Here is a nice little post about the price and purity of cocaine over time. The second graph released by the Washington Office on Latin America shows a huge decline in the price of cocaine in the eighties and a much more gradual decline in price from the early nineties through 2008. They conclude: “In…

I got into an argument with one of my friends who is in law school about lawyers salaries. So I searched around the internet, and I found this fascinating graph of 2008 starting lawyers salaries from this blog entry on elsblog.org . The blog entry goes on to say: “Of the 22,305 law school graduates…

Here is an interesting excerpt from a review of the book The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century: “Salsburg believes that the public is not fully aware of the degree to which recent developments in statistics impact the way we perceive the world. He correctly points out that the twentieth…

The New York Times printed an article today about how important statistics were in the real world which I mentioned in a previous blog post. One of the last paragraphs offers a great example of correlation versus causation which has now won the SITW Correlation of the Week! Congratulations 1940s public health experts. “The rich…

I was just checking out the bernoulli trial blog and Stan has posted a great quote from google’s chief economist about how sexy I am. Well, it’s about how sexy statisticians are. The job anyway. (My friend who is doing a Ph. D. in English also sent me this highly relevant article from the New…

Here is a blog post (from Andrew Gelman’s blog) about an article (also by Andrew Gelman) about the misuse of statistics, if you will, in the wild. From his blog: “The article begins as follows: In the past few years, Satoshi Kanazawa, a reader in management and research methodology at the London School of Economics,…

Here is some good advice from Andrew Gelman about writing research articles. Cheers.

The Harvard stats blog has an interesting post about the distribution of swine flu cases by day. Cheers.

I was just alerted by an avid reader that SPSS has been purchased by IBM. Details in this article: “IBM’s purchase of SPSS ends era”. Cheers.

One of my professors does a lot of work with copulas, and today I was reading a poster presentation that he did where he cites this article, Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street. The author, Felix Salmon, talks about how the Gaussian copula formula brought down wall street. Judging solely by his…