Regular readers will have noticed that things have been quiet around here for a while. I’ll be back to blogging properly in a while.
In the meantime, I am dead impressed by this collection of very accessible briefs from the House of Commons Library (of all places). The briefs are easy to understand, and they will be useful for people who are trying to write good analysis as well as for people who want to understand the statistics that they are reading.
Here are links to the briefs (all of which are pdf files):
- What is a billion? And other units
- How to understand and calculate Percentages
- Index numbers
- Rounding and significant places
- Measures of average and spread
- How to read charts
- How to spot spin and inappropriate use of statistics
- A basic outline of samples and sampling
- Confidence intervals and statistical significance
- A basic outline of regression analysis
- Uncertainty and risk
- How to adjust for inflation
- Chart format guide
Hat tip: Flowing Data and Lone Gunman
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Hi Owen,
Thanks – these are great links. Just to let you know: For some reason this post isn’t rendering properly in Firefox (or, at least, in Firefox on my computer). Fine in ie and the home page is fine in FFox. But when I actually click into the post, the side menu items swallow the blog itself.
cheers
Terence
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