Back in the dark ages when access to computers was not all that common, I was faced with developing a project schedule for, to me, a complex construction project. I was not that long out of school, so I sought out my boss with the hope he would give me some guidance on how to …
“Easy” Excel Inverse Triangular Distribution for Monte Carlo Simulations Redux Read More »
This is a great 5-minute read – well worth your time. Spies, Crime, and Lightning Strikes: The Value of Probabilistic Thinking
This headline popped up in my newsfeed this morning: Boys will be boys: Data error prompts U-turn on study of sex differences in school (Retraction Watch, 2017) The article is about a peer-reviewed article on self-regulation of study habits that was published earlier this year. In the retraction, the authors noted they had discovered a …
Although we often think of paired samples as being the same person (thing) in a “before” and “after” treatment setting, there are some other important types of paired samples. One kind are “natural” pairings, such as spouses, siblings, and especially twins. This type of pairing is often used in medical observational research when it is …
Perhaps one of the simplest but toughest questions for my intro (and graduate) stats students seems to be those asking to classify a variable as discrete or continuous. My quick rule of thumb (heuristic) is to think about whether the variable is countable or whether it must be measured. I tried to come up with …
The most recent assignment in my BUS 430 class was on simple linear regression. In some of the data sets, there are data points that seem to be inconsistent with the bulk of the data. One student called this to my attention and asked if he should just ignore those data points because they were …