‘This is statistics’ website
The American Statistical Association is launching a public relations campaign to make people think statistics is less boring and pointless, which is good:
We want students and parents to have a better understanding of a field that is often unknown or misunderstood. Statistics is not just a collection of numbers or formulas. It’s not just lines, bars or points on a graph. It’s not just computing. Statistics is so much more. It’s an exciting—even fun—way of looking at the world and gaining insights through a scientific approach that rewards creative thinking.
That’s a quote from the shiny new website, ThisIsStatistics. It has stories about what statisticians do, and information about salary and job trends and stuff. There are videos of statisticians talking about their work: currently Roger Peng (Johns Hopkins, SimplyStatistics blog) and Genevra Allen (Rice University).
It’s slightly disappointing that more of the people on the site arent’ real, just stock photos, but I suppose that’s unavoidable. What’s a bit more annoying is one of the photos in particular:
This looks as if it was constructed specially (the cup/mat/tablet/glasses are stock, eg). It’s a rose chart, which is an ok way to display circular data (eg wind directions), but is not so good for comparison because of the way the wedges change shape as they get larger. The numeric labels are also a slightly strange choice for a circle measured in degrees (90 isn’t a multiple of 20).
Much more importantly, given the emphasis of the site on statistics as solving real problems, this is labelled as not being real: “data A” and “data B”. Not helpful when we’re trying to tell people “It’s not just lines, bars or points on a graph”.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I was going to say “at least it shows that two data sets are being compared which, for example ‘horses’ and ‘cows’ might not”. But then two slightly generic labels like “Downtown” and “Airport” might do the job because with circular data it is often places that are being compared.
10 years ago
Expenditures of various kinds of public literacy has not been money well spent. From health literacy to financial literacy, it’s been good money after bad. To raise the level of innumeracy in this country, the money would be much better spent on training statisticians to communicate more effectively with nontechnical people…kind of like bedside manner classes in med school. At the end of the day if statisticians can only talk to other statisticians, then that does not bode well for the profession.
10 years ago