How To Lie With Statistics

This is our first podcast (Alex Held and I).  We decided to do a Q&A for the most part. Enjoy.
How To Lie With Statistics

Comments (1)

Mark Miles (Teacher)
Mark Miles

Good first podcast. You said you were going to talk about chapter 3, however you stopped after chapter 2. Also, there were some distracting background noises.

Don’t forget, your post should also include the following: <ul> <li>Group members present during the discussion</li> <li>What your club discussed</li> <li>How you discussed it</li> <li>Any points of conflict/disagreement in discussion</li> <li>Questions that came up as a result of the discussion</li> </ul>

For next time, please respond to the following questions: <ol> <li>Choose one of the quotations inside the front cover and discuss how it relates to the Introduction.</li> <li>List as many sources of sample bias as you can that are mentioned in Chapter 1 and provide an example of each.</li> <li>What is the advantage of a stratified random sample and what difficulties does it pose, according to this chapter?</li> <li>When we see an average reported, what do we need to ask besides which kind of average is being used? Why?</li> <li>Which kind of “average” (statisticians call all three “measures of central tendency”) would give me the best way to compare the performance of two classes of a required math course? Why?</li> <li>Explain why advertisers often rely on a very small sample to substantiate their claims.</li> <li>What does the author mean on Page 45 when he says, “Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way…?”</li> <li>The author suggests that some reported differences may not be real differences at all and others, even though they can be shown to be real differences, should still be ignored. Explain how each of these two situations can arise and give an example of each.</li> </ol> Finally, when discussing chapters 3, 5, or 6, incorporate the following article into your discussion:

http://gizmodo.com/how-to-lie-with-data-visualization-1563576606

Also, each member of your group should find an article online containing a misleading graph and discuss it during the podcast (be sure to talk about why it’s misleading!). Be sure to include a link to all articles in the text of your post of the podcast that corresponds to chapters 3, 5, or 6.