Articles by David Firth

Robust measurement from a 2-way table

April 26, 2019 | David Firth

I work in a university.  My department runs degree courses that allow students a lot of flexibility in their choice of course “modules”.  (A typical student takes 8 modules per year, and is assessed separately on each module). After the exams are finished each year, we promise our students to look ... [Read more...]

Office for Students report on “grade inflation”

January 2, 2019 | David Firth

A journalist asked me to look at a recent report, Analysis of degree classifications over time: Changes in graduate attainment.  The report was published by the UK government’s Office for Students (OfS) on 19 December 2018, along with a headline-grabbing press release: The report uses a statistical method — the widely used ...
[Read more...]

Simple maths of a fairer USS deal

March 16, 2018 | David Firth

This will be my last post for a while (I promise!).  After today I’ll be taking a rest from all this, until at least the start of April.  Hopefully all this USS stuff will be resolved by then, though! In yesterday’s post I showed a graph, followed by ...
[Read more...]

USS proposals: Tail wagging the dog?

March 15, 2018 | David Firth

In response to my previous post, “Latest USS proposal: Who would lose most?“, someone asked me about doing the same calculation for the USS JNC-supported proposals from January.  For a summary of those January proposals and my comments about their fairness, please see my earlier post “USS pension scheme and ...
[Read more...]

Latest USS proposal: Who would lose most?

March 13, 2018 | David Firth

Yesterday the UUK/UCU negotiations at ACAS concluded with an agreement document. In this post I’ll look at the numbers in those proposed interim changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme, to work out how much money would effectively be lost by USS members at each salary level. This is ...
[Read more...]

Exit poll for June 2017 election (UK)

June 11, 2017 | David Firth

It has been a while since I posted anything here, but I can’t resist this one. Let me just give three numbers.  The first two are: 314, the number of seats predicted for the largest party (Conservatives) in the UK House of Commons, at 10pm in Thursday (i.e., before ...
[Read more...]

R and citations by David Firth

June 25, 2011 | David Firth

We’re hosting the international useR! conference at Warwick this summer, and I thought it might be interesting to try to get some data on how the use of R is growing. I decided to look at scholarly citations to R, mainly because I know where to f... [Read more...]

R and citations

June 25, 2011 | David Firth

We’re hosting the international useR! conference at Warwick this summer, and I thought it might be interesting to try to get some data on how the use of R is growing. I decided to look at scholarly citations to R, mainly because I know where to find the relevant ... [Read more...]

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