Here is a paper by some professors ar Carnegie Mellon regarding the privacy (lack of privacy) of using social security nubmers as identifiers. Here is an article about the paper. Disclaimer: SITW in no way endorese the stealing of SSNs. In fact, we don’t endorse stealing anything. Cheers.

Here are two good articles I received as links in my email recently. Here is a recent article from Slate.com about golf stats and predicting winners. Good stuff. And here is another Slate.com article about people lying about who they voted for in the last presidential election. They delve a little bit into sampling methodology.…

I know it’s been a while. Here is an article about a poll gone wrong thanks to poor sampling design. Cheers.

I’m at NESS right now. Two people I was expecting to see here, both decided they weren’t coming because the weather was too nice. They are much smarter than I. Cheers.

This weeks correlation versus causation debacleis in the form of a letter to the editor from Lee Bradshaw and is brought to you by The Bernoulli Trial Blog. Here is the original article. Cheers.

I was watching a baseball game last night and an announcer, after noting that the Marlins started the season 11-1, jokingly commented that they were on pace to win 149 games that year (11/12*162=148.5). Anyone who knows anything about baseball knows that there is no chance that the Marlins will win 149 games. The most…

As my fourth semester of grad school draws to a close, I am in the lab writing a final project for my Linear Models 2 class about a paper published by Patterson and Thompson called “Recovery of Inter-block Information when Block Sizes are Unequal.” Pretty dry stuff. But one of the citations in this article…

Here is a graphical representation of box office receipts for the movies from 1986 through 2008. This is a great display of data. We can see how much money individual moves made, as well as the length of time they were in theater. We can also easily see the overall trend of the movie industry…

I only got one of the Final Four teams this year, but that team is UNC and they look like they have a good shot to win it. It’s never a total loss when your champion pick is still alive. My bracket might stink, but my “bets” have been good. For the tournament I am…