## 5.5 Activity: Statistical estimates in the news

To access the activty
5.5: Statistical estimates in the news

1. Watch Joy of Stats online at http://www.gapminder.org/videos/the-joy-of-stats/↩︎

2. TinkerPlots™ also provides other types of plots, including the box plot (sometimes called the box-and-whiskers plot) and the hat plot (a variation of the box plot).↩︎

3. Franklin, C. A., Kader, G. D., Mewborn, D. S., Moreno, J., Peck, R., Perry, M., & Scheaffer, R. L. (2005). Guidelines for assessment and instruction in statistics education (GAISE) report: A pre-k–12 curriculum framework. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20140325-01↩︎

4. The details of how to calculate the standard deviation are a bit complex. We won’t ever calculate a standard deviation by hand in this class. However, if you’d like to know how to do it, you can watch this video↩︎

5. Mosteller, F., Kruskal, W. H., Link, R. F., Pieters, R. S., & Rising, G. R. (1973). Statistics by example: Finding models. Reading, MA: Addison–Wesley.↩︎

6. Hartmann, S. (2005). The world as a process: Simulations in the natural and social sciences. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2412/↩︎

7. Starfield, A. M., Smith, K. A., & Bleloch, A. L. (1994). How to model it: Problem solving for the computer age. Edina, MN: Burgess International Group, Inc.↩︎

8. One-child policy. (2015, May 30). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:02, June 1, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=One-child_policy&oldid=664745432↩︎

9. Weber, B. G., John, M., Mateas, M., & Jhala, A. (2011). Modeling player retention in Madden NFL 11. Presented at Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~bweber/pubs/madden11retention.pdf↩︎

10. Carsey, T. M., & Harden, J. J. (2014). Monte Carlo simulation and resampling methods for social science. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage↩︎

11. Greek vs. Roman Letters
Greek letters are used when the parameters of a model are being described. In contrast, Roman letters are used to describe observed results. For example, go back to the situation in which the observed data consisted of 53 heads and 47 tails from 100 flips of a coin.

Here we would say $$p_{\mathrm{Heads}} = 0.53$$. The hypothesis about the model we are evaluating produces heads with a probability of 0.5, so $$\pi_{\mathrm{Heads,~Tails}} = 0.5$$.

Rather than use the Roman letters, some statisticians prefer to put a “hat” on the Greek letter to refer to the observed result. For example, $$\hat{\pi}_{\mathrm{Heads}}=0.53$$.

In this course we are not as concerned about which notation you use to express the result observed in the actual data. In fact, it might be less confusing if you just write, the observed result is 0.53.↩︎

12. Kubovy, M., & Psotka, J. (1976). The predominance of seven and the apparent spontaneity of numerical choices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2(2), 291.↩︎

13. Yaddanapudi (2016) published a paper in the Journal of Anaesthesiology, Clinical Pharmacology in which she explains each of these six principles for practicing physician-scientists using an example of treatment efficacy for a drug.↩︎

14. Liao, T. F. (2002). Statistical group comparison. New York: Wiley.↩︎

15. The website OKTrends includes an answer to this question, as well as many others.↩︎

16. Cobb, G. W., & Gehlbach, S. (2006). Statistics in the courtroom: United States vs. Kristen Gilbert. In R. Peck, G. Casella, G. Cobb, R. Hoerl, D. Nolan, R. Starbuck and H. Stern (Eds.),Statistics: A guide to the unknown (4th Edition), pp. 3–18. Duxbury: Belmont, CA.↩︎

17. Tukey, J. (1962). The future of data analysis. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33(1), 1–67.↩︎

18. Here is the Wolf Population report for 2016.↩︎

19. Du Toit, G., et al. (2015). Randomized trial of peanut consumption in infants at risk for peanut allergy. New England Journal of Medicine, 372(9), 803–813.↩︎

20. Sicherer, S. H., Wood, R. A., Stablein, D., Lindblad, R., Burks, A. W., Liu, A. H., Jones, S. M., Fleischer, D. M., Leung, D. Y., & Sampson, H. A. (2010). Maternal consumption of peanut during pregnancy is associated with peanut sensitization in atopic infants. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 126(6), 1191–1197.↩︎

21. Sicherer, S. H., Muñoz-Furlong, A., & Sampson, H. A. (2003). Prevalence of peanut and tree nut allergy in the United States determined by means of a random digit dial telephone survey: A 5-year follow-up study. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 112(6), 1203–1207.↩︎

22. In two-dimensional space, like on a map, the “mean” is referred to as a centroid.↩︎