The Joy of Stats really is a joy.  It will be shown on BBC4, apparently scheduled for December 7.  (That date comes from Hans Rosling on twitter, I haven’t found scheduling evidence at the BBC.) I saw its debut at the Royal Statistical Society on World Statistics Day. Here is ...

Many from the R world will know The R Inferno. Abstract: If you are using R and you think you’re in hell, this is a map for you. A newly minted inferno is The 9 circles of scientific hell. Most amusing to me is Circle 4: p-value fishing, the punishment of ...

As if that is news to some of you. Forbes has a Mean Business blog post by Steve McNally titled “Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software”. The post includes several links to why R is wonderful. It also includes a pretty — but seemingly useless — statistical graph.  ...

World Statistics Day is 2010 October 20.  If you work with data (or you should), then you are a statistician and this is a day for you. Try the Monte Hall problem on your mother. Start reading Bad Science.  I mean the book, but here’s the blog. Take a step towards ...

Fringe provides an excellent example of cointegration.  This is a television show in which there are two adjacent universes.  The universes are almost alike but not exactly. Now, everyone knows that history is chaotic.  If a butterfly does an extra flap of its wings, then that difference spreads out to ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. As you may have guessed, this is a mashup of a novel by Charles Dickens and an explanation of financial returns. The key plot element of A Tale of Two Cities is that there are two men, Charles ...

There’s a hole in the bucket of traditional economics. Homo socialus seems to be on the rise, and homo economicus is getting harder to find. Vulcanism has become evident in the R community over the last several days.  One of the visible eruptions has been over money.  This resulted ...

When I first came to finance, I kept hearing about “risk models”. I wondered, “What the hell is a risk model?” Of course, I didn’t say this out loud — that would have given the game away.  My wife has strict instructions that she is to be the only one ...