statistics
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Science
The Study Showing Over 260,000 COVID-19 Cases From the Sturgis Rally Has a Fatal Flaw
When I first saw headlines last week that researchers found that the Sturgis motorcycle rally, which attracted 460,000 attendees to Sturgis South Dakota last month, has resulted in over 260,000 new COVID-19 cases, my first reaction was one of indignation. How dare these bikers take indiscriminate risks like attending a Smash Mouth concert in middle of a pandemic, bringing disease…
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Feminism
Racist Algorithms, Crime, and the Ethical Use of Data Prediction
ProPublica came out with an excellent piece this week by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kircher looking at the algorithms used by the US justice system to predict the recidivism rate of people at different stages within the justice system. These predictive scores, called risk assessment scores, are then used to determine things like sentencing and bail amounts,…
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Feminism
Mansplain Monday: Men Mansplain Statistics to Me
Welcome to the first post of our new series Mansplain Monday wherein we post and discuss some of our “favorite” examples of mansplaining that we have come across during the week. For the first Mansplain Monday I want to get a little bit personal. For those of you who are regular Skepchick readers, you know that I post a lot…
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Activism
Stop Panicking: There Isn’t a 98% Chance of a President Trump Future
The internet has been all abuzz about the results of a statistical model created by political scientist Helmut Norpoth that says that Trump has a 98%* chance of winning the general election against Hillary Clinton and a 99% chance of winning against Bernie Sanders. According to the New York Post, Norpoth’s model is “scary accurate” and has correctly predicted every…
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Feminism
Sam Harris Doesn’t Understand Bell Curves
It’s Thursday and that means it’s time for another round of Bad Chart Thursday. This week, rather than make fun of a bad chart, I was inspired to write a bit about bell curves and more specifically Sam Harris’ complete lack of understanding as to how bell curves work. You see, the internet blew up this week after a Washington…
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Skepticism
So You Want to Understand Bayes’ Theorem and/or Look at Photos of Cats
Back in 2010, researcher Daniel Daryl Bem at Cornell University supposedly proved that psychic precognition exists. He did a variety of tests on college students in which he reversed some common psychological tests and found that the students were able to predict something that had not yet happened. For example, he put pornographic photos behind one of two curtains. The students had…
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Skepticism
The Takedown of the NYT Chart on Student Loan Debt Isn’t All it’s Cracked Up to Be
It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for articles pointing out why some giant study being reported on in the media is actually bunk. In fact, that’s pretty much the only thing I ever write about here at Skepchick. So, this week when I saw everyone on my facebook feed sharing an article from the Awl entitled “Gaslighting Millenials: That…
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Religion
Morality on Trial: Why Prison Data Doesn’t Matter
In my previous post, I broke down the issues with prison statistics in the debate on secular morality. Here, I am going to turn my skeptical eye to the way people use and interpret said statistics. Why people bring up the (debatable) statistics that show that there are fewer atheists in prison than there ought to be seems obvious. When…
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