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Why did the entrepreneur cross the road? Because he could make more money on the other side.
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Charles Wheelan |
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A Random Walk Down Wall Street.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Remember, human capital embodies not only classroom training but also perseverance, honesty, creativity--virtues that lend themselves to finding work.) Some
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Charles Wheelan |
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Data are to statistics what a good offensive is to a star quarterback.
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statistics
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Charles Wheelan |
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Os maiores riscos nunca sao aqueles que voce pode ver e mensurar, mas aqueles que voce nao pode ver e, portanto, jamais podera mensurar. Aqueles que parecem tao distantes, fora das fronteiras da probabilidade normal, que voce nao consegue nem imaginar que possam acontecer na sua vida - mesmo que, e claro, acontecam, com mais frequencia do que voce se da conta.
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Charles Wheelan |
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THE
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Charles Wheelan |
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Several studies of thousands of British civil servants (the Whitehall studies) have found that workers who have little control over their jobs--meaning they have minimal say over what tasks are performed or how those tasks are carried out--have a significantly higher mortality rate than other workers in the civil service with more decision-making authority.
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Charles Wheelan |
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our ability to analyze data has grown far more sophisticated than our thinking about what we ought to do with the results. You
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Charles Wheelan |
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Recognize that your own motivation, ambition, and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma."8"
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Charles Wheelan |
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Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).
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Charles Wheelan |
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For all of these reasons, a shocking amount of expert research turns out to be wrong. John Ioannidis, a Greek doctor and epidemiologist, examined forty-nine studies published in three prominent medical journals.8 Each study had been cited in the medical literature at least a thousand times. Yet roughly one-third of the research was subsequently refuted by later work. (For example, some of the studies he examined promoted estrogen replacemen..
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Charles Wheelan |
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A statistical anomaly does not prove wrongdoing. Delma Kinney, a fifty-year-old Atlanta man, won $1 million in an instant lottery in 2008 and then another $1 million in an instant game in 2011. The probability of that happening to the same person is somewhere in the range of 1 in 25 trillion.
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statistics
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Charles Wheelan |
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6d83974
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The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income."4"
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Charles Wheelan |
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But it's not perfect. The GPA does not reflect the difficulty of the courses that different students may have taken.
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Charles Wheelan |
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A study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that every $1 increase in the price of gasoline is associated with an additional 1,500 motorcycle deaths annually.10
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Charles Wheelan |
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Obituaries are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives. I defy you to find a single obituary that begins, "Jane Doe won the Nobel Prize in large part because she was admitted to a prestigious, highly selective preschool. After that, everything just kind of fell into place." Instead, you will read about dead ends, lucky coincidences, quirky habits, excessive se..
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passion
success
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Charles Wheelan |
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VaR has been called "potentially catastrophic," "a fraud," and many other things not fit for a family book about statistics like this one. In particular, the model has been blamed for the onset and severity of the financial crisis. The primary critique of VaR is that the underlying risks associated with financial markets are not as predictable as a coin flip or even a blind taste test between two beers. The false precision embedded in the m..
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Charles Wheelan |
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Housing prices had never before fallen as far and as fast as they did beginning in 2007. But that's what happened. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan explained to a congressional committee after the fact, "The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of [2007] because the data input into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. Had instead the models been f..
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Charles Wheelan |
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Fire, knives, automobiles, hair removal cream. Each of these things serves an important purpose. Each one makes our lives better. And each one can cause some serious problems when abused. Now you can add statistics to that list.
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statistics
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Charles Wheelan |
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The finest studies are like the finest of anything else: They cost big bucks.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Researchers may have some conscious or unconscious bias, either because of a strongly held prior belief or because a positive finding would be better for their career. (No one ever gets rich or famous by proving what doesn't cause cancer.)
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science
statistics
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Charles Wheelan |
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Skepticism is always a good first response.
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statistics
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Charles Wheelan |
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5acb017
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Longitudinal data sets are the research equivalent of a Ferrari. Not surprisingly, we can't always have the Ferrari. The research equivalent of a Toyota is a cross-sectional data set.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things.
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Charles Wheelan |
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The first descriptive task is often to find some measure of the "middle" of a set of data, or what statisticians might describe as its "central tendency." What is the typical quality experience for your printers compared with those of the competition?"
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Charles Wheelan |
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I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with math. I don't like numbers for the sake of numbers. I am not impressed by fancy formulas that have no real-world application. I particularly disliked high school calculus for the simple reason that no one ever bothered to tell me why I needed to learn it. What is the area beneath a parabola? Who cares?
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Charles Wheelan |
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Intelligence Gathering and Crime Analysis,
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Charles Wheelan |
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The irony is that more data can often present less clarity.
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Charles Wheelan |
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verisimilitude,
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Charles Wheelan |
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Therein lies the insight: Even though you will continue moving forever--with each move taking you half the remaining distance to the wall--the total distance you travel can never be more than 2 feet, which is your starting distance from the wall. For mathematical purposes, the total distance you travel can be approximated as 2 feet, which turns out to be very handy for computation purposes. A mathematician would say that the sum of this inf..
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Charles Wheelan |
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So, to return to the title chapter, what is the point of learning statistics? To summarize huge quantities of data. To make better decisions. To answer important social questions. To recognize patterns that can refine how we do everything from selling diapers to catching criminals. To catch cheaters and prosecute criminals. To evaluate the effectiveness of policies, programs, drugs, medical procedures, and other innovations. And to spot the..
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Charles Wheelan |
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You go to war with the army you have--not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Maybe it's a stretch to blame a broader social pathology on hyper-competitive soccer parents. Still, there is not a huge downside to asking every once in a while, Why am I doing this? We will know for certain that my analysis is wrong when we see the following obituary: "Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place."
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success
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Charles Wheelan |
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economy is the art of making the most of life." Economics is the study of how we do that."
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Charles Wheelan |
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Even the most complex financial systems can thrive or fail depending on whether people believe they will thrive or fail.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Prices are supposed to transmit information in a market economy; inflation obscures that mechanism.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Statistical malfeasance has very little to do with bad math. Judgement an integrity turn out to be surprisingly important. A detailed knowledge of statistics does not deter wrongdoing any more than a detailed knowledge of the law averts criminal behavior.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Inflation of all kinds devalues everything it infects. It obscures information and so distorts behaviour.
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Charles Wheelan |
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Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading.
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Charles Wheelan |
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The beauty of the normal distribution - its Michael Jordan power, finesse, and elegance - comes from the fact that we know by definition exactly what proportion of the observations in a normal distribution lie within one standard deviation of the mean (68.2 percent), within two standard deviations of the mean (95.4 percent), within three standard deviations of the mean (99.7 percent), and so on.
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Charles Wheelan |
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The challenge with any "before and after" kind of analysis is that just because one thing follows another does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the two."
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Charles Wheelan |
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For as long as there have been creditors and debtors--which is a darn long time--creditors have tried to protect the value of the currency and debtors have sought to devalue it.
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Charles Wheelan |