by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | People, Statistics
Two members of India’s National Statistical Commission resigned in late January over the government’s attempts to hold the release of data to avoid unpalatable news. NSC Acting Chair PC Mohanan and member JV Meenakshi joined several other key Indian officials like...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | People, Statistics
Greece’s former statistics chief Andreas Georgiou has been found not guilty for the third time by the Council of Appeals. He has been accused of falsifying his country’s 2009 country data to justify a bailout by the IMF. Georgiou was Greece’s chief statistician from...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | People, Statistics
Ivan Fellegi, former chief statistician for Canada, is one of the recipients of this year’s Public Service Awards for Excellence. Fellegi held the top statistician job in Canada for 23 of his 60 years in public service, fiercely guarding his agency’s independence from...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | Statistics
Former Statistics Canada chief statistician Munir Sheikh praises the recent amendment to the Statistics Act that will create a Canadian Statistics Advisory Council that would allow for the better allocation of institutional resources in collecting more data about...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | Issues & Insights, Statistics
Deborah G. Mayo, a philosopher of error statistics, expounds on the “myth of objectivity” in this excerpt from long article in errorstatistics.com: We invariably sully methods of inquiry by the entry of background beliefs and personal judgments in their specification...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | Issues & Insights, Statistics
Almost all researchers use statistical methods but only few researchers receive intensive training in such methods. This has resulted in a wave of statistical malpractice and butchered numbers that has coursed through the ranks of even the most prestigious scientific...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | Issues & Insights, Statistics
The traditional approach is to formulate a hypothesis and then look for data to validate that hypothesis. Yet many data scientists consider it a virtue to come to a trove of data with unbiased eyes and simply find patterns already present in it. The idea is not to try...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | Issues & Insights
Zombie statistics are false facts that just never seem to die. Examples include such whoppers as “People use only 10% of their brains” and “You need to drink eight glasses of water a day”. Less obvious zombie statistics haunt researchers in every field and steps must...
by CDO Review Staff | Mar 4, 2019 | Issues & Insights, Statistics
Highly-accurate statistical models may not work in real world contexts as has been proven by the large amount of published research that has resisted replication. Stephen Chen blasts the sacrifice of model accuracy for predictive power in this report from Predictive...
by CDO Review Staff | Feb 26, 2019 | Issues & Insights
The sensitive personal data of Texans have long been kept in data centers managed by the state. But rapidly rising maintenance costs and the advent of new sharing technologies are persuading many state legislators to consider the affordability and flexibility of cloud...
