Republic of Mathematics blog

Posts Tagged ‘statistics

We should have been paying attention during Perl classes

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: March 22, 2013

A joint post by Keith Resendes (histogramma.com) and Gary Davis Image courtesy of http://translationbiz.wordpress.com 1. We found unemployment data in text format by metropolitan area, for several years (by months in fact) at a Bureau of Labor Statistics site. 2. Great! we thought: let’s read this into R using the read.table function. 3. Uh, oh! […]

Do you understand histograms as well as a 5th grader?

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: March 22, 2013

This is a joint post of Keith Resendes (histogramma.com) and Gary Davis. Karl Pearson described histograms – and gave them their name – in 1895. As the cartoon below suggests, people still have trouble interpreting them today: Cartoon courtesy of www.whatthegregg.com In our experience, even university mathematics majors, studying statistics, have trouble with the meaning of histograms. But histograms can be explained to […]