Dear colleagues,
At my university the science undergraduates have to do a compulsory
communications paper.
As part of this, they have to do an assignment where they critique an
article touching their major subject area - in particular students planning
to major in Statistics have to comment on an article where statistics have
been misused or twisted for political or other purposes.
The Lecturer for this paper has been using the same 1998 article (a
newspaper article against gun control) for a while now, and is starting to
notice recycling of answers among the students. So she would like to
change to a new article.
Can anyone provide a reference for an article that could be used in this
way? Basically it should be where someone is making considerable use of
statistics "more for support than for illumination". As most students
take this paper in their first year, the level of
statistical sophistication in their argument need not be high, but there
needs to be enough content for them to write more than one paragraph
on. The flaw(s) in the argument could be in terms of sampling, mistaken
analysis, correlation versus causality, etc., and the article should
preferably be one that is accessible to the intelligent layman rather than
the specialist in some area.
Please reply to me and I will be happy to post a summary of responses.
Regards, Barry
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