Today on Slate, there is an article about Hal Stern’s call for all qunatitative analysts to boycott the BCS. I would like to let everyone know that in addition to Hal Stern and Bill James, the Stats in the Wild Blog is officially joining the boycott. That ought to bring the BCS to its knees.…

Happy New Year! Here is an article from the Freakonomics blog tracking American’s (un)happiness. Cheers

Finals are over and I hope to post more regularly again. Here is a quick picture. This picture, by French engineer Charles Joseph Menard, graphically depicts Napolean’s fateful march to Russia. The width of the line represents how many troops Napolean had at each point on his way to Russia and what makes this graphic…

Voter turnout for this last election was as high as it has been in the last 60 years. Click here for a good graphical display of voter turnout since 1948 on Andrew Gelman’s blog. Also check out the United States Election Project where they have data about past election going back about 50 years.

A friend of mine told me about this problem, so I went and looked it up. This is stats in the wildest of the wild. So, during World War II, the Allies were trying to estimate the number of a certain kind of German tank. They needed this information to better plan their attacks and…

Accoriding to this article from www.readwriteweb.com, they claim that “Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study Finds”. Interesting. So how did they reach this conclusion? From the article: “The company [goosegrade.com] asked a demographically diverse group of respondents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to fill out the survey and published the results today on…

The Bradley effect is a supposed effect that Black candidates poll numbers are often higher than the percentage they win in the actual election. One explanation that is offered is that survey espondents do not want to appear racist or respond with an unpopular answer and thus skew the results. Articles about this appear at…

Say there are two hospitals in your area well call them General Hospital and Specific Hospital. (What?) Ok. We’ll actually call them A and B. Hospital A starts a marketing campaign and they want to target specific groups of people. They run two ads. The first says, “If you’re under 65 we have a lower…

Hem Line index updated This is an article from the New York Times updating the hemline index. The hemline index, first proposed by economist George Taylor in the 1920s, is a proposal that says during hard economic times women’s hem lines get longer. Shorter skirts = Better economy. The author is looking to update the…

Presidential predictions and stats galore: www.fivethirtyeight.com