Researchers at Stanford University used data from the Union Army Veterans of the Civil War (1860-1940), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1971-1975), and the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (2007-2017) to determine that the mean body temperature in men and women has decreased by 0.03 degrees Celsius per birth decade. The reduction in body temperature is a Read More …
Category: Statistics Articles
Frames in Polling
Random-digit-dialing (RDD) is a popular method for selecting people to be in polls. So, the population from which a sample is drawn is anyone with a telephone (because RDD dials both listed and unlisted numbers). A problem with RDD is that of bias as a result of nonresponse.A study by Pew Research compared polling results using random-digit-dialing to the use Read More …
Question Wording in Polls
The folks at Pew Research have a video that explains how they word their questions so that they are clear and neutral. Worth a watch!
Beware the Lurking Variable
I just completed the discussion on correlation and regression with my Introductory Statistics students. One of the recommendations within the new GAISE outline is to introduce students to multivariate analysis. A classic application of this practice is the SAT score versus teacher salary data. This data may be found by joining a group I created in StatCrunch titled “SullyStats”. To Read More …
The Story of Guinness
Pricenomics is a nice website to visit periodically for interesting studies and articles that you may find relevant or useful for your stats class. For example, here is a link to an older article about the history of William Gosset and his research at Guinness.