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Conference utility-maximisation

This next slide shows the two research questions I sought to answer in my PhD. Students scored on average 4.26, which is between 4 and 5. What’s really interesting about this chart is that… I have copies of the full report here if anyone would like one. No? Please take one! I don’t want to have to carry them back with me on the plane. Tea or coffee? Where are you from? It’s academic conference season, that small window between when the...

How to Clean Up Your Online Presence and Make a Great First Impression

Odds are someone is searching the web for you right now, or at least has looked you up fairly recently. Do you know what they learned? Better yet, do you control the pages and profiles they visited? If not, it's time to take your online reputation into your own hands instead of leaving it to Google. Here's how. Why First Impressions Matter on the Internet It's no secret that friends, nosy family members, and potential employers will all take...

That’s just so meta: Data about data

“Sir, I think you should see this.” Imagine an 18th Century sorting office, musty and dusty with leather-bound ledgers in which were meticulously scratched with quill and ink the dates, senders, and receivers of letters. Mr Braithwaite has discerned a pattern in the correspondence of Ms Catherine Mossday. Today, she wrote to her dressmaker, a florist, and her sister, as well as four times to Mr Brown of Dover Place, Kent Road. Lord Mossday...

New year, new job

Our new year’s resolution is to help you get a job and, unlike normal resolutions, it’s not one we’ll be giving up on after a week of failed attempts to get up at 6.00am to go to the gym. For us, it starts with writing this post. For you, the first step is to decide that you want a new job. Once you’ve decided that you definitely want to do something, you see, the next steps become obvious, starting with reading this. What’s more, finding a...

Measure for Measure: Five steps to validity bliss

Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure (Shakespeare, 1623). There are those who would have you believe that Shakespeare was writing about justice and morality and how everyone gets what they deserve in the end. But what if Shakespeare was really trying to teach us an important lesson about the statistical validity of measurement scales? Measurement is about defining a unit of...

Revealed: The secret life of the perfect statistical analyst for you

• You won’t believe how young she was when she learned long division • More letters after her name than you’ve had hot dinners • Check out the MOOCs on him! • SAS, SPSS, and Stata: everything you need to be pooled t-test-ready this summer • Sources: “He’s the Madonna of data analysts” This post is not about how to lay out your CV, whether you should include a photograph, or whether it should be two pages long or three pages long. It’s about...

Studies show we should cancel Christmas

Dreaming of a white Christmas, are you? Buying presents for loved ones, eh? Office Christmas party? Wrote a letter to Santa that ended with the words “and a surprise”? Anticipation building with every Christmas card you write? It might be time to think again. Most coverage of the mid-winter festival is overly emotional and sentimental while assumptions relating to positive effects are not supported by evidence. Studies have shown, in fact,...

Data Scientist, Data Miner, Statistician or all of the above?

It was not so long ago that Steve Lohr quoted economist Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google at the time, as saying “ that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.” Lohr spoke of a “new breed of statisticians (…) that use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online...

The power heuristic: When is a billion not a billion?

‘One’, ‘two’, ‘many’, or ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘two-and-one’, ‘two-and-two’, ‘two-and-two-and-one’. Learning to count is a doddle in cultures that use a base-2 counting system where knowing that there are simply lots of something is usually enough. Anthropologists marvel at their primitive abilities which compare unfavourably to higher primates and even some species of birds but most civilisations, they argue, need more than that, like a base-10...

The necessity of teamwork

The task is simple: take a pile of car tyres, pieces of wood, and bits of string, build a 50cm platform on which you can stand, and do it quicker than everyone else. The trick is that none of the piles is intended to be sufficient so that, sooner or later, some great leader will emerge to unite the individuals into one big team to build a super-platform of peace and harmony on which everyone can stand together holding hands. Contrary to the...

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