Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart is an awesome guide that points out holes in the reasoning of many scientific studies.  I initially book marked it to double check myself.  When dealing with survey and request data it’s easy to present a picture that is what you want to find, instead of what is actually there.  However, Statistics Done Wrong deals with issues that are far above the data I pull for departmental reports.

Each error is explained with a hypothetical and/or real example of a study that contained statistical errors.  This makes it even easier to wrap a layman’s mind around a subject that affects the authors of studies and articles for which he/she is the end audience.  As an example:  after expounding on the multiple ways that scientists error in their quest to prove or disprove a hypothesis, Reinhart includes an excellent example of double checking:

 courtesy of John Ioannidis and Jonathan Schoenfeld. They studied the question “Is everything we eat associated with cancer?”⁵¹[1] After choosing fifty common ingredients out of a cookbook, they set out to find studies linking these studies to cancer rates – and found 216 studies on forty different ingredients. Of course, most of the studies disagreed with each other. Most ingredients had multiple studies claiming they increased and decreased the risk of getting cancer.

Another interesting thing: being allowed to right turn on red wasn’t considered until the 1970s and was allowed because of underpowered statistics and a drive to save gas in a fuel crisis.

How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com is awesomely accurate.  I think it’s fun to do things like this but I wondered what it would say about me since I grew up in two different locations and was raised by parents who were both from a third location.  I highly recommend answering a handful of questions to get your own dialect map.

 

Holiday Greetings | The LeEMS Bean.

It was the Bean’s 7th blogiversary yesterday!  Did I even have it on my calendar?  So, lets take a trip back in time with some posts from long ago. In the beginning I was talking about Crafting Out Loud, a craft fair that I joined for three or four events:

13 December 2006 11:59 EST | Posted by LeEMS

Too little talked about Crafting Out Loud
Although the Bay Area has had Mainsail to showcase local artists, the new and alternative craft movement that has been a-washing the country has not yet saturated this part of Florida. Enter Crafting Out Loud, happening in Tampa once to twice monthly. Crafting Out Loud fills a gap that artisans, crafters, and DIYers all appreciate. Still aspiring to the renown of shows like the Bizarre Bazaar, Renegade Craft fair, and various Alternative Craft Fairs, COL has not yet proved to the non-crafting community that its home-made goods fill a hole created by mainstream consumerism.

Even with a write up in the Best of the Bay, courtesy of Creative Loafing Magazine previously known as The Weekly Planet, the main customers at any COL event seem to be the crafters themselves. Surely its worth the sometimes overcrowded (strangely by people not buying) and always small event locations to happen upon the amazing goodies that local artisans have come up with. I encourage everyone to elbow through the loafers and do some buying already!

Crafting Out Loud has since evolved from a crafting fair to an educational venue.  By 2007 I was oogling couch design and home furnishings.  In 2008 I was talking comics.  In 2009:

Wednesday, 23 December 2009

Blast from the Past
More past than I am actually.

“Doesn’t
Kiss you
Like she useter?
Perhaps she’s seen
A smoother rooster!!
Burma-Shave”

More slogans here.  Why can’t advertising be this comfortably corny today?

In 2010 I was at the tail end of a massive project to move theleemsmachine and the bean to a new web platform and begin publishing comics online.  And the rest is saved right here on the Bean.  Happy Friday the 13th everybody!

I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but I have found that searching out my family’s genealogy invariably leads me to questions of obscure history.  I want to know why so many branches of family were migrating from Vermont to Pennsylvania in the same three decades.

My genealogy experience also lead me to another slightly crazy, if I do say so myself, project trying to trace the history and popularity of the name LeEtta.  I mapped it out with publicly available census’ and did the math to find that no, the increase in LeEttas was not simply in line with the general population increase.  All of this lead me, again, to the question: why are these people and cultures migrating the way that they do.

I can’t say that I’ve got the whole answer (regarding my Vermont ancestors or the LeEttas), but I did find a fabulous resource along the way.  The Animated Atlas of American History does a lot to clarify some of the why and how, and it moves and speaks to me, which I really like.  It reminds me of junior high and history timelines and bright colors.