Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife
should be mandatory in l'ecoles secondaire.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Comment in Nature on discipline of statistics (Vaux 13 Dec
2012)
From: William Stanbury <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, January 04, 2013 4:00 am
To: [log in to unmask]
For what it's worth, having worked several years with francophone
statisticians, I've noticed perception diffferences which may be
socio-cultural or other. A simple arithmetical example will suffice:
occasionally but regularly whilst doing mental arithmetic to calculate
answers, in a few seconds I might say:"The answer is circa 140,000." All
my francophone colleagues would look at me in surprise, get their
calculators out, take sometimes a minute to cacluate the answer, then
answer:"You're wrong actually, the answer is 138,989.76."
On 4 January 2013 11:46, John Bibby <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
Unreliable evidence and Belgian red herrings! ( Vaux + other
francophones are common here in Yorkshire too!) NB: Vauxhall
However this Vaux is at University of Melbourne, as the article clearly
states.
JOHN B
On 4 January 2013 01:12, William Stanbury <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
Interesting situ: Vaux is a francophone name, do you know his
University and possibly nationality or background? As a native speaker
having worked several years with francophone Belgian statisticians, I
understand the issues here. Thanks.
On 3 January 2013 12:24, Allan Reese (Cefas) <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
Nature (Vol 492 p180) contains a personal comment article by a
professor of cell biology. He condemns reporting of “P values for
single `representative’ experiments. ... Because science represents
the knowledge gained from repeated observations or experiments, these
have to be performed more than once – or must use multiple independent
samples – for us to have confidence that the results are not just a
fluke, a coincidence or a mistake.”
There are follow-up comments at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7428/full/492180a.html that
appear to come from other scientists, not statisticians.
I have sympathy with Vaux’s views but think they are badly expressed
and muddled as a critique of the way statistics is used in science. One
specific point is that he confuses the statistical analysis with the
reporting (“I see figures with error bars that do not say what they
describe.”) I have personally exchanged emails with Nature on the
subject of poorly designed graphs, and was put off on the basis that
they had a comment article in press. Hence I don’t want to continue
an individual campaign against the magazine, but maybe Allstat members
would be interested to read Vaux’s article and respond. Maybe editors
should ask a qualified statistician to referee statistics.
Just to rattle your cage, “[Experimental biologists] don’t all need
to understand complex statistics, or hire professional statisticians,
but there would be fewer sloppy papers if every author, reviewer and
editor understood statistical concepts such as standard deviation ....
[boxed Glossary] Standard deviation: The typical difference between each
value and the mean value.”
Allan Reese
(personal view, not on behalf of Cefas)
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