Came across this question on Quora today: What are the most subtle ways to deceive people with statistics? The answers are legendary. Going to be one for the bookmarks.
Playing Baseball without a Bat – a great example of effective statistical visualisation
Came across a very interesting and persuasive video on baseball via Kottke.org today. It's a great example of what an interesting question, effective visualisation, and some statistical knowledge can do. The question the video seeks to answer is the following: what would happen if baseball player Barry Bonds, who happened to play one of his greatest... Continue Reading →
Business Experimentation
Imagine for a moment that you want to implement a new sales initiative that you think will transform your business. The problem is, you're not too sure if it'd work. You decide, prudently, that maybe a pilot test would be good: let's roll out the initiative to just a small subset of the company, the... Continue Reading →
My thoughts on (sales) forecasting and predictive models
I need to have a data-dump on the sales forecasting process and forecasts. On optimistic and pessimistic forecasting: When forecasts are (consistently) too low: well-known issue that even has a name: sandbagging. You forecast lower to temper expectations. When you do get better results than the forecast you look like a hero. When forecasts are... Continue Reading →
KFC and the Representative Survey
I had KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) for breakfast yesterday. Chicken rice porridge and a "breakfast" wrap (that oddly enough didn't seem to contain any chicken). It was decent, and I liked it. So when I was quite excited when I saw that the receipt had a link to an online customer satisfaction survey, for which... Continue Reading →
Big Data and Personality
Andrew McAfee posted about a very intriguing study on personality, gender and age in their relation to language. In essence, what the study did was to look at the correlation of people's Facebook statuses and their personality, gender, and age. You'll know why I say it's intriguing when you take a look at some of... Continue Reading →
Risk vs. Uncertainty (Part I)
I can’t believe I didn’t write about it before today: the difference between uncertainty and risk. I’d originally thought that uncertainty and risk were one and the same. If you’re uncertain about something, about taking some action, and you had to decide whether or not to take that action, it was a risky action to... Continue Reading →
Confounding and the measurement of the MRT off peak initiative
The Singapore government announced a while back that they were going to start an initiative to try to reduce peak period crowds on our public rail system or MRT (Mass Rapid Transit). The initiative involved providing free and subsidised travel for passengers on selected trips during the morning off-peak period. This initiative kicked off two... Continue Reading →
The Reliability of Internet Marketing Research
I was doing some secondary research on the web to try to gather some statistics on small businesses and websites when I realised that there just wasn't much reliable data around, and that the majority of the statistics on the web were referencing themselves (this is like when an article on website A would point... Continue Reading →
Donn, fragments 