[R] OT Sorta: Odds Are, It's Wrong...

(Ted Harding) Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk
Mon Mar 15 18:21:05 CET 2010


On 15-Mar-10 16:22:13, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> Hi all,
> I thought that readers of R-Help might find the following article at
> ScienceNews of interest:
> 
>   Odds Are, It's Wrong
>   Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
>   By Tom Siegfried
>   March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26)
>  
> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wro
> ng
> 
> Regards,
> Marc Schwartz

If you changed your Subject to "Odds R, it's wrong", arc, you might get
more on-topic, Marc. Or at least increase people's subjective beliefs
that it was OT.

That's not a bad article, as such things go!

I was reminded of reading, many moons ago in a book[1] by John Ziman[2],
words to the effect that[3]:

  "If your experiment gives a result significant at the 5 per cent
   level, then 1 in 20 of your colleagues is entitled to disblieve
   you."

[1]
Ziman, John (1968).
Public Knowledge: Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science.
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-06894-0.

[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ziman

[3]
I don't have the book immediately to hand (though I have it somewhere),
so cannot vouch that the above is verbatim. However, it's not far off,
and the final clause very probably is verbatim.

Ted.

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Date: 15-Mar-10                                       Time: 17:21:02
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