Tag: statistics
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Back’s boats
Senator Back is doing the rounds with a strong anti-boat-arrival theme. I fired back a letter in frustration, which I’ll get to in a moment. First, I’ll mention something else I discovered. Back sent out two letters, about a month apart, each accompanied with a pamphlet on how Labor is failing to “stop the boats”.…
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Open source science
Slashdot notes an article from the Guardian: “If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too“. The author is, Darrel Ince, is a Professor of Computing at The Open University. You might recognise something of the mayhem that is the climate change debate in the title. Both the public release of scientific…
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The Mad Monk’s modelling mockery
Tony Abbott has tried his hand at modelling the economic costs of carbon emissions reduction. The results are a little disturbing. Unless Abbott was being deliberately, deceptively simplistic in order to appeal to the burn-the-elitists demographic of Australian society, he truly doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about: He says given a 5 per…
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Software defect costs
In my persuit of software engineering data, I’ve recently been poring over a 2002 report to the US Government on the annual costs of software defects. The report is entitled “The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing“. Ultimately, it estimates that software defects cost the US economy $59.5 billion every year. Modelling such…
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The American hypothesis
I have a hypothesis on politics – a somewhat unfortunate hypothesis given its implications. Roughly speaking, it’s this: the workability of democracy diminishes with large populations. I’m not talking about the logistics of holding elections, but about the ability of society to engage in meaningful debate. My reasoning goes like this. Insofar as I can…
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Asylum statistics
One of Amnesty International’s media releases reports on a survey of Australians’ knowledge and opinions on asylum seekers. However, the point of the media release is clearly to highlight some of the facts themselves, not just the extent to which people are aware of them. This seems reasonable, given that: The opinion poll also showed…
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The doomsday argument
This has recently been the source of much frustration for some of my friends, as I’ve attempted to casually plow through a probabilistic argument that most people would instinctively recoil at. So, I thought, it might work better when written down. Of course, plenty of others have also written it down, including Brandon Carter –…
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Theoretical frameworks, part 3
The [intlink id=”225″ type=”post”]first[/intlink] and [intlink id=”324″ type=”post”]second[/intlink] instalments of this saga discussed the thinking and writing processes. However, I also need to fess up to reality and do some measuring. A theoretical framework is not a theory. The point of a theoretical framework is to frame theories – to provide all the concepts and…
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When statistics attack
I swear stats is trying to kill me. I’ve redesigned my experiment so that it’s a nice elegant “two-factor repeated measures” flavour. I won’t trouble you with exactly what that means, or exactly what the nine separate hypotheses I’m testing are. What I will trouble you with, for it’s certainly been troubling me, is this:…
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How does this experiment work?
Statistics. It all seems to easy until you have to do it. No worries Dave, I confidently assured myself as I fitted the last details of my delicate experimental design into place, all set to be unleashed on as many undergraduates as I had chocolate to bribe. Now all I have to do is plug…