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Category Archives: statistics

2010-03-01

Olympics

I enjoyed watching the Whistler/Vancouver Olympics. As anyone who knows me would guess, I was excited to watch the Nordic events, since the Olympics are the only time they are on broadcast TV in the USA. This was a good year for Team USA, with the first Nordic Combined medals. And it’s fun to watch [...]

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2010-01-30

Playing up the numbers

This week I read a USA Today story (from the first screen of Tuesday’s homepage) that made a couple common mistakes. The newspaper’s mistake is basing a story on a press release from an advocacy group, instead of doing an independant story based on the study itself. As frequently happens, the press release commits a [...]

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2009-10-04

Zipf’s Law

I’ve run across the interesting Zipfian distribution several times recently. Zipf’s law states that for many things, particularly words, the frequency is inversely proportional to the rank of the frequency. So, for example, the most common word is used twice as often as the second most common word, which is used twice as often as [...]

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2009-07-15

One-hundred and ten

I had a flash of inspiration this morning. A story about the All-Star game came on the radio and got me thinking.
I’ve always been annoyed when people, often athletes, say “I gave it one-hundred and ten percent,” or something along those lines. Now, there are plenty of times when percentages over 100 make sense, but—by [...]

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2009-07-02

Obesity

One of today’s headlines is “Hoosier obesity rate flat at 27.4%.” The article cites a RWJF/Trust for America’s Health report, which included this map and an interesting interactive map. The original data are from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics.
Sources:

The Journal Gazette: Hoosier obesity rate flat at 27.4%

Trust for America’s Health: F as in [...]

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