lies, Damned Lies and (Misused) Statistics…

Mark Twain is credited with stating that there are three kinds of lies, "Lies, damned lies and statistics". As a statistician, I often hear people quoting this to me to which I often point out that Twain was only partially correct. There are three kinds of lies, "Lies, damned lies and lies told by misusing statistics". It appears that once again in Australia, vital funding choices are about to be made through the use of a faulty statistic, the citation count.

During this past week I’ve been happily working away with my students, teaching them all I can about the wonderful world of mathematics and statistics. In particular, we’ve looked at what inferences you can draw from a set of descriptive statistics. One particular example in their textbooks asks the students to compare the pulse rates of 21 adult males and 22 adult females and make an inference about male and female pulse rates. As expected from the data supplied, these students conclude that females, in general, have higher and more variable pulse rates than the males. Whilst that is a correct conclusion from the supplied data, I always ask the students if there is anything they might be concerned about with regards to this data and how it was collected.

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