Stats in the Wild

Here is some salary information about the statistics profession from amstat.org.

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Prior to the ratification of the United States Constitution, many of the founders wrote a series of papers supporting the ratification of the Constitution. These papers came to be known as the Federalist papers. When they were written, they were published anonymously. Years later several of the authors claimed their work. However, many of these papers went unclaimed. In the seventies, two statisticians, Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace, tackled the problem of identifying the authors of the unclaimed papers. Here is a brief description of what they did on page 130 of the book “The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century” by David Salsburg

Stats are everywhere.

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Welcome to the Halloween edition of StatsInTheWild:

Here are some interesting articles:
THE PARANORMAL: THE EVIDENCE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSCIOUSNESS
PAPERS RELATED TO THE 1995 REVIEW OF THE GOVERNMENT STARGATE PROGRAM
AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC FUNCTIONING
JESSICA UTTS’ HOMEPAGE

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I met Stephen Fienberg (not to be confused with Steve Feinberg) today at the Pfizer Colloquim.

This morning he met with all of the grad students, and we got to ask him questions. Somehow we got onto the topic of the flu vaccine and it’s safety, which led to him talking about the link between autism and the M/M/R vaccine. He explained that one paper published in Britain found a link between autism and the M/M/R vaccine when controlling FOR NO OTHER FACTORS. Since then, countless other studies have been unable to find this link. However, Thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, has since been removed from the M/M/R vaccine and the reported number of autism cases continues to rise. This seems to be clear evidence that Thiomersal was not causing Autism. Here is an article about that very subject: Autism Cases Still Going Up As Vaccine Mercury Removed.

Later, he gave a talk where he spoke about his career. The vast array of applied work he has done over his career is just amazing. One topic he spoke about was some work he did for the department of energy about the accuracy of polygraphs which led him to write this book. Applications like these where statistics is applied to real problems in the real world is what this blog is about.

John Tukey once said, “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.” Stephen Fienberg added tonight, “and we get to take their toy’s home with us.”

Cheers.

One of the things I’ve always liked about statistics is that the methods can be applied to so many interesting areas. John Tukey expressed this sentiment well, saying “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.” Well said, John. Well said.

Today, let’s play a little bit in evolutionary biology’s backyard: Human Evolution: Are Humans Still Evolving?

Cheers.

evolution

AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling

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I’ve been reading a lot about vaccines lately, and I just finished a book, “Look Me in the Eyes” (highly recommended) about Asperger’s syndrome so naturally I stumbled across this article: On Parenting: Genes—Not Vaccines—Linked to Autism from 2008.

In the last paragraph they say: “Earlier this week, researchers at the California Department of Public Health reported that the rates of autism in children born from 1989 through 2003 has risen, despite the fact that the preservative thimerosal, which contains toxic mercury, was largely phased out of vaccines during that time. It echoes studies in five other countries, including Canada in 2007, that failed to find a link between the use of vaccines or thimerosal and autism. Some parents and autism activists argue that vaccines, or the thimerosal in them, is responsible for autism..”

Who are these “parents and autism activists” and are they just making this stuff up? Are any scientists claiming there is a link between the vaccines and autism? Are these the same “parents” who claim that the H1N1 and HPV vaccine are unsafe?

That paragraph from the article finishes with a quote from Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and father of a 15-year-old daughter with autism:
“Hotez says: ‘It doesn’t make sense that mercury would cause autism, because we know what mercury does cause”—horrible diseases like Minamata, in which children are born with deformed limbs. He’s optimistic that the momentum for focusing on how genes interact with environmental triggers will soon bear fruit.’

Moral: Vaccines do not cause Autism.

Cheers.

Here is an interesting website about the H1N1 flu with state by state data for the United States.

And here is an interesting graph from the CDC about the number of hospital visits for flu like symptoms. Not a good start to this flu season. I wonder if that spike this year is influenced more by an increase in severe flu cases or an increase in people visiting doctors as a reaction to the news reports about the flu.

Cheers.

The Shutdown Corner, a Yahoo! sports blog notes that the redskins will play their sixth consecutive game against a winless opponent. Quite impressive. In the post they note that the chances of this happening are 1 in 32,768. I have some comments:

I think what they mean to say is that given the Redskins schedule this year and assuming each of their opponents has a 50% chance of winning each of their games the chances of this happening are 1 in 32,768. (That calculation checks out.)

However, the assumption that any of the redskins opponents has a 50% chance of winning their games is laughable at best (i.e. Lions, Bucs, Chiefs). If we re-do this calculation with last years respective winning percentages for these teams the chances are only about 1 in 1,703. ((14/16)*(7/16)^3*(4/16)^3*(14/16)^5=0.000587). But the bucs and panthers are much worse than last year, so the chances are probably a bit larger than 1 in 1,703.

On the other hand, for this to happen to a random team with a random schedule is very unlikely. Evidence of this is that it has never happened in NFL history before, as noted in that blog post.

So while the Redskin’s feat is impressive (or depressing?), I think they got the numbers wrong.

Cheers.