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Cause and effect

If you don't see why this cartoon is funny, hopefully you will by the end of this post. The following graph shows the volume of crude oil imports...

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Intuition

  Intuition is a great asset, but: Can sometimes lead you astray; Always needs to be balanced by doubt, to avoid becoming complacency; Is never...

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Killfie

  I recently read that more than 250 people died between 2011 and 2017 taking selfies (so-called killfies). A Wikipedia entry gives a list of...

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Proof reading

In an earlier post I described what's generally known as the Mutilated Chessboard Puzzle. It goes like this: a chessboard has 2 diagonally opposite...

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Statistics of the decade

Now that the nights are drawing in, our minds naturally turn to regular end-of-year events and activities: Halloween; Bonfire night; Christmas; New...

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Love it or hate it

  A while ago I wrote a post about the practice of advertistics - the use, and more often misuse, of Statistics by advertising companies to...

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A day in the life

  Over the next few weeks I'm planning to include a couple of posts looking at the way Statistics gets used - and often misused - in the media....

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Family problems

  In an earlier post, I set the following problem: You're at a party and meet someone. After chatting for a bit, you work out that the girl...

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Weapons of math destruction

I haven't read it, but Cathy O'Neil's 'Weapons of Math Destruction'  is a great title for a book. Here's what one reviewer wrote: Cathy O'Neil an...

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Disgraceful

  Here's a problem for you. You're an executive member of a medium-sized company. You have quite a few employees whose livelihoods are...

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Advertistics

    In a recent  Guardian article, Arwa Mahdawi defines something that she jokingly calls 'advertistics'. These are statistics based on...

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