We Americans have a reputation as being unworldly. Given the results of the most recent Pew survey, perhaps we deserve it. Evidently, the majority of us never move out of our home states. [Read more...]

Being a drummer, a programmer and a fan of statistical analysis, this post on the (unnaturally) perfect timing of drum parts recorded to a click track was a real delight to me. Of course, many claims in the post are odd: it seems hard to imagine that a... [Read more...]

A recurrent source of irritation for me is the absence of a good default behavior in R for choosing the color scheme for bar plots. A stacked bar plot looks only as good as the color scheme you use. In hope of finding a usable scheme that I could settl... [Read more...]

One of the misuses of statistical terminology that annoys me most is the use of the word “correlation” to describe any variable that increases as another variable increases. This monotonic trend seems worth looking for, but it plainly is not what m... [Read more...]

Every time that I read a paper that discusses the frequencies of single letters in English, I feel like I should sit down and calculate them for myself from a sample of English text. Today, I finally did. Here are the probabilities and negative log pro... [Read more...]

For any Princeton graduate students who are interested, here’s the success rate for graduate students applying for school housing. These charts were built using the data from the 2008-2009 Room Draw Statistics pamphlet provided by the Division of Hou... [Read more...]

Yesterday the topic of academic citation counts came up, so I decided that I should write up some tools for exploring cite counts. The first thing I did was to build a cheap screenscraper in Ruby for pulling citation count information from Google schol... [Read more...]

These interactive graphics are simply beautiful. And they just so happen to be profoundly informative about the structure of modern science as well. Here’s to the hope that we will see more work from Moritz Stefaner soon that shows how our aesthetic ... [Read more...]

Because of Andrew Gelman’s strong, repeated recommendations, I’ve been reading “Forecasting Presidential Elections” by Steven J. Rosenstone for the last two days. It’s quite a remarkable book and complex enough that I’m sure I’ll return t... [Read more...]