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The lastest stories and analysis on the Economist job market

Announcing the First Annual Corrigan Brothers Statistics Music Video Medal

The Corrigan Brothers are leading exponents of how to capture the zeitgeist. They wrote about Barack Obama’s Irish roots and helped him win the 2008 American presidential election, about the 2011 Irish presidential election, Luis Suarez’s bites, Vincent Tan’s shirts, and the Irish government’s proposal to give free cheese to poor people. Inspired by a blog post on the 100-year-old debate between Frequentists and Bayesianists, Ger Corrigan thought...

The Stats of Wall Street: Banking on probabilities

Mark Kermode’s (2014) review of The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013) opens somewhat confusingly with a quote from a review of the 1929 film of the same name that bemoans the “madness, women and swindling”. Michael Lewis (1989) told some less than legal tales in Liar’s Poker; Jordan Belfort went to jail, as recorded in his memoir The Wolf of Wall Street (2007); Gordon Gecko’s comeuppance in Wall Street (Stone, 1987) was supposed to be a lesson...

Electoral collage: If I want to get elected, which party should I join?

Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king! Dennis: (laughingly) Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony! I...

Walking the line: Stats and policy development

In 2011, with Ireland’s economy in the depths of recession and a general election imminent, several prominent journalists and commentators seemed to be about to launch bids for election to the national parliament as a new party called Democracy Now. They had, the argument went, been pointing out precisely what politicians had been doing wrong for many years and now was the time for them to cross the line and actually try it out for themselves. In...

Frequentism vs. Bayesianism: Pick a side

Basic and Applied Social Psychology (BASP) has banned the use of null hypothesis significance testing procedure (NHSTP). The editorial making the announcement is full of evocative language about having to “remove all vestiges of the NHSTP” from manuscripts before publication, criticising “the stultified structure of NHSTP thinking”, and liberating psychological research from the “crutch of NHSTP”. They’re down on confidence intervals as well and,...

Unsuccessful at interview: The six stages of rejection and recovery

“Tell me, baby: Where did I go wrong?” (Prince, 1990) “Dry your eyes, mate” (Skinner, 2004) “I will survive” (Perren & Fekaris, 1978) Looking for and not getting a job is an emotional experience worthy of the great poets and popular music artistes. It has everything from the thrill of the chase to the infatuation, from the fantasising about a blissful future together to the pain of rejection when the job goes off with someone else. However, p...

That’s a surprisingly big number! Descriptive statistics

You’re on the bus. It’s early in the morning and difficult to remember what number comes after one. (Twelfty, isn’t it?). There seem to be some other people on the bus, people with coats, and hair, and bags, and mobile phones. When the early morning coffee starts to kick in, you start counting the colours of the coats and the hair and the bags. “Wow!” you think, “That’s amazing! There are seventeen people on this bus with blonde coats! That’s mil...

“So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?” Scepticism and scientific literacy

“So, you’re telling me there’s a chance?” said Jim Carrey’s Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber, delighted at the prospect of one in a million. Lloyd is demonstrating a high degree of statistical and scientific illiteracy. This week, people have been talking about vaccination and whether parents have a right to choose vaccination for their children. The reason everyone is talking about vaccination can be politely referred to as scepticism, that is...

Error, Part 2: Type II and sampling

“How many would you need for a nationally representative sample? Would five be enough?” “Five thousand?” “No, five participants.” There are trials in the life of a statistician, and being asked silly questions about sampling is one of them. An inadequate sample is a great way to make a Type II error, that is, failing to find something that is actually there. Last week’s post dealt with Type I error and Captain Statto of the pirate ship Regressor ...

Error, Part 1: Type I and reliability

Statistics is far, far simpler than normal life. In most spheres of daily existence, there are hundreds of things that could go wrong whereas in statistics there are just two, very simply named Type I and Type II. If you can avoid both, you’ll do just fine. Type I error is essentially seeing something that isn’t there, and Type II error is failing to spot something that is. This post will take you through Type I next week’s will cover Type II, al...

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