Should Any Current COVID-19 Estimates Be Used To Make Policy Decisions?
There is a popular saying in statistics - "Everyone believes the data except the collector. No one believes the model except the modeler."read more
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Poll Averaging Was No More Accurate In 2012 Than It Is Now
In 2012, the enthusiasm for poll averaging reached a fever pitch. Very few people were critical of it and instead talked about how science had taken over predictive politics. (1)I was critical of the accuracy and swam against the tide of those in media gushing about the new frontier opened up by New York Times statistical pundit Nate Silver and others, which posited that we could now predict...
read moreScience 2.0: How The Math Of 10 Million Data Points Per Day Can Help
They're data mining our children, notes Politico writer Stephanie Simon. She is talking about education technology startup Knewton and their use of data analytics to find out how kids think. They want to be able to predict who will struggle with fractions next week.Exciting, right? Obviously this can be misused and the fact that its potential problems (if they can forecast it, they can...
read moreWeekend Science: Why You Should Always Order A Large Pizza
I understand why someone living in the city might get a slice of pizza - they don't want to carry a box of pizza back to the office, and there is something nice about sitting down and having a quick bite.But I have never understood why anyone buys a medium pizza, much less a small. If you understand what a circle is, and you understand what a dollar is, it makes no sense.First, the dollar. The...
read moreMath Takes On The Baseball Playoffs
NJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet wrote an article here on his Markov process predictions for the baseball playoffs. That wasn't something new, he is in his 13th season of doing just that, often to maddening success.How did he do this time? The Pirates didn't advance, the Cardinals are now facing the Dodgers, but otherwise he nailed it, with the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers getting...
read moreMath Takes On The Baseball Playoffs
NJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet wrote an article here on his Markov process predictions for the baseball playoffs. That wasn't something new, he is in his 13th season of doing just that, often to maddening success.How did he do this time? The Pirates didn't advance, the Cardinals are now facing the Dodgers, but otherwise he nailed it, with the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers getting...
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