Stats in the Wild

[Since this was originally published in 2013, I’ve collected new data that renders this article obsolete. You can always see the most recent data here. -Bob Muenchen]

Learning to use a data analysis tool well takes significant effort, so people tend to continue using the tool they learned in college for much of their careers. As a result, the software used by professors and their students is likely to predict what the next generation of analysts will use for years to come. I track this trend, and many others, in my article The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. In the latest update (4/13/2012) I forecast that, if current trends continued, the use of the R software would exceed that of SAS for scholarly applications in 2015. That was based on the data shown in Figure 7a, which I repeat here:

Let’s take a more detailed look at what…

Lately you’ve seen a string of articles about how women say sorry too much. We’ve got yesterday’s New York Times opinion piece entitled Why Women Apologize and Should Stop, we’ve got Amy Schumer’s amazing-as-always skit on accomplished women apologizing for everything including existing, and even academics are weighing in.

This is not my problem. I don’t apologize as an automatic response. I learned that early on, when I got my first teaching evaluation; I had apologized exactly once to my (all female) class about not being prepared, in a summer semester where I met with them daily for 10 weeks, and at the end of the summer they all mentioned that I came to class unprepared. I had never come unprepared a second time, nor had I ever mentioned being unprepared a second time. That experience cured me of apologies more generally.

But I remain curious about how men…

Apparently students in the UK have been protesting against the following question on a GCSE math exam (see e. g. coverage at The Guardian):

There are n sweets in a bag. Six of the sweets are orange. The rest of the sweets are yellow. Hannah takes a random sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. Hannah then takes at random another sweet from the bag. She eats the sweet. The probability that Hannah eats two orange sweets is 1/3. Show that n²-n-90=0.

The probability that the first sweet is orange is $latex 6/n$. Now there are five orange sweets left out of $latex n-1$, so the probability that the second sweet is orange, assuming that the first one is, is $latex 5/(n-1)$. Therefore we need to solve $latex (6/n) times (5/(n-1)) = 1/3$. Multiplying it out gives

$latex {30 over n(n-1)} = {1 over 3}$

and we can…

Do you like geometrical constructions? Then you should like theflag of Nepal, which is the only non-rectangular flag of a nation, is actually defined bya Euclidean ruler and compass constructionin their constitution. See astep by step drawing of the constructionorthis video from Numberphile.

The flag of the state of Ohiois also non-rectangular, but sadly their laws only describe it as “burgee-shaped”. It might be possible to extract a construction fromthe picture in this brochure from the Ohio secretary of state, but it looks like many of the points are specified but their position in a larger rectangle. Ohio’s flag is analytic geometry; Nepal’s is synthetic.

On February 20, the National Hockey League announced a partnership with software company SAP. The alliance’s primary purpose was to bring a new enhanced stats section to NHL.com, built in the shadows of popular analytics sites like war-on-ice and the now dormant extra-skater.

It was, it seemed, a partial admission from the league that it’s best metrics were hosted elsewhere.

“The stats landscape in the NHL is kind of all over the place,” suggested Chris Foster, Director of the NHL’s Digital Business Development, at the time. “One of the goals is to make sure that all of the tools that fans need are on NHL.com.”

One tool presented in February was SAP’s Matchup Analysis, designed to predict the league’s postseason play. The tool claimed 85% accuracy, which Yahoo’s Puck Daddy boasted was good enough to make “TV executives nervous and sports [bettors] rather happy.”

There’s just one problem.

85%…