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Archive for the ‘Statistics’ Category
Large, fuzzy swaths of Americans.
April 3rd, 2010 by Steve | No Comments | Filed in Graphs, StatisticsAccording to the Washington Post, the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found
Traditional Christian beliefs continue to resonate with large swaths of Americans: 70 percent believe in a personal God, according to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, and nearly a third believe the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally, according to recent Gallup polls. Another 47 percent believe the Bible is divinely inspired.
Another 47 percent? Nice of the Post not to begin a sentence with a numeral, but not so nice to avoid the gaffe by prepending a word that obscures the meaning of the numbers. I’ll resist the temptation to draw possible Venn diagrams, in part because I don’t know how to represent 117 percent of Americans.
d(Teen Pregnancy)/dt estimates
February 26th, 2010 by Steve | No Comments | Filed in StatisticsGoogle News reveals the uncertainty:
- UK Minister Admits Failure to Bring Down Teen Pregnancy Rate
- Teen pregnancies fall by three per cent Lincolnshire Echo
- Dramatic fall in teen pregnancy Swindon Advertiser
Tags: Pregnancy, Uncertainty
Two Fruit Bats Walk into a Bar Chart
December 19th, 2009 by Steve | No Comments | Filed in Graphs, NSFW, Statistics
When a male was chewing or severing the Chinese fan-palm leaves to make a tent, or when males crawled upon the upper surface of a tent or were grooming themselves within a tent, a female would fly to the tent, stretch her wings, move her head slowly towards the male, and then sniff the male’s face and neck. Subsequently, the pair’s heads extended towards each other and the bats would lick one another. At this time, the male would make approaches to the female with his thumbs.
If you teach statistics and have a good lawyer, you might consider using this article in class. Figure 2 (not shown) doesn’t have a bat illustration, but it has a fine interpretation of the regression line slope: “Therefore each second of licking prolongs copulation by approximately 6 s.”
Reference: Tan M, Jones G, Zhu G, Ye J, Hong T, et al. 2009 Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7595.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595
Tags: Bar Chart, Fellatio, Fruit Bats, Intromission, PloS ONE
